Jonas Staal shares experiences on assemblies and internationalism contesting imperialist propaganda.

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020-ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union.

Portrait of Jonas Staal, © Ruben Hamelink

Oana Bogdan and Olaf Grawert discuss about the possible ways of political commitment in architecture. They share ideas and professional experiences confronting the rhetoric of conventional politics that keep citizens away from the debate and from the design and construction of the city.

Oana Bogdan is a Belgium-Romanian architect. She founded the architectural firm Bogdan & Van Broeck, now reconfigured as &Bogdan which stands for cooperation. Her problem-solving mentality and cooperative ethos questions the architect’s traditional role, believing that the profession’s skills can be used to navigate the complexity of many areas of life. She took the role of Secretary of State for cultural heritage in the Romanian Government which assumed leadership of the country in 2016. In 2021 she was appointed Chairwoman of the ‘Good Living’ Expert Committee in charge of the reform of Brussels Region’s building code.

Olaf Grawert works as a partner at the collaborative architecture practice bplus.xyz (Berlin), as a lecturer at station.plus (Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich) and in spring as an Adjunct Professor at the Politecnico in Milan. In 2021, he was co-curator of 2038 - The New Serenity, the German Pavilion at the 17th Architecture Biennale in Venice. As part of HouseEurope! a non-profit organization, he is currently co-organizing an European Citizens' Initiative aimed at boosting the renovation of existing buildings, to stop their demolition driven by speculation. bplus.xyz is known for its adaptive reuse projects of building ruins and industrial facilities that have fallen out of use.

Claudia Chwalisz talks about deliberation, new democratic models, and commitment as a form of participation.

Claudia Chwalisz is the Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext. Prior to that, Claudia served as the Innovative Citizen Participation Lead at the OECD, where she established and analysed around 600 examples of deliberative assemblies around the world, co-authored the "Catching the Deliberative Wave" report, and set standards for implementation and institutionalisation. She was involved in designing the world’s first permanent deliberative bodies made up of people drawn by a lottery in Ostbelgien, Paris, and Brussels. Claudia is an Obama Leader Europe 2023.