Multispecies Speculative Futures: Endarken NYC’s nightscapes

We invite you to explore and craft more-than-human worlds where darkness at night has been restored in our cities for multispecies flourishing and cohabitation. We will showcase collective visions of the future in Berlin and NYC where we rewired our relationship with light and darkness to design for the wellbeing of all species. Through experiential futures methods we will invite to expand the worldbuilding and open up possibilities for multispecies cites at night. Keeping an embodied approach to futures, in this workshop we will seed designerly alliances with living bioluminescence on the lab and speculate how to engage with more-than-human agency in caring and regenerative ways to create thriving nightsca[MI1] pes in NYC for all species

About the Endarken futures:

We colonized the nights with artificial light and pushed darkness to the wilderness. But in 2050 an era of Endarkenment has come: cities embrace nocturnal darkness to heal from light pollution, for ecological restoration, and cosmic re-awakening. In Berlin, the right to darkness was an inalienable right of all species and humans had formed alliances with bioluminescent fungi to design thriving nocturnal nightscapes. In NYC, hurricanes and floodings left most of city in ruins, and massive blackouts left it in the dark. Yet, slowly the city was recolonized by bioluminescent species: phytoplankton, fungi and algae that decomposed urban waste, healed the soil and water. As old imaginaries of the city decomposed as well, people stayed with darkness instead of turning the lights back on. NYC is lit only by cosmic light from the sky and bioluminescent light that thrives in a darker city. In the darkness insects, plants, and small mammals found their way back home and thrived.

In this workshop, you will:

• explore and reflect on the visions of Endarken futures
• critique, reshape and expand the worldbuilding of the NYC darker futures
• explore and speculate on the possibilities to collaborate with bioluminescent organisms to create thriving nocturnal futures for multispecies cohabitation. This includes a hands-on activity to seed cultures of bioluminescent fungi and bacteria
• reflect collectively about the envisioned futures

*The visions, narratives of this workshop will contribute to an upcoming exhibition in the Nature of Cities Festival 2024 in Berlin

Melissa Ingaruca Moreno (she/her) is a transdisciplinary explorer, working mostly at the intersection of multispecies thinking, urban design, and futures. As a PhD researcher in “Multispecies Cities and Emerging Technologies”, she explores how to transform urban design practices to care for the wellbeing, cognition and agency of more-than-human species, to enable multispecies cohabitation. Her research-though-design project Endarken, awarded in 2022 by the School of International Futures (UK), applies a multispecies lens to rethink the design of urban light and darkness at night for multispecies cohabitation, including nocturnal walks to embody more-than-human perceptions of light pollution and experiments to design and live with bioluminescent fungi M. She is also a co-founder of  Mycohackers, a Berlin-based transdisciplinary collective that explores biodesign with fungi and member of the global network NATURA (Nature-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene)

Insta: mel_ingaruca, endarken_cities

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Genspace, 132 32nd Street, Brooklyn, United States