Derk Loorbach appointed chief curator of the 2022 IABR: SHOCK AND ROLL

 
The board of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) has appointed director of Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) and professor of Socioeconomic Transitions at the Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences Derk Loorbach as chief curator of the next edition of the IABR, SHOCK AND ROLL.
 
SHOCK AND ROLL will open in the fall of 2022 and is the first in a new series of biennales that will go all out for transition. The series will focus on the urgent need to put into design practice the all-embracing change to which science incites us, which the Paris climate objectives call for, to which the global community committed itself in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and with which the reality of the climate crisis confronts us every single day.
 
SHOCK AND ROLL will also initiate a long-term collaboration of the IABR, DRIFT, and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design (RAvB), an alliance of imaginers, transitionists and designers.
 

Photo by Aad Hoogendoorn © 

 
IABR president George Brugmans: ‘The appointment of Derk Loorbach allows the IABR to take a crucial next step: the step from design-driven exploration towards actively putting into practice what the goals of the Paris Agreement call for: all-embracing change. This is all the more urgent now that the corona crisis has revealed our inadequacy and made it clear that we really have to organize society differently if we want to be able to face the rapidly increasing threat of the much more serious climate crisis before it’s too late. I have asked Derk to bring together the fields of design and transition with the aim of taking us from research by design to development by design. Supported by a team of young curators, it is up to Derk to turn the IABR into a transition design practice. So that we can accelerate. More action, with a greater socioeconomic impact. We want to show what it means, all-embracing change, what we have to let go of, as well as that we can go on, and how. There is no alternative – it’s time to shock and roll.’
 
Derk Loorbach: ‘SHOCK AND ROLL intends to fuse imagination, design, and transition science in order to disrupt. To escape routine. To stop what has to stop. To make possible what is possible. I call it development by design. Improvise yet continue to play. Break down but redesign. Disruption and transition. Always off balance, not falling. Shock and roll!’
 
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