The film is an emotional, visual and narrative dimension of a collective learning process of a cultural institution that took place in the pandemic. The “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process” signifies a strategic search for more just, sustainable and solidary forms of organising creative work in Augsburg, Germany. Initiated to support the re-design of a creative & community hub, it unfolded through a series of culture political experiments that took place in different analogue/digital spaces between Spring 2020 and Summer 2021. In a logic of grassroots experimentation, we gathered cultural producers, activists, local authorities and other engaged citizens to deliberate the means of urban culture production in late-stage-capitalism. Aesthetic practices facilitated knowledge co-production and triggered unusual collaborations between ‘the state’ and civil society. Drawing on the provisional understandings of the coordinating researchers, the film gives a glimpse into the activist-led research project. The aesthetic form reflects the post-structuralist interpretation of the – at the time unfinished – process, mirrors the complexity of the researched situation and speaks about the discontinuities and ambiguities that made the conditions for change.

As the research project is finished now, Julia Costa Carneiro would like to share some analysis and invite the participants to discuss the role of coordinating practices, technologies & tools in the co-creation of culture political experiments. Your contributions will inform the work-in-progress of the film that is imagined becoming useful material for transformative education in the context of urban planning.

As directors, we imagine the film and how it is made might give impulses on how to connect arts, tech & care in the response to crisis situations. We hope that raised questions & sensitising concepts might trigger mutual learning about how to organise culture politics beyond the pandemic. Thus, we invite the participants of the session to translate the learnings of the “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process” into their own fields of action, look for differences and share commonalities that might be important for other agents of urban transformation that are operating in a similar mindset of co-creation.

Julia Costa Carneiro is connected to the Grandhotel Cosmopolis since 2012 and mainly supported the culture & community hub through her action research alongside her interdisciplinary MA in “Studies in Social and Political Conflict” at the University of Augsburg, Germany. As activist-researcher she is interested in strategies for urban transformation, degrowth politics and feminist methodologies. She is passionate about political engaged performance art, co-founded Augsburg’s first civic housing project and is currently working with Degraux!, a collective that facilitates co-creative exchange and experimentation based on the discussion about degrowth. She is now based in Bristol where she works with Knowle West Media Centre in the role as Research Lead.

Juan David Uribe Saavedra studied Industrial Design with a scholarship at the EINA School of Design. He received a master’s degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Environmental Studies and completed cross studies from the School of Peace Culture at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His post-industrial design project Ido involves research and experimentation of new functional and formal possibilities around material waste and reuse: to reissue, expand and explore the life cycle of products through design. During his residency within the pandemic, he supported the visualization of the “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process”. He is an associate doctoral student of the AGI research group Art, Globalization, Interculturality at the University of Barcelona. His developing research thesis focuses on Interdisciplinary Design Criticism at the Framework of Degrowth.