Field, 2021, Governors Island, NY, grass-based bioplastic. Photo credit: Priyanka Jain
Field collaborators Supermrin, Jil Berenblum, and Xenia Adjoubei will lead a hands-on workshop transforming grass clippings into a sustainable and structural bioplastics material. This in-person workshop is limited to Barnard and Columbia affiliates due to Covid-19 guidelines and takes place on Friday, Dec 10 at 2pm in the Design Center.
Field is a bio-arts laboratory and research space that creates new discourse around our relationships with land and nature to rethink the homogeneity, order, and control present within the built environment. Field collaborators are biohackers, artists, engineers and architects who open source their findings to share recipes, fabrication processes and tools for working with new experimental and sustainable materials. “How to Grow a Field?” is a 2.5 hour workshop where participants will learn to make Field’s new grass-based bioplastic and experiment with a variety of fabrication processes with this material. In the process, Field will discuss the opportunities and challenges of working with biomaterials, and introduce participants to their ongoing research with robotic fabrication techniques for these new materials.
Field is a collaborative long-durational art project, presently on residency at Governors Island in New York. Field members form a vast network across the globe and include Jil Berenblum, Ane Gonzalez Lara, Jessica Fernonani Cooke, Xenia Adjoubei, Supermrin and many others. Field was founded in 2018.
Supermrin is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, art, and design. Through a research-led, speculative, and site-specific practice, she creates installations and environments that seek to reconsider the values that spaces offer, and the ways through which they mediate human relationships. She is interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within eastern practices. Supermrin is a Visiting Artist at the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) Program at Pratt Institute, and an Assistant Professor of Art at the School of Art, University of Cincinnati. She holds an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, California and an undergraduate degree in Exhibition Design from the National Institute of Design, India. Her work has been exhibited at venues across the United States and beyond, including the Venice Biennale 2021, the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Old San Francisco Mint, Root Division, The First Presbyterian Church of New York, ChaShaMa Space, and the India Habitat Center in New Delhi. Supermrin founded Streetlight in 2017 as a critical spatial research and design laboratory for decolonizing public space. She is presently engaged in public arts projects in Oakland, California, and on Governors Island, New York.
Jil Berenblum is an industrial designer at the Cartier Innovation Lab and a biomaterials researcher with Expressive Matter at Genspace. She is working on building a set of skills that both understand the needs of existing commercial fabrication spaces, but can also answer the urgency with which we need to integrate more sustainable and responsible practices in design.
Xenia Adjoubei is the director of ASWStudio, founder of Nikola-Lenivets Classroom, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Inclusive Ecologies Incubator at the Pratt Institute, New York, and head of an architecture practice which specialises in culture and education. Xenia's research is on Environmental Diplomacy and Climate Justice with a focus on migration, informal economies and their impact on the environment, which is showcased at biennales and exhibitions internationally. She directs the Nikola-Lenivets Open Classroom at the largest art park in Europe, where she leads short courses and research projects on Art as Labour in a Post-work Future and the New Rural condition, which have participated in conferences and exhibitions including the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019, in collaboration with the Global Free. She teaches an MA studio with Alejandro Haiek at Umea University, Sweden.