Disruptive Nostalgia is a collective that sets out to reimagine and challenge the narratives of architecture, landscape, and cultural memory informed by intersectional politics. The group consists of Lesego, Frederick, Chris, and Miliswa, artists, designers, and researchers local to South Africa, Lebanon, the Netherlands and the UK. Their expertise spans architecture, landscape architecture, digital archiving, machine learning, indigenous practices, storytelling, queer experiences, and ecological research. Working together, they respond to the climate emergency, explore the material archive of our urban and natural environments, and spark new forms of solidarity in the more-than-human world.
 

Research Approach

Disruptive Nostalgia dedicates their residency at Spreepark to exploring how memory, color, and play shape our understanding of place and connection to each other and nature. By looking at both human and nonhuman traces—collecting and cataloging the steel hues of former rides and the color palettes of the vegetation that reclaims them, they seek to collect memories that emerge from the interplay between synthetic and natural colors. Drawing on the importance of color in material culture and social processes, they will study how these sensory experiences, viewed through an archive of memory, create new ways to connect with nature and each other. Through experimental “coloring scripts”, they aim to offer reflections on resilience, transformation, and ecological entanglement, building on the histories of the Spreepark once filled with laughter and now reclaimed by both plants and time.