Peripheral Perspectives Friday Colloquia

Peripheral Perspectives Friday Colloquia

Friday Colloquia

A series of colloquia to bring together interdisciplinary academics with non-academic thinkers, diverse practitioners (designers, visual and performative artists, and others) and citizens.

With the concept of Peripheral Perspectives we intend to build a space to disturb, activate and generate difference while giving visibility and voice to alter-realities that encourage contestation of the status quo through inspiring modes of reorientation, action and regeneration.

Peripheral Perspectives: Friday Colloquia is interested in theories, practices and experiences that embrace diverse ways of knowing with tacit and situated knowledge.

Scientific Committee to the Friday Colloquia: Alberto Altes; Ana Margarida Ferreira; António Gorgel Pinto; Daniel Maciel; Helena Freitas; Inês Veiga; José Bártolo; Luisa Ribas; Maria João Baltazar; Maria Manuela Restivo; Maria Milano; Mariana Pestana; Miguel Carvalhais; Paula Reaes Pinto; Rodrigo Hernández-Ramirez; Tom Bieling; Virginia Tassinari; Tomé Quadros.

Colloquium I Heterodoxies of difference

2 July, 12h00-14h00

Online with transmission at esad-idea, Matosinhos

3 Long Talks + Panel Discussion

Moderators: Luísa Ribas & Miguel Carvalhais

 

What forms of (re-)productive peripheries can inspire alternative or heterodox economies through different ways of socially organising, knowing and being, and cultures of experimentation? What is the role of Artificial Intelligence in this process? What new economic dynamics are born from an algorithmically controlled world? What are the cultural biases and other forces that control the contemporary condition? How can interdisciplinary design and research create new communities of difference that react to this condition?

Kate Crawford

Atlas of AI: Mapping the Extracted Logics of Artificial Intelligence

Kate Crawford is a scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence, focusing on understanding large-scale data systems, machine learning and AI in the wider contexts of history, politics, labour, and the environment. She is the author of Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021). Kate’s work also includes collaborative art projects and critical visual design, as Anatomy of an AI System (2018) with Vladan Joler and Training Humans (2019-2020) with Trevor Paglen.

McKenzie Wark

Automation of the Arbitrary

McKenzie Wark is a writer and scholar known for her work on media theory, critical theory, and new media. She is the author, among other titles, of Capital is Dead (Verso Books, 2019), Sensoria (Verso Books, 2020), Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotext(e), 2020). She edited a special issue of e-flux journal on trans and fem aesthetics, published in April 2021. McKenzie Wark was awarded the Thoma Prize for digital art writing in 2019. She is a professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate liberal arts division of The New School, in New York City.

Metahaven

Fiction

The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design. Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016, nominated for the 2017 European Film Awards), Hometown (2018), Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), and Chaos Theory (2021). Solo exhibitions include Turnarounds, e-flux, New York (2019), Version History, ICA London (2018), Earth, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018), Hometown, Izolyatsia, Kyiv (2018), Information Skies, Auto Italia, London (2016), The Sprawl, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2015), and Islands in the Cloud, MoMA PS1, New York (2013).

 

Colloquium II Caring for diverse kinship

9 July, 17h00-19h00

Online with transmission at Maus Hábitos, Porto

1 Keynote Speaker + 3 Panel Speakers + Panel Discussion

Moderator: Teresa Franqueira

 

Beyond disciplinary knowledge it is possible to find uncommon realities, which can be perceived by other perspectives in a given time and space. These trajectories of thinking may converge into the definition of new strategies to implement the innovations that our planet really needs for a sustainable and holistic development.

At different local, regional and global scales, what is at stake is how design can establish different kinships, with human, non-human, or more-than-human ways of being. A rhizomatic approach combining human, biophysical, geographical, economic, political, social, cultural, historical and ecological aspects of life as a whole. From human-centred to life-centred design… and beyond!

Arturo Escobar

Against terricide: Designing as a praxis of caring for the web of life 

Arturo Escobar is an activist-researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism, post-developmentalist and post-capitalist transitions, and ontological design. He was professor of anthropology and political ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, until 2018, and is currently affiliated with the PhD Program in Design and Creation, Universidad de Caldas, Manizales, Colombia, and the PhD Program in Environmental Sciences, Universidad del Valle, Cali. He is currently working on a book on relationality (Designing Relationally: Making and Restor(y)ing Life) with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma.

 

 

Paolo Cascone

Decolonizing Performative Design

Born in Italy and grew up between West Indies and East Africa is an AA trained architect with a PhD at the intersection of environmental engineering and sustainable architecture. Paolo is the founding director of www.codesignlab.org, and teaches Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of Westminster and is the scientific director of the African Fabbers project. His work on ecological design and performative architecture has been exhibited and published widely. The African Fabbers project is going to be displayed at the Italian Pavilion of the next Venice Biennale of Architecture (May 2021)

Yanki Lee

From Older People to Butterflies: Design as The Others!? 

As a global citizen, Yanki Lee research and teach between Hong Kong, London and Växjö.  As a design activist with architectural design background and founder of Enable Foundation, a social design collective and an education charity, Lee co-design objects and exhibitions as co-creative tools that unlock wicked social problems using immerse design methodologies. As a design researcher, Yanki Lee started his career on self-reflective discussions about human-centred design practice, i.e. Now, the discussion is extended from human to non-human. Sounds like the act can also expand to “design as people” or even “design as the others”.  

For more information visit: www.yankilee.com; www.enable.org.hk

 

Martin Ávila

Alter-Natives: Designing as a poetics of relating

Martin Ávila is a designer, researcher and Professor of Design at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. His PhD work (Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design), was awarded the 2012 prize for design research by the Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education. His postdoctoral project Symbiotic tactics (2013-2016) has been the first of its kind to be financed by the Swedish Research Council. Martin’s research is design-driven and addresses forms of interspecies cohabitation.

See also www.martinavila.com

 

Colloquium III Narratives of more-than-human ecologies

16 July, 17:00-19:00

Online + live at esad-idea, Matosinhos

5 Panel Speakers + Panel Discussion

Moderator: Alastair Fuad-Luke

 

When thinking of more-than-human ecologies, language and narratives play a key role as they inform (or inhibit) the acknowledgement of relationality and envisage diverse ways to design (think/act in designing) for radical interdependence. Today, Herbert Simon’s long held notion of design as a means of changing existing situations into preferred ones through a course of action, crosses with expanded ontologies, epistemologies and cosmologies. This topic will be addressed by a series of conversations where different ways of thinking and practicing relationality in and through language — coming from different disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy — are brought in dialogue with design practitioners and researchers dealing with the same issue in and through their design experimentations. 

Thomas Pausz

Amplifying Ecosystems, Interspecies media practices

Thomas Pausz is a Critical Designer and Artist born in Paris (1978) and based in Reykjavik. In his interdisciplinary practice, Pausz stages real and fictional ecosystems to amplify the voice of Non-Human entities through careful work on media and artefacts. In his entangled scenarios intersecting experimental science, ethics and contemporary design, Thomas Pausz offers a poetic space for renegotiating technological and biological hierarchies.

For more information visit: www.pausz.org

Orkan Telhan

Where do cucumbers come from?

Orkan Telhan investigates critical issues in cultural, environmental and social responsibility. Telhan is Associate Professor of Fine Arts – Emerging Design Practices at University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He holds a PhD in Design and Computation from MIT’s Department of Architecture. He was part of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and a researcher at the MIT Design Laboratory. Telhan’s individual and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally.

Marisol de la Cadena

Listening in Pluriversal Contact Zones

Marisol de la Cadena was trained as an anthropologist in Peru, England France and the US. Marisol locates her work at several interfaces: those between STS and non-STS, between major and minor politics (and what escapes both,) between history and the a-historical, and between world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. In all these areas, her concern is the relationship between concepts and methods, and interfaces as analytical sites. Most specifically, she is interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between what we call theory and the empirical and can indicate the limits of both.

Performing what she calls ono-epistemic openings, her recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) is an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical.

Currently her field sites are cattle ranches, peasant farms, slaughter houses, cattle fairs, breed-making genetic laboratories, and veterinary schools in Colombia. There she engages practices and relations between people, cows, plants, and things.

Mario Blaser

Infrastructures of emplacement: stories about other-than-ecologies

Mario Blaser is an Associate professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. He is the author of Storytelling Globalization from the Paraguayan Chaco and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2010) and co-editor of A world of Many World (Duke University Press 2018); Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for the Global Age (University of British Columbia Press, 2010) and In the Way of Development: Indigenous peoples, Life Projects and Globalization (Zed Books 2004). His current book in preparation examines the challenges of articulating heterogeneous life projects under the shadow of discussions on the Anthropocene and the Common. For more information visit: https://mun.academia.edu/MarioBlaser

Patrícia Vieira

Can Plants Write?  

Patrícia Vieira is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. Her most recent monograph is States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture (SUNY UP, 20018) and her most recent co-edited book is The Mind of Plants (Synergetic, 2021). She is the recipient of a European Research Council grant to analyze literature, cinema and art about the Amazon River basin.

For more information visit: www.patriciavieira.net

 

Colloquium IV Animating everyday heterotopias

23 July, 17:00-19:00

Online + live at esad-idea, Matosinhos

1 Keynote speaker + Discussion + 7 Short talk Speakers (7x7min.)

Moderator: Teresa Fradique

 

What forms of everyday heterotopias can contribute to the creation of new possibilities and paths? How might we activate new languages, actions and interventions that move us from probable futures to preferable futures? By gathering different projects that articulate alternative ways of doing — either by rethinking ethics, aesthetics, difference, sustainability, education or social justice — we intend to nurture the strength of disobedient perspectives and outsider cultures to grasp different ways of thinking and being in the world.

Zoy Anastassakis

Remaking everything, everyday

Zoy Anastassakis is a Brazilian Designer and Anthropologist. Between 2016 and 2018, she was Director at Superior School of Industrial Design, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ), where she works as Associate Professor. She coordinates the research group “Design and Anthropology Laboratory” (LaDA), where she experiments on means of composition between Anthropology and Design. Since 2020, she is an associated researcher at the Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), in Lisbon, Portugal. Together with Marcos Martins, she is co-author of a book on ESDI’s experimentations during the period of 2016–18, at Bloomsbury’s series “Design in Dark Times.”

 

 

Alemberg Quindins

Casa Grande Foundation: A cultural management school for children in Brazil

Alemberg Quindins is a researcher, musician, social entrepreneur, writer and self-taught artist that created, in 1992, together with his partner Rosiane Limaverde, the Casa Grande Foundation – Memorial do Homem Kariri in the city of Nova Olinda, Ceará. As a Unicef ​​consultant, he participated in the creation of child-to-child radio programs with national radio stations in Angola and Mozambique. He was the culture manager at SESC Rio de Janeiro (2018) and is currently an institutional relations advisor at SESC Ceará. He teaches the Postgraduate Course Latu Sensu in Inclusive Social Archeology at URCA and works as a researcher at CEAACP at the University of Coimbra – Portugal.

Bota-Abaixo Royal Republic

Ká Trá Ká: Old houses, new directions

The “Real República do Bota-Abaixo” is a self-governed students’ house located in the city of Coimbra. It was founded in 1949 as a part of the broader academic cultural tradition of the Coimbra University under which students embrace a set of customs, practices and aesthetics related to their identity as University alumni. With an internal organization based on communal living, sharing of responsibilities and collective ownership of habitation, Bota-Abaixo has been passed on from generations of new students, with its current inhabitants carrying the historical legacy of this house as well as bringing in their own contributions to its present and future.

JoYas da Terra

Designing paths for sustainability using Permaculture

JoYas da Terra (Jewels of the Earth) are all the simple things that the Earth provides us with… a stone, a stick, a flower, a seed, all the living beings… a moment that allows us to connect with our essence and therefore Nature. Joana and Yassine, founders of the movement, thrive to build their own settlements, their own food and embrace education in a regenerative and respectable way. They use the principles of Yoga, Permaculture Design and Regenerative Actions to guide us through their actions trying to be part of the solution while inspiring others!

Pablo Calderón Salazar

Dishwashing designers

Pablo Calderón Salazar was born on a cold Wednesday morning in a city 2600m above the Andes. Built a close relationship with LEGO from an early age, perhaps the only clue I would become a designer. Applied to three different master programmes, and chose social design given the higher political awareness I had cultivated. Acutely aware of my privileged position in Colombia as a white-looking straight man; but simultaneously subaltern, as a Latin American in Europe. I have developed my work as a border practitioner, walking along -and trespassing- the borderline between academic and popular knowledge, theory and practice, teaching and creation, as well as between different knowledge domains.

Collectif Etc

Where have common spaces gone? 

“Collectif Etc” is a non-profit organisation since 2010 and based in Marseille city since 2014 and now moving in a rural area in Rhon-Alps region. As employees, we’re four architects-builders and one chief administrator, though we regularly work with some twenty other partners. We try out self-management methods and autonomous ways of working together since the very beginning. We are interesting in supporting common spaces trough actions that gather people around construction workshops. We’re using various mediums like edition, screen printeing, sewing, filmmaking, artistic processus. We hope that architecture can be a tool to change our world toward a more social, democratic and ecological ways of life.

Roseanne Kimber & Patricia Csobánczi

Co-Creating Everyday Foods – with Insects and Seaweed!

Roseanne Marie Kimber is an award-winning Experience Designer and Researcher living in Denmark. Inspired by the power design has for creating positive change, Roseanne works closely with participants to discover what’s at the heart of a design challenge. CoDesigning products and experiences that support social connection through playful, emotive and sensorial solutions. She has a background in Human Biology, Entrepreneurship & Innovation and an MA degree in Design for People (Designskolen Kolding). Her project ‘Sensory Tools for Needle Phobias’, which activates sensory play as a therapy tool in children’s healthcare has been nominated for a Danish Design Award 2021 (Visionary Concepts category).

For more information visit: www.roseannekimber.com

Patricia Csobánczi is a Designer and Researcher of sustainable urban life with a focus on food systems and more-than human design. She has a background in Industrial Design and earned her MA degree in Design for Planet from Designskolen Kolding. In her work, she develops citizen-driven initiatives that challenge urbanites to reexamine their relationship with food, non-human neighbors and environment. Currently, she works at Growing Pathways, a human-nature relations agency, where she prototypes future neighbourhoods through biodiversity enhancement, community-driven action and citizen education.

Rui Silva

Publishing for imagined horizons

Rui Silva has been working as a graphic designer since 2005 on the www.alfaiataria.org project, where he was predisposed to make graphic cut-and-stitch around the world. Since 2007 he has been pleased to design books for publishers such as Antigone, Black Orpheus and Dafne. In 2016, he adhered to the paradigm of materialities for a period of four years — renewable for an indefinite period — by joining the Doctorate in Materialities in Literature, which is nearing completion with the thesis: «The condition of being a book. Publication as an artistic practice and the book as an artefact». Since 2018, he has dedicated himself to editing as an artistic practice in his publishing laboratory: Gabinete Paratextual.