Venue: Innovation Port at Wee Cho Yaw Plaza, Nanyang Technological University Singapore

Date: 20 April 2026

Launched on 20 April 2026, the Max Planck-NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW) is a new joint initiative of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany, and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore). Planned to run from 2026 to 2031, with the option of a five-year extension, the Center brings together researchers, artists, curators, legal scholars, and knowledge-holding communities to explore how biological diversity and cultural life are profoundly entangled, how this entanglement shapes planetary futures, and what forms of knowledge are needed to respond to these realities.

Rather than treating nature and culture as separate spheres, the Center seeks to understand how ecosystems, biodiversity, cultural practices, and systems of knowledge continuously shape one another. It defines “biocultural worlding” as the active and ongoing process through which human and non-human beings collectively create, interpret, and inhabit worlds through intertwined biological and cultural knowledge.

The launch was anchored by the symposium Who Owns Knowledge? Guardianship? Stewardship? Ownership?, jointly conceived by NTU CCA Singapore and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin. Two keynote conversations, the first between curator and policy analyst Marian Pastor Roces (Philippines) and curator and Professor Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), and the second between scholar of international law Dr Nilüfer Oral (Turkey/Singapore) and historian of science Professor Dagmar Schäfer (Germany), MPIWG, addressed the question of knowledge ownership, addressing the rights of nature, place, and culture.

This was followed by two roundtables—Biocultural Methods for Future Pasts and Grounding the Biocultural: Place, Landscape and Living Knowledge—chaired by historian of science Dr Lisa Onaga (United States/Germany), MPIWG, and environmental sociologist Professor Saidul Islam (Canada/Singapore), NTU CCA Singapore, featuring perspectives from researchers and practitioners across diverse fields.

The symposium programme is available here.