The Wellbeing Culture Forum launched in May 2020, initiated by Therme Art and curated by Mikolaj Sekutowicz, as an expansion of our ongoing Therme Forum programming to address the importance of mental health and preventive wellbeing in face of a global pandemic. The year-round talks program features public and private panel discussions, between online and offline spaces, gathering experts from diverse fields to exchange knowledge towards an enhanced vision of the city and its cultural activity in symbiosis with the natural world.

The Wellbeing Culture Forum program for 2021 returned on the 14^th of April with Experiencing to Reconnect: The Transformative Potential of Art, a Zoom session co-moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist that explored the role that experiential art can play in revitalising a sense of community. This was then followed up by our programme at the 17^th Venice Architecture Biennale, which featured talks such as Mutual Aid: The Politics of Gaia (21 May), Resurrecting the Sublime: The Smell of Gaia’s Molecules (21 May), Experiments in New Spatial Contracts: The Garden of Privatised Delights (21 May), and From Non-Extractive to Regenerative Architectures: Growing a Symbiotic City (22 May). The widely viewed programme examined the role that architecture can play in carving out a more equitable and sustainable future for all.

Continuing into the second half of the year, the Wellbeing Culture Forum travelled to Basel, Switzerland for Art Basel and Design Miami/. The talk, Art and Architecture as Healing: Shaping a Mental Health Economy was held on the 22^nd of September, exploring the healing potentials of art and architecture in our processes of building urban landscapes. The year’s programme continued with COMMUNION, a celebration of community, mental wellbeing and inclusivity at the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion designed by Sumayya Vally of Counterspace. In partnership with MYTH and enabled by MYND, Therme Mind’s mental health initiative, the night included musical performances by ENNY and Tinie Tempah, as well as two Wellbeing Culture Forum talks moderated by Yomi Adegoke, titled In Conversation: The 2021 Serpentine Pavilion and Community and Belonging Through the Lens of Creative Practice. The talks explored the importance of centering community in architectural, artistic, and social endeavours.

The 2021 Wellbeing Culture Forum programme concluded with the talk From Building to Growing Cities, which took place at COP 26 in Glasgow in November. During COP26 Therme Group announced its One Health initiative for human and environmental wellbeing, which established the One Health Research Centre together with founding partners IKEM and the University of Greifswald.

2021 Talks Programme Overview

Experiencing to Reconnect: The Transformative Potential of Art

Panellists: Es Devlin, Tino Sehgal, and Torkwase Dyson
Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mikolaj Sekutowicz
Date: 14 April 2021
Location: Virtual

In the current moment of isolation and quarantine, reconnection through shared experience has become a widely felt need. Gathering actors who are helping to define and expand the increasingly influential field of experiential art, Experiencing to Reconnect explored how art can generate reconnection, counter a ‘dominance of nationality’ (Sehgal) and help us navigate this crisis, and the next.

Mutual Aid: The Politics of Gaia

Panellists: Stefano Mancuso, Refik Anadol, Sissel Tolaas, Anab Jain, Nina Gualinga, Maja Hoffmann, Jeanne de Kroon, Joseph Grima, Salome Rodeck, Not Vital, and Marianne Krogh Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mikolaj Sekutowicz
Date: 21 May 2021
Location: Venice

Mutual Aid is an installation created by Stefano Mancuso and Pnat, presented as part of the Resilient Communities exhibition in the Italian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. The work explores the intricate systems of cooperation within underground root structures as a case study for how to live together harmoniously above ground. In an effort to address some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the world today, shifting away from ideas of self-identity towards a more inclusive understanding of collectively is essential. Mutual Aid asks us to take a critical look at the human-centric organisation of the world, and to adopt a view that acknowledges the constant, horizontal exchange taking place between plants, humans, bacteria, and fungi alike.

Resurrecting the Sublime: The Smell of Gaia’s Molecules

Panellists: Stefano Mancuso, Refik Anadol, Sissel Tolaas, Hala Wardé, Nina Gualinga, Jeanne de Kroon, Joseph Grima, Salome Rodeck, and Not Vital
Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mikolaj Sekutowicz
Date: 21 May 2021
Location: Venice

Resurrecting the Sublime, a time-bending project by Sissel Tolaas, Christina Agapakis, and Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg at the 2021 Venice Biennale, found its origins in the Harvard University Herbaria, a library of extinct specimens. Tissue samples of floras were then collected, and the gene sequences that could code for the flowers’ smell molecules were subsequently identified and isolated by the team. These tissue samples were later inserted into yeast for a ‘brewing process’ that allowed for the cultivation of the flowers’ smell molecules.

Experiments in New Spatial Contracts: The Garden of Privatised Delights

Panellists: Sarah Wilson, Madeleine Kessler, Manijeh Verghese, David Ogunmuyiwa, and Jayden Ali
Moderator: Monilola Ilupeju, Sevra Davis
Date: 21 May 2021
Location: Venice

Architect and Curator of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition Hashim Sarkis has argued for a “new spatial contract” founded on a more sustainable relationship with each other and our natural world. Responding to this idea, Therme Art and The British Council co-hosted the hybrid panel discussion Experiments for New Spatial Contracts to mark with the opening of the Biennale. Presented as part of Therme Art’s ongoing Wellbeing Culture Forum, the discussion focused on the idea of cohabitation prompted by the biennale’s guiding question – How will we live together? – along with the British Pavilion co-curators’ response in The Garden of Privatised Delights, curated by Unscene Architecture, the experimental architectural practice comprising Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler.

From Non-Extractive to Regenerative Architectures: Growing a Symbiotic City

Panellists: Simon Schäfer-Stradowsky, Jeanne de Kroon, Nina Gualinga, Alexander Voigt,
Robert C. Hanea, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Kosuth, Joel Dietz, Joseph Grima, Dr. Noah Raford, and Sarah Wilson
Moderator: Monilola Ilupeju, Mikolaj Sekutowicz
Date: 22 May 2021
Location: Venice

Non-Extractive Architecture is a manifesto and project conceived by design research studio Space Caviar and architect and curator Joseph Grima that calls for major social and operational reform of the architecture sector to design buildings that avoid exploiting humans, non-human species, and the planet. It seeks to address how we can re-design the chain of processes commonplace in architecture, to switch from extractive practices towards renewable ones. The intersections between non-extractive and re-generative architectures are manifold. Bringing together experts from the fields of architecture, activism, art and design, and science, this talk aimed to articulate this interdependency and locate its practical applications within the future of urban life.

Art and Architecture as Healing: Shaping a Mental Health Economy

Panellists: Precious Okoyomon, Lonneke Gordijn, Olaf Blanke, Torkwase Dyson and Franziska Kessler
Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mikolaj Sekutowicz
Date: 22 September
Location: Basel

The talk Art and Architecture as Healing: Shaping a Mental Health Economy, centred art and architecture’s potential as a medium to improve mental health, going beyond architectural preconditions previously founded on the notion of productivity. Art, architecture, and cultural production were introduced as resources that hold the power to create physical spaces in which mental health becomes a priority.

In Conversation: The 2021 Serpentine Pavilion

Panellists: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sumayya Vally, and Torkwase Dyson
Moderator: Yomi Adegoke
Date: 12 October 2021
Location: London

The talk In Conversation: The 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, moderated by journalist Yomi Adegoke, brought together Counterspace Co-Founder and architect of the 20th Serpentine Pavilion Sumayya Vally, Serpentine Galleries Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist, and artist Torkwase Dyson in a discussion that illuminated the influences and creative processes behind the design of the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion and its related sound piece by Dyson. The talk also provided space to meditate on what is possible when architecture is utilised to amplify the presence of multiplicity and migration in London and beyond.

Community and Belonging Through the Lens of Creative Practice

Panellists: Priya Ahluwalia, ENNY, and Sumayya Vally
Moderator: Yomi Adegoke
Date: 12 October 2021
Location: London

The talk Community and Belonging Through the Lens of Creative Practice, featured musician and rapper ENNY and fashion designer Priya Ahluwalia alongside Sumayya Vally, moderated by Yomi Adegoke, who shared stories from past and present histories, addressing subjects that ranged from diaspora, migration, and intergenerationally, to gentrification and identity, and that inform each of the artists’ work.

Therme One Health: From Building to Growing Cities

Panellists: Maria Rivera Espinosa, Patience Naamara, Michael Mehling, and Simon Schäfer-Stradowsky
Moderator: Mikolaj Sekutowicz
Date: 11 November 2021
Location: Glasgow

To accompany the publication of its policy paper, on November 11, Therme One Health staged the Wellbeing Culture Forum panel discussion From Building to Growing Cities. The panel discussion addressed and questioned the traditional values and moral systems that guide the way we construct policies. To reassess the ways in which our cities and environments are being built today, we must turn to more inclusive decision-making processes, ones that involve not just the bodies’ actioning these policies but also those that are affected by these implementations firsthand, by means of a more integrated urban planning and conscious engagement with the local fabric and indigenous communities’ wisdom. As such, policies guiding urban development must include the voices of front-line activist, Indigenous people, underrepresented communities, and those interacting closely with the ecosystem, so that cities can become platforms for more voices to be heard in a wider, enriched dialogue.