Berlin Fellowship 2021 — Architecture

Vita

Melissa Makele studied architecture and art history at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and was a guest student at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Her workplaces after graduating include the Atelier Bow-Wow and the Studio Velocity in Japan. She is an editor of the Berlin magazine ARCH+ Zeitschrift für Architektur und Urbanismus. Her current research interests lie in the field of intersectional feminist (spatial) practices and their transformative potential for architecture and society.

Residency

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the concept of “care” has increasingly found its way into public debate. It has also once again shown the extent to which care and reproductive work are constitutive for the survival of us all. “Care” hereby includes various dimensions – from the level of service and solidarity relationships that extend into the private sphere, to public nursing networks and services, all the way to physical-material infrastructures.

Starting from the third level and a focus on space-creating processes, the project asks how one can succeed in designing new imagination horizons for a future that, along with a broadly defined “care” perspective, aims at a structural reordering of our production modes and “ways of relating” (Bini Adamczak) – away from capitalist, exploitative logics of utilisation towards a paradigm of care in dealing with people, animals, our environment and social institutions.