RECLAIM TO TRANSFORM

Storytelling Through Design, Material, and Relationship

Talk - 1.5 Hours

This conversation explores the launch of the first Reclaim and Transform collectible furniture and artwork series: Hybrid Habitat: Chrysalis, Elemental Sigils, and Unity Web. Together, these works offer a new design model grounded in material innovation, cultural repair, and embodied care.

Waste does not exist, only materials without a relationship.
Sustainability has been absorbed into the very systems it was meant to disrupt.
“Regenerative capitalism” is the contradiction of our time.

So where do we go from here?

Toward a shift.

Away from maintaining broken systems, and toward transforming how we participate within them.

Join First Nations artist, founder, and educator Melissa Gilbert of UnitePlayPerform for a deeply personal, practice-led conversation exploring how values, ethics, principles, and material decisions can reshape the way we make, collaborate, and build across art, design, architecture, and public space. At its core, this session reimagines waste not as an endpoint, but as a valuable material resource, an invitation for systemic change, and a catalyst for cultural shift.

Moving beyond sustainability, beyond regeneration, the talk introduces Melissa’s journey toward the Symbiocene, shifting from minimising harm to actively restoring, repairing, and rebuilding the systems that hold us. Through this lens, design becomes a relational practice that can nourish planet, people, and place.

Melissa will be joined by Reclaim and Transform material innovation partners Patricia Chircop (KNOVUS), Sam Davies (Defy Design), Glenn Albrecht- Environmental philosopher (Symbiocene), PLP Labs, CT Labs Cambridge University professors, whose contributions have been integral to bringing this vision into form.

Glenn A. Albrecht is an Honorary Associate in the School of Geo-sciences, The University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. In numerous publications and public talks over the last two decades, Dr Albrecht has developed the theme of the psychoterratic (psyche-earth), or negative and positive emotional states connected to the state of the Earth. New concepts, developed by him, are now becoming well established in the international scholarly literature, new research theses and as inspiration for many creative people in the arts and music. While he is best known for creating the concept of solastalgia, or the lived experience of negative environmental change, his most recent work develops the mega-meme of the 'Symbiocene', a future state where humans re-integrate with the rest of nature. A book, 'The Symbiocene: Our Only Future', should be completed and published (Cornell University Press) by the end of 2026.

Participants

Melissa Gilbert — Artist, Founder, Educator UnitePlayPerform Studio, Co-Founder The Nest Creative Space
Patricia Chircop — Knovus, Material Innovation (Knitting Systems) Director of KNOVUS | 3D Knit Specialist
Samuel Davies — Defy Design, Closed Loop Plastic Systems, Structural Design
Ron Bakker — Co-founder of PLP Architecture, Leader of PLP Labs, Author of Smart Buildings (2020), Co-founder of CT Labs
Prof Glenn Albrecht — Symbiocene philosopher, Author of Earth Emotions (2019). Creator of the mega-meme of the Symbiocene (2011). Creator of the concept of solastalgia (2003). Sumbiologist.

UnitePlayPerform

KNOVUS

DEFY Design

Contact the host of UnitePlayPerform presents Reclaim and Transform: Storytelling right relationship in design, material, and form