Reframing The Politics of Design 2020-2022
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Website of the research project
Virtuality and Sustainability event, Flemish Government 'Kunst in Opdracht' [commisioned public art]
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RESEARCH PROJECT INFO
Re-Framing the Politics of Design is a research, exhibition and book project exploring the role of designers and artists in collaboratively giving shape to future changes addressing complex challenges such as climate change, mobility and migration. By looking at concrete, situated case studies, this book explores the current need for designers to re-frame their political agency, engaging with the deep relationality connecting us all, humans (and not only those who already have a voice in society and are represented) but also more-than-human actors. Contributors are Andy Weir, Barbara Roosen, Bart Van Gassen, Ben Hagenaars, Bert Villa, Ciel Grommen, Els Vervloesem, Hannelore Goyens, Jan Schreurs, Jenny Stieglitz, Judith Seng, Julie Marin, Luigi Coppola, Mela Zuljevic, Roel De Ridder and Sarah Martens.
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My Chapter in the book:
PAZUGOO AND NUCLEAR WASTE AS ALIENATING FUTURE RELIC
Within the complex materials of radioactive waste, where toxic half-lives can extend for millions or billions of years, deep timescales of past and future are bound up with environmental catastrophe in the present. Alongside the question of what to do with ever growing masses of waste come questions of responsibility to and imagination of futures far beyond a single human lifespan. A history of design that ‘marks’ sites of buried waste, for example, has focused on communicating danger to future generations for safety purposes. It is argued through this art practice intervention, however, that this is problematic. In restricting itself to these locations and assuming an unchanged future addressee, it affirms a heroic story of future salvation, missing questions of who may be excluded from managed anthropocentric narratives of the future. Further, it doesn’t account for scales of deep time that insist on unearthing more critical questions of relations between humanity, waste and natural environments. Weir proposes instead a more speculative approach to the context through his Pazugoo work. This adopts a distributed format of collectively produced and buried 3d-printed demon artefacts, aiming to connect multiple planetary scales of toxicity and care. Through this work, it proposes nuclear waste as future relic, not communicating to a future but instead reflecting back and critically alienating what counts as ‘human’ in the present.