Care Matters in Human-Ecological Infrastructures

Care Matters in Human-Ecological Infrastructures is a transdisciplinary autumn school that takes place during Mesh Festival in Basel, Switzerland from October 14 – 17, 2026. During the autumn school participants and metaLAB tutors explore care as human-ecological infrastructure through community health narratives, fermentation, XR, and sound and sensing. Over four workshops (1.5 -2 hours each per day), 12–18 participants (open call; participation at all four sessions) from academic, activist, and artist communities engage various methodological lenses and co-create knowledge together:
Day 1, Methodologies of Care: Participants conduct observations and interviews on care and health journeys, then annotate and structure the material into the shared neighborhood AI dataset (begin manifesta).
Day 2, The Body as Living Archive: Body-Environment Relations: Participants engage fermentation as feminist archival practice through microscopic and embodied observations, and written reflections and visual information for the manifesta.
Day 3, Extended Reality Ecological Entanglements: Participants experience XR environments and record auto-ethnographic observations on body-spatial relations, then map these into the evolving dataset’s visual and cartographic layer.
Day 4, Listening to More-than-human Urban Ecology: Participants practice sonic methodologies and participatory field recording, then synthesize sound recordings and mappings into the final co-authored manifesta.
Each session unfolds in two parts: a short input introducing a hands-on methodological exploration, in which participants engage with and explore the day’s themes themselves, followed by participatory knowledge production (prototyping and community mapping), through which participants contribute to and negotiate a shared, co-created neighborhood AI dataset, synthesizing experiences toward the manifesta.
The manifesta is the autumn school’s collaborative, multimodal outcome: a co-authored statement of embodied mapping, sound fragments, spatial annotations, and written reflections, gathering four days of negotiated care relations into a public, multi-voiced document.
The manifesta is presented at Day 4’s public Roundtable and Exhibit at Mesh Festival.
Led by metaLAB (at) Basel and coproduced with the metaLAB community Harvard, Berlin, Basel, the autumn school is supported by HGK Basel and by ChallengeEU, in cooperation with Mesh Festival 2026. It is positioned within Mesh Festival’s thematic strands Urban Living Environments as Ecological Assemblages and Memory Machines.