About the workshop
At the workshop, scholars from the fields of art, architecture, urban studies, sociology, and related disciplines will come together to address two interrelated questions: How can digitalisation and sustainability be approached in an inter- and transdisciplinary manner, both in practice and in policy? And how can we reclaim the use of technologies to protect our environment?
Programme
Day 1 – 18 November
13:00 – 13:30 Opening
13:30 – 16:30 panels & discussion
Day 2 – 19 November
10:00 – 11:00 panel
11:00 – 13:00 closing remarks
13:00 – 14:00 lunch
Participation of the workshop is by personal invitation only. If you would like to receive an invitation, or know someone who should, please get in touch with Letizia Chiappini.
The last part of the workshop on 18 November (16:30-18:00) is a public event, please register if you want to attend by mailing Letizia Chiappini.
About the public event
The structure of the event draws inspiration from community forums and participatory knowledge-sharing traditions. It seeks to foster exchange between artists and researchers—bridging speculative and practical approaches to sustainability in the digital age.
This public event brings together as keynote speakers Benj Gerdes and Patricia de Vries in conversation with Letizia Chiappini. Together, they will discuss how digital technologies shape our ecological futures and explore pathways to align digital transformation with socio-environmental justice.
As digital infrastructures increasingly underpin our social, economic, and political systems, the discussion will examine their entanglements with environmental degradation, data extraction, and unequal access to technological resources. Drawing from art, urbanism, sociology, and philosophy, the speakers will explore how transdisciplinary thinking can contribute to reclaiming technologies for collective, sustainable futures.
Themes and Questions
This programme brings together three interconnected themes:
- Digital extraction and ecological cost – What hidden infrastructures sustain our digital lives, and how can we trace their material and environmental consequences?
- Spatial justice and technological governance – How can artistic and urban practices expose, critique, and reimagine the politics of digital and spatial development?
- Grassroots technologies and acts of repair – What everyday practices of resistance and co-creation can challenge extractive platformisation and open up alternative modes of digital sustainability?
Through dialogue, we will consider how art, critical theory, and urban research can inform strategies to build solidarities between technological innovation and environmental care. The goal is to reimagine sustainability not as a technological promise, but as an embodied, collective practice that reclaims the digital for our shared environments.
Speakers
Patricia de Vries (she/her)
Head of the Interdisciplinary Research Group Art and Spatial Praxis, Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam)
Patricia leads the interdisciplinary research group Art and Spatial Praxis at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. This group explores how artistic and social practices can analyse, claim, and shape urban spaces, land, and territories. Drawing from feminist geography, Black studies, environmental humanities, and critical theory, the research examines the dynamics of power that determine who holds authority over spatial development and land use. One of the group’s initiatives, the open artistic research platform Plot(ting), investigates alternative forms of knowledge production, existence, and social relations. Previously, de Vries was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Maastricht University.
Benjamin Gerdes (he/him)
Artist, Writer, and Researcher, Institute for Futures Studies (Stockholm)
Benjamin is an artist, writer, and organiser working in video, film, and related public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. His work examines intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination, focusing on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes. Gerdes’s projects often emerge through long-term research conducted in dialogue with activists, trade unionists, architects, urbanists, geographers, and archival researchers. Before joining the Institute for Futures Studies, he was based at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where he led a professorial group in Fine Art and Moving Image for five years.
Moderator: Letizia Chiappini (she/they)
Distinguished Urban Fellow, NIAS (2024–25) / Assistant Professor of Digitalisation and Sustainability, University of Twente
Letizia is an urban sociologist and digital geographer whose research focuses on critical approaches to the notion of the “smart city” and platformisation as a socio-spatial process. Her work critiques dominant and extractive platform-driven digital markets, advancing instead the concept of the urban digital platform—platforms that support grassroots initiatives and practices of resistance. She also investigates artistic practices related to digital fabrication and makerspaces as alternative modes of spatial production. Her main research interests include feminist, queer, anti-colonial, and anti-racist perspectives on digital platforms; digitalisation and governance; participation and co-creation in grassroots communities; social justice and radical action; and open-source practices of democracy.
Please note: during this event, photos and videos will be taken for documentation and publication purposes. If you have any objections, please notify the photographer.
