This presentation is about the practice of designing and design’s capacity to relate (or not) to beings of all kinds, human and others, in ways that are life-affirming. It is based on arguments of the book Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating, where the author develops the notion of alter-natives, a concept that exposes the alterity of artificial things and the potential of these things to participate in the sustainment of environments. The arguments immerse us in a poetics of relating, a semiotic practice of interrelating humans, artificial things, and other-than-human species; a design practice of care for the affirmation of cultural and biological diversity.
Martín Ávila is a researcher, and Professor of Design Ecologies at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. Ávila’s research is design-driven and addresses forms of interspecies cohabitation. His postdoctoral project, Symbiotic Tactics, reflects on biosemiotic aspects that confront socio-ecological challenges. One of his most recent books, Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating (Bloomsbury, 2022), Ávila pursues the work of caring for how our mattering through design can become constructive in creating more-than-human ecologies.
*The lecture will be held in English.
To receive a seminar text in advance, please contact:
____________
Praxis of care
The lecture series 24/25, Praxis of care explores the notion of care as attitudes, resistances, and narratives of making, and how these practices are embedded in various societal processes. Care time, according to sociologist Barbara Adam, is often devalued as unproductive or merely reproductive. Conventional approaches to care have shown how the work of reproduction and the maintenance of life have been historically marginalized.
The praxis of care is proposed as a way to weave together worlds, histories, and memories through the complex interplay of materials, frictions, gestures, and interactions. Practicing care means paying attention to the unexpected vulnerabilities of entities, beings, and disciplines in a disrupted world, all of which are interconnected through complex, visible, and invisible relationships.
In the seminar, students will explore different artistic research practices that involve everyday caring activities, such as the responsibility of community building, revealing hidden efforts, and the invisible labor that sustains everyday life — the unsung histories, techniques, and things that lie behind systems of making and production.