The Whanganui River, Google Satellite Image.
The Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW) is a joint initiative between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany, and the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA). Established in April 2026, the Centre is supported by the Max Planck Society and Nanyang Technological University, with staff and leadership based in Berlin and Singapore.
The CBCW envisions a future in which biological and cultural diversity are no longer treated as separate domains, but as mutually dependent conditions for sustaining life on this planet. In this future, insights from diverse histories and knowledge traditions inform more fair, responsible, and locally grounded responses to planetary challenges. We believe in the capacity of people, culture, and nature to generate many worlds—through relationships, practices, and meaning-making—a capacity that depends on the health and integrity of both biological and cultural diversity. This vision calls for empowering people as knowledge holders and for rethinking standards for doing research across legal, scientific, artistic, and local and Indigenous knowledge systems. By inviting people to actively rethink ownership and responsibility in decision-making processes that produce consequences for who thrives, the Centre contributes to building more robust and equitable biocultural futures.
The CBCW functions as a space where artistic practice, legal inquiry, and diverse knowledge traditions converge to explore new forms of collaboration and stewardship of biocultural worlds. The CBCW is driven by a commitment to empowering knowledge holders and communities to shape more just and sustainable planetary futures. The CBCW brings together communities from cultural practices, knowledge-holding traditions, the arts, law, sciences, and the humanities that share inclusive ways of defining shared futures. The Centre prioritizes collective and tangible field-based initiatives to understand and negotiate different worlds that are structured by the separation or integration of culture and nature. The CBCW uses methods of history of science, curatorial practice, storytelling, among others, to advance biocultural matters to public platforms, institutional partnerships, and interventions beyond academic boundaries.
What is Biocultural Worlding?
Biocultural worlding describes the active, plural, and ongoing processes through which human and non-human beings draw on entangled biological and cultural knowledges to collectively shape planetary futures with care, equity, and epistemic humility. At CBCW, biocultural worlding is simultaneously the object of inquiry and the aspiration for how the Centre itself operates: producing knowledge about the world through genuinely pluralized, accountable, and relational practices, across all the disciplines, traditions, and communities it brings together.
For more information:
About Max Planck Centres
Max Planck Institute for History of Science
