Neighborhoods of Europe: A Youth Participatory Magazine Workshop

Above me, the clouds are moving. They have no fixed shape. They gather, dissolve, become something else. Perhaps this is what clouds do. I watch them changing while birds continue their conversations and insects move between flowers. A breeze passes over the grass and across my body. I think about Anna Tsing and her writing about life in the ruins of capitalism. What stays with me is her attention to unexpected collaborations—to the ways life persists, adapts and creates relationships in damaged landscapes. We often imagine ecological crisis as the end of something. But perhaps crisis is also a condition in which new forms of relation become visible. The garden is not outside the crisis. The traffic is here. Pollution is here. Climate instability is here. The histories of extraction that have shaped our present are here.

And yet life continues. A flower opens. An insect arrives.

Gather in the garden of the Athens Concert Hall for the concert of nature, meet and exchange with the artist Jenny Marketou around the installation Folly for Songs for FUNK Kinships: A Pollinator for Other Futures. 

Towers of Winds is an environmental architecture research project, exploring new design possibilities for passive downdraft evaporative cooling devices in Athens. These experiments provide zero-enegy cooling and air movement at the scale of individual buildings and urban spaces, and can contribute to climate adaptation in increasingly hot cities.