Krater Collective: Krater Model – Toward Urban Ecological Regeneration through Culture

Krater Model: Toward Urban Ecological Regeneration through Culture

The Krater Model project explores a set of principles that shape creative work with overlooked spaces of urban natures. Grounded in the work of the Krater Collective—transcending the divide between culture and nature—these principles reflect knowledge and methodologies developed over the past five years, opening new ways of imagining urban futures: from future city cartographies, systems of representation, and curating the untamed, to feral stewardship for the post-Anthropocene, regenerative material cultures and community economies, and long-term photographic documentation as a means of articulating invisible spaces and archiving the often-unseen labor of multi-species communities and ecological processes.

Drawing on Krater projects such as Crafting Biodiversity, Multispecies Typologies, Feral Palace, Forbidden Vernaculars, Notweed Paper, and Feral Occupations: Our Labor is Our Infrastructure!, the lecture will present practical skills, design strategies, and theoretical reflections, addressing immanent questions around the legal status of urban nature in spatial planning, community participation in shaping programs, the use and maintenance of public greenspace, and the role of culture in processes of ecological regeneration.

Krater Collective (2020–) consists of transdisciplinary enthusiasts who deliberately redefine professional roles, studios, and working conditions in order to act as guardians of a rewilded ecosystem in a pending construction pit in Ljubljana. The unregistered urban nature, owned by the Ministry of Justice and designated for a future Palace of Justice, remains under constant threat of erasure. Working at the edge of extinction, the collective cultivates creative resilience through feral tactics, public programs, legal negotiations, and material experimentation, treating administrative and other constraints as material for artistic intervention. It is precisely the inadequacy of spontaneous nature when confronted with systems of representation (cartographies, vocabularies, spatial plans), institutionalization of knowledge (curricula, professionalization, scientific authority), and with heritage regimes (conservation principles, archives, maintenance), that shapes the formats and focus of our work. Krater relies on the autonomy of art. It is through art — especially when confronted with the impossible — that feral practice takes form against hierarchies of structural injustice and inherited extractive regimes.

Guest speakers in Vienna will be Gaja Mežnarić Osole, Danica Sretenović, Andrej Koruza, Amadeja Smrekar and Klara Maček.

The lecture takes place as part of the IKA Lecture Series Summer 2026 curated by Thilo Folkerts and Christina Condak.