A more sustainable way of life

Talking Futures: Updating Germany -- Updating Bangalore by Matthias Bottger will be held at Max Mueller Bhavan/Goethe Institut in collaboration with CoLab- Goethe Lecture Series: Practices in Contemporary Art and Architecture at 6.30 pm on October 12 Out of the endless repertoire of futures, only one briefly becomes the present before turning effortlessly into the past.Future is something that will happen to us, utopia on the other hand is a concept we create in order to make things happen.Updates are commonly known from software applications.From time to time, updates add new functions, revamp the interface or patch up old flaws, while doing good often introducing new bugs.Mostly it is a mere continuation and refinement, sometimes though you need to reboot and start from scratch.Updating Germany adopts the concept of accumulating small and not so small steps that add up to massive change, to an utopian development towards a more sustainable way of life.With the concept of updates we acknowledge that there is not one right path forward and it is impossible to predict all the future implications of today’s actions or tomorrow’s changes.We will have to endure this condition of unpredictability, debug an ever-unstable balance and explore the future on many parallel branches — two steps forward one step back, as in computer software.Matthias Bottger studied architecture and urban planning.His academic career started at the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, continued at University of Stuttgart and since 2007 he teaches Art + Architecture at the ETH Zürich.In 2007 - 2008 he was the visiting professor for Art and Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremburg.In 2006 he curated the exhibition Global Players communicating the influences and effects of globalisation with examples from the world of professional soccer.In 2008 he was commissioner and curator for the German contribution Updating Germany-Projects for a Better Future to the 11th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.In 2007 - 2009 he was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.2010 he ran the exhibition space aut — Architektur und Tirol — in Innsbruck and curated the series aut.raumproduktion.Since July 2011, he has been a curator and artistic director of DAZ , Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, in Berlin.In his Berlin-based think-tank raumtaktik office from a better future, he collaborates with Ludwig Engel and Stefan Carsten on spatial intelligence and intervention in the present and the future.The CoLab-Goethe Lecture Series: Practices in Contemporary Art and Architecture, initiated by CoLab Art and Architecture and the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore began in July 2010 with a lecture: All that is rarefied, abstract and abstruse by Roger M Buergel, art writer, university teacher and curator and artistic director of documenta XII.Spread over a year with one lecture a month, the visual art series focused on practitioners who look at both ‘reconstruction’ and the ‘historical turn’ from the perspective of contemporary artistic practice: the revisions and re-readings that take place when images, works or events from the past circulate in a changing set of configurations; the lectures on architecture attempt to look at the radical shift in the imagining of the public space and the notion of spatial equity, and the questions thus raised.—