Repairing the Ruptures
through Situated Materials and Sensibilities

Repairing the Ruptures is a collaboration between Kyoto-based PERSPECTIVE and the UAL/CSM Masters Material Futures and Regenerative Design. Through this open call, we formed a research team to explore and propose new ways of mending, reimagining, and transforming worlds from a regenerative ethos. Inspired by practices of worlding (Haraway), we aim to cultivate speculative and situated ways of making-with, not only repairing what is broken, but generating new possibilities for collective futures where place and species thrive.

The briefing asks for responses that share new ways of listening, tracing, and activating: unpacking living systems and their invisible, subtle languages; repairing social and cultural practices that activate landscapes of care through community relationships. These project approaches are open entry points but require local connection and hybrid translations, built on situated interventions.

Repairing the Ruptures is about mending and proposing, advancing and regenerating, cultivating attentiveness, rituals, and the weaving of whole systems.

Participants conduct site visits to observe and "listen" to the landscape. Through guided fieldwork, they identify local ruptures, disruptions, tensions, or gaps in the environment or social fabric. A key method is "playful listening": asking locals about the games they played in childhood or their sensorial memories of the place. These conversations reveal deep, often unnoticed relationships with local materials and ecologies.

Through mapping exercises and interviews, participants explore how ruptures and materials connect to wider systems and stories: histories of extraction or cultivation, struggles over land use, informal infrastructures, or cultural memories. Tracing Materials that Mediate the Ruptures like water, soil, and vegetation are approached as media that connect multiple dimensions of the rupture: political, ecological, infrastructural, spiritual.

The program culminates in a collective reflection where participants share the traces they leave behind. What have they learned from materials? From each other? What new questions have emerged?

Participants are asked to articulate how their individual responses contribute to a wider regenerative horizon, not by "solving" ruptures but by tending to them.

This project took place from February to March 2026.

Participants

Quoï Alexander
Vibhuti Amin
Anouska Anquetil
Kexin Chen
Charlotte Clarke
Shannon Daly
Long Doan
Ines Quinones Fabregas
Gayle Forman
An Garcia
Olga Glagoleva
Eve Gross-Sable
James Harle
James Harlow
Sammy Johnson
Florence de Keijzer
Antoine Léger
Louise McArthur
Sarah Muir-Smith
Laurain Park
Betty Parker
Fraser Pearston
Nikhita Ramdas
Lesley Roberts
Simone Suss
Yusra Tanveer
Tuukka Toivonen
Charlie Whinney
Sue Wu
Qier Zhu

Guest Speakers

Professor Atsuro Morita
Prof. Atsuro Morita is a social anthropologist in Science and Technology Studies at The University of Osaka. His research focuses on climate change and urban everyday life, working with grassroots movements in Japan. He examines how everyday practices, energy, material flows, and infrastructures in the Yodogawa Watershed cut across Osaka and Kyoto. Prof. Atsuro Morita spoke beautifully about how we consider the infrastructures we are part of, and the remaking of our world and bodies. He explored the anthropological backgrounds of ruptures in landscapes, what they have brought about and how their significance sits in the present. He also reflected on irrelevance, apprenticeship with more-than-human others, and experimentation in making practices.

Theun Karelse
Theun Karelse is an artist based in the Netherlands an is an active member of FoAM, part of the Embassy of the Earth, a contributor to the Future of the Delta team at the Embassy of the North Sea, and Speaker for the Living at ZOÖP CCU and ZOÖP Amstelpark. Theun shared his practice, reflecting on how he is part of the community of life as a whole, building communities by weaving together people, species, places, practices, and experimental formats. It’s not about doing work alone but about growing collectively. Theun’s practice is embodied, lived, experimental, inquisitive, activating, and open. It moves constantly in place: being in place, being with species, and testing how we might look through different lenses.

Partners

Perspective, Kyoto, Japan
Inspired by the dialogical relationship between humans and nature embodied in craft, we explore the interconnections between nature, culture, and making through the lens of the watershed. Our base, Keihoku, is the headwaters of the forests and rivers that have long sustained the cultural life of Kyoto, the ancient capital. Moving between this rural landscape and the city, between sources of materials and sites of cultural expression. we create learning and practice-based programs rooted in place, including residencies and educational offerings.
Our work unfolds between two distinct yet interconnected landscapes:the forested mountain region of Keihoku, and the historically layered urban environment of Kyoto City.

Keihoku, located about 45 minutes north of Kyoto’s urban center, has long supported the culture of the capital by supplying timber and natural materials for its temples, shrines, and townhouses. Traditional knowledge rooted in forestry, agriculture, and craft still lives on here, though the region now faces serious challenges—including population decline and the difficulty of sustaining its forests and livelihoods.

www.prspectiv.co

MA Material Futures, Central Saint Martins
Material Futures is studio-based Master where is where science, technology and design collide. We invite practitioners from all fields of the creative industries to create alternative narratives to what will become the defining issues of our times. United in our belief that our planet is at breaking point and our current methods of managing and dealing with these systems are ineffective and outdated, we encourage our students to look beyond existing disciplines to anticipate our future needs, desires and challenges for the 21st century. Whilst our students come from entirely different disciplines, from science, politics, design, engineering, fashion and architecture, they are all united in their hunger to become real-world agents of social, ecological and political change through expert collaboration and trans-disciplinary practice.

www.materialfutures.com

MA Regenerative Design, Central Saint Martins
Regenerative Design (MARD) is an online Master supporting a diverse international community from different practices, ages and locations. We teach situated with focus on blended, collaborative and hybrid learning and are particularity suited for mature and mid-career practitioners. MARD contributes to a world in which designers practice collectively within communities, making positive ecological and social change, acknowledging that we are part of a whole and living system. Through consciously connecting a new generation of regenerative practitioners into the ecosystems we are part of we are connecting practice, education and communities. MARD investigates ecosystems, species and complexities in order to propose a new perspective on building a thriving more-than-human world.

www.csmregenerativedesign.com

Repairing the Ruptures

Index