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What are cities made of?

The relationship between materials and worldviews from Giulia Bellinetti's experience

Riccardo Silvi
a story by
Riccardo Silvi
 
 
What are cities made of?

Building new relationships with materials and the stories they tell us. This is how Giulia Bellinetti goes beyond fossil culture.

What happens when we choose a certain material to build, invent or contain something? An everyday object, a work of art, a building or an entire city? It is never a neutral choice: it can tell us about our relationship with the planet, it can express our position on a historical or social issue, and it can even describe the economic model we believe is best.  

Giulia Bellinetti, in addition to her role as Head of Nature Research Department and Coordinator Future Materials at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, is Phd Candidate in Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam and has been Coordinator of the Production Department at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp.

Discover her on LinkedInn

«Materials are generous containers with many dimensions, stories and points of view that allow us to read reality,» states Giulia Bellinetti, coordinator of the Nature Research Department & Future Materials Lab at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (Netherlands). We met her, trying to understand what our everyday life is made of.

Let’s start at the beginning: what does it do and how?

Right now, I find myself “wearing several hats”: in short, I am trying to question a romantic view of nature to investigate the layering of ecosystems and the relationships between human interventions, which modify a landscape, and the wildness of natural elements, which interact with these changes.

Within the Jan van Eyck Academie, in Maastricht, I am the coordinator of the “Nature Research department“, which is specifically concerned with helping and supporting the research of artists in residence, designers, researchers and more generally “thinkers” on the relationship between their artistic practices and the ecosystem that surrounds us. Not nature but a more ambiguous and ambivalent context such as the ecosystem.

Also within the academy, I coordinate “Future Materials“: a space, both physical and digital, that encourages artists and designers to rethink their creative practices concerning the materials they use in their productions. It is a work that goes beyond the “linear” model of transition, that suggests replacing polyester with bio-plastics. The idea behind Future Materials is that it is key to reflect on the very nature of materials, and the implications that their use, according to our paradigms of production and consumption, have on climate change.

Furthermore, there is a broader and deeper level of reflection that leads artistic productions to question what meanings and narratives a material activates in the construction of a work. Materials contain stories and it is important to reflect on what surrounds us to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of which we are part as an ecosystem. With the “Future material programme” we stimulate artists to look around and imagine what an alternative material could be. Any sustainable transition starts here.

Why is an art academy so committed to issues of ecological transition? What does art have to do with climate change?

Art has always played a role in opening up and stimulating new scenarios and contexts that, in everyday life, we would not notice. The Jan van Eyck Academie has linked its mission as an artist residency to the objectives of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change1 to combat climate change. Why? I believe that in this historical moment, characterised by such decisive social, environmental and geopolitical challenges, art is called upon even more to make its contribution, not only in a figurative sense but in much more concrete, I would say ‘material’ level, to contribute to real change. As early as 2020, the academy chose to align its timeline for developing the policy plan to 20302, renewed last March 2024, questioning the very functioning of the organisation in the wider context of climate change where artists find themselves. One of the most profound ways it reflects on the relationship between ecological transition and artistic practices is through materials.

And how is this effective contribution implemented?

I have noticed one thing recently: the rapid acceleration in interdisciplinarity. Chemists, engineers, and architects, who are artists, working with social and natural scientists and researchers. In 2022, for example, we organised the first edition of the “Future Materials Research Fellowships“, to support the development of existing sustainable materials – whether natural or the result of the circular economy, i.e. reuse and recycling. The selected artists were able to develop their research in scientific laboratories3, to take the creative idea to another level: in summer 2024 we will start the second edition of the project.

Jesse Adler and her works. Source: Tom Mannion, Chris Ould. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the consent of the authors.

There is also a growing interest in the “Future Material Bank”, the bank of sustainable materials: we are contacted by artists and designers looking for alternatives to synthetic resins, but often also by fashion companies looking for new materials. However, it is not that simple. I have personally experienced that when we find ourselves at the boundaries of our disciplinary fields, rooted in our vocabularies but in contact with other dimensions of knowledge and culture, tensions arise in the terms and ways in which we ask questions.

So when we talk about material and “future material”, what are we dealing with?

Here we refer to the concept of ‘material’ as something tangible, necessary to realise, not static but in the process of becoming. This is because there is always a relationship between matter, us and ecosystems. Materials change with time, in substance, colour, and flexibility. We do not know how they will evolve because they are in a constant flux of change, through interaction with human intentions, the atmosphere and micro-organisms. Take for example the Japanese Knotweed4, part of our material bank5: in Europe, it is considered an invasive and dangerous plant, an alien species, and it is, while in China it is used for its medicinal properties. It arrived in England in the 1800s, imported by the royal family, then given to wealthy European merchant families, thus finding an ecological imbalance that allowed it to develop rapidly. It is a material that carries with it a history of colonialism, imperialism and migration. With an aesthetic function linked to power that becomes, today, an ecosystem problem. 

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How much do we know about the materials we are dealing with?

Little, in particular, do we know about the elements that make them up. A synthetic pigment, for example, contains microplastics that end up in the environment every time we wash the surface that contains it. This is a crucial issue: artists investigate and open up scenarios with their work on climate change, using materials that encourage it. In the academy, we use the concept and “ecologically conscious material practice”

We need to automate a critical look at the materials around us and create an implicit reflex to ask ourselves what meanings this material adds to my artwork, in addition to its technical and aesthetic properties.

How can we bring this reflection into our communities and the construction of our cities?

It is essential to understand the ecological relationship around the material one chooses to use and to ask oneself what happens in the second phase of the project’s life. There has been, in this last period, a transition around the discourse of materials, a shift from the concept of “keeping things as they are” to the theme of regeneration: using materials not only for present benefits but also for future regenerative contributions. What if we thought of cities made of materials that, when they decompose, nourish the soil instead of releasing toxic substances? We need to rethink economic paradigms, taking the ”Donut Economy” as a model6.

What is this about?

It is a concept introduced by British economist Kate Raworth7 that growth, primarily economic growth, has limits, which are the limits of the planet: this is the widest circumference of the doughnut. On the other hand, the inner circumference represents the minimum level of well-being required to live as a community. Our task is to position ourselves in the middle range, in the doughnut. The work on materials goes in this direction, to affect environmental and social value. An example that can well explain this approach is “Color Amazonia”, a project linked to the process of producing pigments from certain plants through the preservation of the artisanal knowledge of communities in the Colombian Amazon, which in turn triggers a process of preservation of the ecosystem in which they live, in a virtuous and circular relationship flow.

And with that we are back to a theme that we often address in Mangrovia: the generative economy

Even more than that. We talk about “beyond fossil culture”. Fossil culture’ is a theme introduced by researcher Stephanie LeMenager8 for whom «oil itself is a medium that fundamentally supports all modern media forms that deal with what counts as culture, from films to recorded music, novels, magazines, photographs, sports and wikis to blogs and Internet videography. One can cite many other cultural forms indebted to oil». Culture is strongly rooted in fossil fuels and consequently so are our objects. That is why we need to develop a culture beyond, from the design of an exhibition to how we build our cities.


  1. IPCC — Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. https://www.ipcc.ch/. ↩︎
  2. Beleidsplan – Jan van Eyck Academie. In Jan van Eyck Academie. https://janvaneyck.nl/pages/policy-plan. ↩︎
  3. With the Brightlands Chemelot Campus Labs CHIIL and the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design (London). ↩︎
  4. The native range of this species is the Russian Far East, China and East Asia. It is a perennial or rhizomatous geophyte and grows mainly in the temperate biome. See Reynoutria japonica Houtt. In Plants of the World Online | Kew Science. https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:435655-1. ↩︎
  5. Asad, A. A. (2024). Future Materials Encounter #16: Japanese Knotweed. In Jan van Eyck Academie. https://www.janvaneyck.nl/news/future-materials-encounter-16-japanese-knotweed. ↩︎
  6. Raworth, K. (2018). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Kate-Raworth/Doughnut-Economics–Seven-Ways-to-Think-Like-a-21st-Century-Economist/21739630. ↩︎
  7. Kate Raworth is an economist focused on making economics fit the realities of the 21st century. She is the creator of the Doughnut of Social and Planetary Boundaries and co-founder of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab. ↩︎
  8. Stephanie LeMenager is a researcher and lecturer in English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. ↩︎

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