Mariana Pestana: "Towards New Beginnings"

uh so that we can have it also for for our uh for the rest of our community but um again thank you uh thank you all for joining and thank you marina mariana for um uh for joining our su digital community uh for now uh we are uh sort of we i want to welcome everyone uh to to this is our second lecture uh from this semester and i'm really excited to see both students and instructors joining from other parts of our syracuse community on main campus and here in florence but also sort of to be able to extend these conversations with uh with a larger audience outside of of the university proper um and so uh it's really um inspiring to see how we continue to try and find ways to sort of come together under the pressure of this sort of ongoing uh pandemic which we're hopefully going on the outside of it soon i also want to thank again uh dean speaks and associate dean julia cerniak for the help and their support in sort of coordinating these events um so today uh i am really excited to welcome mariano pistana to our uh join uh to join our sort of community um and in the past few weeks um the conversation with our students here in florence we're sort of doing a studio that is called borgo digitale digital borgo and the conversation has been sort of focusing on the issue of design intent or how do we frame the sign beyond the definition and construction of a single isolated artifact and instead think of design practice practices as sort of collective and diverse connecting individual entities with larger communities and ecologies uh where the two sections have been going at this from two different trajectories from zooming in or zooming out but always at the core was the idea of creating this sort of network of uh connections between between the the object of design let's say um so really thinking of design as uh sort of uh the making of a world view that it engages humans and other than humans agents alike our primary ambition has been to think through the articulation of a community as i was saying a space can be understood both a physical and a conceptual gathering that moves beyond what in some of the readings that you suggested can be described sort of as dualist ideologies um and so from this perspective i really could not imagine a better speaker to join us to fuel and sort of inspire our conversation than mariana her research and creatorial projects can be considered an exemplary reference of interdisciplinary design practice i find particularly inspiring to see her commitment to the role of fiction as a critical design tool fiction understood as sort of an investigation that supports the imagination of new relationships between objects and ideas i should frame it um and and so really i think that in this sense the design of this new positive possible world that she puts forward is really not to be understood as an escape from our current reality uh but rather as a way to sort of look anew to our current cultural and political condition uh the practice of world building as a radical practice to these large patterns of discrimination exclusionary violence in favor of networks of empathy as she i'm sure we'll speak up today in ecological justice so i'm going to try and keep this as short as possible to be very respectable of this sort of coordinated time across multiple continents uh but so i'll keep your bio short but uh we have provided links to students and to our audience to to see more extensively your work but mariana pestana is an architect and an independent curator interested in critical social practice and the role of fiction in design for an age marked by technological progress in an ecological crisis she's a member of the collective the decorators an interdisciplinary practice that makes collaborative public realm interventions and cultural programs marina co-curated the exhibition of the future starts here at the vna in 2018 and the eco visionaries art and architecture after the anthropocene at the maat in 2018 and the matadero and the royal academy in 2019 currently marina is the creator of the fifth instable istanbul design biennial title empathy revisited the signs for the more than one which many of the students have read both your statements and the the reference reading really inspiring so thank you for sharing those um biennial that it's sort of ran in october 2020 and i think he's gonna have another iteration in april april 2021 so i'm really excited to hear about this and marina is also a researcher at the center for other worlds an assistant professor of design at the school of communication arts and information technologies at the universidad de lucio fawn sorry i'm sure i didn't miss spell but thank you again marina for mariana for joining our lecture series um please welcome you no thank you so much daniel for the the invitation and and and for the the thoughtful introduction um you'll have to to send it to me so uh it's really really beautiful thank you so much uh i'm really honored to be here and to be part of your program uh which i have um read and um and yeah super happy to be here and and looking forward to the discussion afterwards and and your the questions you you may all have thank you all for for being here too um so um i've prepared the presentation that i can share with you with some with some images so i'll just share my screen just one second and i'll i'll speak speak with you um about the istanbul and design biennial this fifth edition um which as danielle mentioned is is is taking place um it began in october 2020 but um it's it's a very slow and uh uh and ongoing on you know developing projects that um that culminates in april um with the on the 24th of april we will have an online day so you're all invited to that of course where we will present an overview of um some of especially the research projects i'll tell you more about those in a minute um but we we yeah it's it we called it not quite a finnish because the nature of the projects that we are doing is that they don't really end exactly they never they don't really reach a final form so we can never say that it's closed but on the 24th what we will do is um there are um four projects four new projects that we will launch then um and we will also it's a moment more for for sharing for the designers and participants to share what they've where they're at in this moment let me just begin you have to tell me if you see my screen full full if it's full screen yeah perfect yeah it's perfect to see your windows um speaker windows okay perfect great so i thought that i would begin um by um showing you where this journey began um and and do and in that uh give you an introduction to my work with the decorators because um i have um i i i'm an architect by training and my practice is above anything is it's a design practice and i do curatorial work but um the methodologies that i use are informed by my design practice and especially my work with decorators um and so i'd like to begin um with an introduction to where it's it's quite literal this is where i was at when i when when denise over uh director of the istanbul design biennial um first approached me and um and i was in this place um very precisely which is which is in the azores um isle uh the san miguel island in the archipelago of azores um and i was doing a project with the decorators uh my practice which is uh me um together with chavyard susan o'connell and carolina for a festival that's called the arts the walk and talk festival it's an arts festival and this was in 2019 and this is where we were and the azores is an archipelago that sits between three tectonic plates it's a volcanic archipelago um and it was populated by humans in the 15th century since then it's been subject to many many um expeditions and experiments for including for example the acclimatization of plants before they were brought from the south hemisphere to the uh north european botanical gardens so it was this uh territory um that was not um that was populated by human humans quite late um until then uh only um one mammal lived in the island um a bat a species of bat and but much of the uh uh of the expeditions that took place um to the azores which were done by um to a great extent uh rationalist minds let's say of the north of europe they resulted in books like these two that you see on the right um and these are books that um offer a perspective on the island and outside their perspective on the islands and what they do is they categorize and they classify plants species peoples landscapes minerals very much in tune with the spirit of the enlightenment that motivated many of these expeditions in the 19th century but when we were doing field work in the azores in preparation for our project what we found was that these um volcanic uh events that take place this image that you see here in the background is the the last eruption last big eruption that happened in the azores in the 1950s which was televised completely and and so um it's it's a very um dramatic experience to watch the the eruption of you know that took place in the islands i i know that uh for you in italy this is also a very present reality uh what we found in the azores um because uh there's an insularity almost about the azores because it's so far detached from the mainland of portugal this is portuguese territory um is that uh often in azores they speak of a double insularity so um within it's an archipelago that's isolated in a way and then the islands are sort of further isolated from one another because they're quite distant from one another um but what we found when we were there was that um there were a number of religious ceremonies and and practices and rituals that um of the contemporary time that still are incredibly linked to these natural phenomena such as for example this procession where all the men um in the island of somigal go to every um chapel it might be if it seems like there's just speak it and i just muted that person okay it wasn't a question was it because there was a little delay no okay um and um and so today and and uh in in in those rituals often they they will ask for the volcano to stay calm right because the volca because the the eruptions often evicted populations in very dramatic ways over history of course and so these religious practices developed in relation to those events of eviction and of relocation of entire populations so anyway what we found was that these that events like this one um in a way uh were better placed uh to deal with some of the um incommensurable or um unintelligible dimensions of these phenomena um so we were we were interested that not all dimensions um could be captured by the rational systems of thoughts that these expeditions and subsequent books put forward things like the magnetic properties of rocks the impending ascent of the lava the hold all the suspense that comes with it um they defied logical scales because they can hardly be predicted or often they cannot be predicted and so these uh myths and rituals both sacred and profane in a way they captured the strength and the magnitude of these events in a way that we found was at times more rigorous almost so when when working you know as a practice we decided that our approach to to to to this um landscape would also take the form of an expedition but um and so at the time we called it expedition empathy and i will get back to that and we um so what we did is we got together a group of of artists and thinkers and we um [Music] came to the islands of of the azores um and we did a series of interventions in the landscape and then organized a day where we walked across different territories and visited those those kinds of places but our idea was to organize an expedition that began from a position of doubt and and that didn't try to explain but rather was trying to merge with the landscape and uh was trying to open questions about it um so this is for one of the projects that we did which we designed ourselves which was a very very long table it was also in the first slide um in an area called furnish where it's uh very common to um cook underground so if you see in this aerial image you'll see some round holes on the ground so we very simply just designed a table that was very long and then had a hole in it and we made that hole coincide with a hole in the ground um and then we worked with an artist initial who developed a bread recipe in collaboration with a local cook and then we cooked the bread underground and then we had this pulley system where everyone sitting at the table would collectively pull the bread from under the earth when it was cooked and then eat it collectively so this is to to introduce you to the the kind of practice that um we at the decorators have which develops these methodologies of deep listening to the context in which we are operating and then creating infrastructures for collaboration in this case it took the form of an expedition other times it took the form of a restaurant or some kind of structure that then generates many um collaborations and then within each collaboration for example this one with the net well the expedition had several actors and then with indianapolis we developed this recipe she in turn collaborated with this local chef and then there was also this moment of communal eating um that was the celebration that you see here uh in the image um and so when approaching a curatorial project um um i often um take these you know um learning that i've done in 10 years of practice with the decorators um and um and obviously that those methodologies are present they of course they get distorted and transformed by the context but um i wanted just to let you know this is this is where i'm coming from and also i wanted to tell you that when we called this an expedition empathy um we did this very intuitively we thought what could it um how could we name this expedition in a way that um translates in a in a relatively um intuitive way this um desire to to to merge with the landscape to learn from the context to um to to begin with this position of doubts and at the time we called it empathy and it was really interesting because when we um were there uh and uh i introduced the the the starting point and the title of the project and an artist was doing a residency um brought to my attention that empathy as a term was also a 19th century construction so very much like the expeditions that we were in a sense critiquing empathy is a term that had emerged in the well at the turn of the 20th century but it had around 100 years of history and um so it was following that that i um so when when i was sort of exposed to all these i started thinking about the biennial and um i wanted to develop this research strand right and think okay um what if we i was curious about empathy and what empathy could do as a term so uh i uh that's when i became familiar with susan lonzoni's um fantastic work her 10 years of research into the term empathy and how it developed over time and um if nowadays we tend to think of empathy as the understanding or or grasping or even stimulating of someone else's feelings actually when the term entered circulation um about a hundred years ago it was um used to describe how feelings transferred between people and objects and the natural world and how things like like chairs and paintings and sculptures elicited certain bodily sensations and emotions in us empathy was translated in the beginning from the german i'm feeling and which means this idea or contains this idea of feeling into [Music] and one of the first people to write about empathy was violet paget who um wrote under the pseudonym vernon lee and she did a series of experiments together with her partner kit um where they would analyze how certain objects like this chair which was one of their [Music] objects of study how they how it would elicit certain bodily sensations instead in them so it was a form of aesthetic experience and in a for a and and empathy was used um in the context of an aesthetic embodied aesthetic uh theory and violet pages described empathy as the landing of one's life to a thing uh which um could be um these are just some examples of of of things that that she referred to or analyzed and so to to empathize is by definition uh feeling into something else and so it contains in it this idea of this embodiment of this centering right so what interests me is not the idea of humanizing the other but the idea of othering the human um so i'm interested in destabilizing this boundary between the two between one and the other and how empathy in a way is a tool that invites us to do that of course skeptics might say this is a pointless exercise how can we ever escape our anthropocentrism how can we ever escape our situatedness um and indeed this is a very you know it's a physical impossibility but um i really trust that in the effort of escaping one's center um and in this movement of detaching from one's body that and the simulation of seeing from another perspective that we may see the world differently and i mean this is what fiction does so well as well narrative fiction is a gesture of recentering and we can come back to it if you'd like later on but now in 2020 in in a digital world and in face of a serious very serious climate crisis uh obviously also the general state of social deprivation brought about by the pandemic um this biennial you know when working um for the biennial i was interested in taking back empathy back to its roots so to recover this original meaning of empathy as the idea of feeling into the others and the natural world but putting it in this context in this contemporary context and and asking like what what does this mean um of course we know that this uh the interdependence the coexistence of humans within larger ecosystems as you are exploring in in your classes is is has been subject to many disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses in the last years um with a greater emphasis i believe in the last in the last decade in the field in various fields from anthropology to science philosophy and in design too and so we are aligned with those discourses and um we want to revisit empathy as a means to interrogate how we may relate emotionally with other species with other bodies and they can be biologic or geologic or machinic even i'll show you what we mean by that so if let's say if the question was what does empathy do if we bring it to the design fields today then our attempts at answering that question was this idea of designs for more than one so um designs that take into consideration um not just um [Music] one body uh not just an immediate client not just an immediate user but the complexity of entities and their interlocks and systems in which they operate um that are inherent to any new design production um so we ex we presented design as a tool to see from other perspectives to connect with other bodies to form communities across different dimensions and scales and this was our starting point so i want to show you um um maybe i'll go back here so this was our starting point this is what me um at this point we were a curatorial team so i was working with sumitra upham and billy mirabin um and with this um let's say we this um line of questioning which is what i shared with you with my curatorial essay we then um reached out to designers thinkers activists and what i'm going to share with you now is how um they have responded to to these um these questions that we opened up but also what i've attempted to do is also to to reflect about what we have learned from from these works and these responses um so one um [Music] one important aspect is that when we were speaking about empathy in our curatorial discussions in our curatorial meetings meetings um the limitations of scale and embodiment came up really often so questions like if we are if we cannot see or perceive the bodies with which we are designing what tools may be used to overcome it um so throughout the scope of the biennial design was used and discussed as a tool to sense the world and help us see more than our naked eyes allow in a way and so these sensing offered different perspectives and connected viewers with elements and matters and living beings with which they wouldn't naturally connect with so i'll show you some examples of that this is a a still from a vr experience by callum bowden um and this work is called dark origins and it's a vr experiment it was shown at the biennial as a narrative film so it's a walk through this um digital world that callum created and um in this narrative our perspective as viewers shifts between human bacterial geologic and machinic perspectives to um reveal mysteries that have to do with extremophiles um so these are creatures that live in um extreme conditions for example no sunlight um a few years ago um there was a really important piece of um research project that prevailed that there was more life under the earth than on top of the earth right so there are more living entities there's more biodiversity in the darkness can you imagine under the earth you probably know this already then then on top of the earth and and when callum uh read about this and i remember reading those articles as well i'm being fascinated about this and so that's what really prompted him to to create this um this work and he he i just want to read a quote that by him and he says that vr provides a means of encasing oneself within worlds that are completely other and of becoming other with the world sleeping from the familiar human scale into other strange scales of perception so in this vr experience because you shift your perspective you see at different scales and at some point you encounter these extremophiles right these creatures that that strive with without sunlight a different example is for this this work science fiction movie by alice where a marine biologist that's leading a project of mapping the atlantic ocean the bottom of the atlantic ocean develops a relationship of friendship with the subject of her research which is krill so krill is a small crustacean you cannot see krill almost at um when when there's only one element of it but when krill swarms and then it forms these really large red clouds then then you see it when it exists as a group you can recognize it's its shape and form and the character uses a nano camera that she places inside an individual krill and she uses this camera as a means to overcome the distance between her scale and the scale of of the crustacean and then she falls in love um this idea of how how we relate to an other which we cannot see is also something that is very much present in in the work of paula gaitano adi who works um in robotics for a long long time and for the biennial she created a robocalliptic manifesto which calls for the liberation of all robots and a general strike of all the robots she believes that um we must move beyond this illusionary narrative of robots for care robots um for companionship at the idea of inter artificial intelligence as effective and uh we need to create a new history where humans and robots um are in alliance there isn't a hierarchical difference um between them so um the so this idea of um how technology enables us to um to decenter to to move outside of our body is something that is present um in many projects um across all programs um then a second idea i wanted to share with you is is this idea of unraveling complexity so when we think about how um we have a society and historically and culturally related to other living entities um when um when we think about how in the present time humans control or domesticate or patent or um other living entities we thought that one interesting way to analyze how those relationships have been maintained is through food systems so um because we believe that um on the one hand food is a subject that is interesting to many many people um so in that sense it works almost like a trojan horse because everyone cares about food um but also because through food systems we can see how living entities have been associated with qualities of possession of property and value um which have rendered them inert and detached from social and ecological um relations so without agency and so this part of um this let's say this moment in today's talk i wanted to to to share with you um how we began also to unravel our existing relations with other species um the values that lie beneath them and and we've um i'd like to share a number of projects that have mapped the complexity of those relations um through two programs one is the critical cooking show and the other is the library of land and sea so i'll begin with the critical cooking show so this was a series of talk as well a series of films um that we presented online entirely and um they all departed from an ingredient or a kitchen tool to reveal much more complex geopolitical um stories let's put it that way this is just a map we created um depicting some of the subjects that came up in the film in the films and i'll show you two examples um to give you an idea of what what this program is about and also as an invitation for you if you haven't watched the critical cooking show all of the episodes are available um online why a critical cooking show we thought that the cooking show is you know is a format that has been perfected for the screen and so we thought that um in the current scenario of digital saturation it would be interesting to present um research because many of these projects are incredible um or they they result from incredible research projects but in a way that was you know digestible in a sense and good to watch from home so i'll show you an example by um linda schilling quelar who is an architect and researcher and she looked at the avocado toast as the starting point of her film what's interesting about this project is it starts with the trend of avocado toast on instagram hipster cafes etc but then it takes you on a journey to investigate the patents that avocados as a as a fruit right that have been subjected to the politics behind those patents but also the patenting of irrigation systems for example and how they have dramatically transformed the um the landscape surrounding the petrarca river so sorry about that just show you an exit [Music] for this recipe we will need the following ingredients an artificial and accidental new variety of avocado it's 1935 somewhere in la havre heights california brutal has developed what would be the first house avocado tree mixing a few varieties in his house backyard an unforgotten bunch of seedlings found their way to the hands of his grandchildren who found the fruit advertising rudolph has patented this new plant august 27 1935 [Music] i hope the sound was okay i'll show you another example um by vivian kakuri which is new world syrup and this film reveals an unexpected connection between mosquitoes and sugar plantations in the 18th century which is a very unique moment for for latin america and so she makes these links between sugarcane plantations yellow fever catholicism uh the production of sweets using egg yolk and how mu and music as well and how all of these elements were reflected in colonial interactions especially between portugal and brazil and the consequences that they had for south american bodies and again um i'll show you a very short excerpt just for you to see what the to get to know a little bit the universe of the film [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] mariah so of course vivian in her very humoristic and ironic style i mean um tells really disturbing stories connected connected with these processes and around the color yellow you can watch the complete film online if you want um another um project that also um practice this kind of uh complexity unraveling was the library of land and sea so we commissioned 10 research projects to that were taking place in the mediterranean basin um and we presented them in istanbul um at the beginning of the research project in the form of a library um so we opened an archive in the city for people to come in and become researchers themselves right this was a place you could book a table at and then you could examine archival material documents photographs maps that were created by these different researchers and each of the projects then developed into a legacy outcome and this is what we will share on the 24th of april but i'll give you a sense of what was on display in in istanbul one of the projects um that we showed was uh the cosmogony of racial capitalism by delhi adeyemo who is an architect and researcher and this is an investigation into the birth of capitalism and how it emerged out of the relations of power forged in sugarcane plantations again um so as delhi says that um prototyping practices of colonization industrial agricultural production and atlantic safe slavery um europe's sugar cane plantations would propel the expansion of capitalism across the planet transforming notions of rice in that process so what delhi did was he forced us to distort the map of the mediterranean all the way down to the guinea coast of africa he identifies the sugarcane plantations in the island of madera in portugal as the first exercise in global capitalism so what he did uh with this research project was um he um took as a point of departure um the meeting between the portuguese and the idol people in the kingdom of benin which was a living society in west africa among the yoruba and he recovered these long neglected histories that narrate the extension of the mediterranean to to the guinea coast to do this he um he looked at cartography european cartographies um of of this time but he also looked at artifacts and um objects and um cultural artifacts that were present in uh that were produced by the yoruba so his project is an exercise in mapping different cosmologies so different perspectives into into into images and we also asked everybody um in the library of land and sea to share with us some of the the books and the documents that were important to them so for example this is the bookshelf that dele put together and here's an example of this cartographic exercise that combines practices of european and african societies to explore a different narrative about how the initial conditions for global capitalism came into being another to give you another example of a project in this library of london c very different um the project by aslahan de mirtage with her students from kadir has university and this was a project that compiled um a collection uh they that mapped really um the food production in the city of istanbul from soil to supermarkets um and so on the right you see a map that illustrates a repertoire of differing typologies of urban agriculture food networks that exist currently in istanbul but also they compiled so this is the map sorry uh here you see um like let's say the the result of this exercise of compilation um they also compiled homegrown produce um during the pandemic through social media so uh how people are growing food and perhaps well apparently a lot more than they were before since the general lockdown and they created um a prototype which is this table and stools that contain soil this project it's both let's say an announcement of something bigger that they are doing as their legacy outcome that they're building a garden new garden in the city of istanbul but also it's important to refer that in istanbul there's there are these thousand-year-old urban market gardens um that still exists called bostons and many of them are at risk of disappearing so through processes of gentrification and regeneration many of them are contested spaces and so in this let's say this sculpture in a way uh azlahan de mirtage wants to bring our attention to soil and the value of soil and how discussing what happens to soil in the city of istanbul is really really important for the near future and uh in this image we captured just the first moment when a little plant came out of this of this soil it wasn't planted this soil not intentionally right but there's a richness that comes with any soil and by the end of the first week or two this was completely green already and then i wanted to to bring your attention to another program which is new civic rituals and this idea that um is very present in the biennial of rehearsing futures of using the biennial as a and the cultural context of the biennial as a means to test out ideas experiment with doing projects that wouldn't exactly be possible outside of this cultural framework so we've commissioned um a number of rituals we call them rituals i'll tell you what uh in the city um both in the european side and in the asian side uh and so here this map just show you more or less where where they are located um of course rituals are these series of of gestures uh that are performed normally according to a certain order and normally because they have a symbolic meaning we were interested in inviting citizens to perform new protocols and to develop new [Music] modes of engagement with entities beyond their immediate scale so we were interested in in projects that would invite citizens to consider what citizenship is and to broaden what they think of a citizenship exactly i'll show you some examples so some are um some of these projects are they have to do with what we could call human empathy let's say so they are design objects that generate communities around them this is an example of a project that came uh from lebanon so this was existing already i think it's the only case of a project that already existed um it's called the revolution wood stove and it was created by beats to atoms and made in beirut for the revolution in lebanon in 2019 it's a very simple wood stove that allows people to make tea coffee and even bake a cake or bread it uses wood only it's very easy to assemble in less than a day and it was designed to support the the revolution so to support the protesters um in the cold during the winter um in that process but when we bring it to istanbul um of course um then we must think how how how does this project exist within the reality of the city and so one really important aspect of these new civic rituals was that we created a young curators group based in istanbul and we formed this group for the biennial for the first time so they are nur horsanola the three curators that formed this group and they had a really important role because they were in charge of making establishing a connection between the designers and the projects that were coming to the city but also the communities that were hosting the project in the city so for each of these projects we elected a host and then the project was developed in collaboration between designers and hosting entities because these projects remain in the city after the biennium so we wanted to make sure that they are cared for and there are a number of projects that we are installing that have to do um with new forms of collectivity through food um i'll just show you a couple of examples this is a solar kitchen that we are developing with martijn with um we are developing with public works a series of food preservation units so one that uses smoking one that uses uh drying and one that uses the barrier the burial of food is a technique of preservation and we will install them in a public park so these are all public facilities that will be available for for the citizens to use another um of these projects that form new collectivities is is by dan spana a group of swedish architects who for a long time have been researching um how uh how public space is used and the gendering of of public space and they have found that public space um is used by boys and young men a lot more than it is used by girls and young women so they um through dance platforms they they generate spaces that encourage women to to use public space actively in turkey this is particularly important because the history of dance and the history of politics they they go hand in hand um but so for istanbul they designed this stage in a public park and at the end you see this shell and this is a speaker so the way this works is you connect your mobile phone to the speakers via bluetooth and you play your song and you can dance so i'll show you um a clip i have of when it was the first week it got installed [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay you get you get the idea so uh this was really a happy moment for us right because it's it's really interesting when these projects come to life um and and how they are uh then activated one really important thing to say though is that in this case it was ulya soleil um the curator um based in istanbul that um worked with dan spana as designers of this dance stage but also created bridges with dance academies hip-hop groups feminist groups in the city of istanbul who are really active in the design of the structure and also are designing its activation of course um we we can talk about that more if you'd like um but then um to the end i'd like to to show you a couple more examples of um how some of these objects explored not just human empathy let's say but also in this case machinic empathy this is a project by soft baroque it's called point clouds and on the left is the image that they've created digitally which is made of these nodes right so point clouds are are unknowns when machines read reality they they identify certain points so think about for example facial recognition systems what they do is they identify certain um key points and then they join them together forming a mesh which then results in a three-dimensional shape so um softboro wanted us to um think and consider how machines read reality and bring that to the vocabulary of our urban environment so they've created these furniture pieces that we have installed in the city and they are designed with this principle as if they were designed by machines soft rock are really interested also in how artificial intelligence and consciousness are developing and what their role might be in design processes in the future and how machines may feel or how they may design in a near future when they have that kind of agency and here you see the objects already in location being used by by different people in in the besiktas pier in istanbul and finally some of these projects rehearse more than human empathy or we could say um forms of inter-species collaborations or collectivities this is the case of a project we are also developing and we'll be launching now in april with studio osidiana and um this is a floating island called bujukata songlines which will be an interspecies architecture which is designed um taking into consideration of course the the human pleasure of of being in a garden but also the migrating patterns of of birds that fly over the the prince's islands and the city of istanbul in this time of the year so they have been doing a lot of material research um but also developing different kinds of forms perches and and architectural elements that cater for these different species that exist together in this place so um this this is a map we've we've just made which sort of overlaps all of the programs um and i thought i would use it just to make some final reflections um so as i said i'm trained as an architect and i my curatorial practice is above anything it's it's it's a design practice and it's a spatial practice um there are these key methodologies that i um i've attempted um to to use so one is this idea of deep listening so learning from the context of the city both in terms of the food culture of a city like istanbul we did we started doing research right from the beginning but also learning from these um everyday practices of interspecies designs that are present in istanbul today like the ottoman bird policies or the stray cut houses um then the you know there's this radical hospitality methodology so the idea that we constructed a cascade of collaborations um from the young curators group to participants um to the curatorial team to the carers of the projects the hosts that received the projects in the city and then finally this idea of rehearsing um ideas that may be may exist at the moment between reality and fiction and we hope that through a program like the biennial we can make these ideas a bit more plausible a little bit more real by inserting them in everyday contexts and intersecting them with with everyday life um so yes i think i'll um end here thank you so much for your um attention and um yeah i look forward to any questions or or doubts to hearing about those that you may have thank you so much mariah this was a really a super exciting conversation and presentation um i i would tons of questions i have my notepad requests plenty of comments and and curiosities but i really would like to give some space to the students first uh from here in florence or main campus really to to start the conversation and see see where we go from there so feel free to just jump in and and ask some questions questions or comments you may have also happy yeah i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how different modes of production might affect empathy because you had various like with the with the bread you had that great communal uh production of the whole process and then they got to eat it together and then with them the one you just showed in istanbul you had a designed object that was designed for a community to center around but not designed by the community um so these different modes of production yes um so we what we set up were was as a system of uh hosting yes i would say more than more than collaboration so um there's a a designer is developing a particular research or a line of work we open up at the biennial an opportunity for that strand of work to be tested in a real context but we don't want to parachute that into the city right so this this was something we were really um concerned about and uh so i thought that by creating a a system of of hosting that we could create a context um prepare the ground in a way in the city to receive that um proposition um so often what that resulted in so for example in the revolution wood stove that i showed you the hosting group was urban co-op which is a cooperative of young urbanists and architects um that are based in istanbul and they worked with beats to atoms to choose the location for example choose a place that would where where it would make sense for this stove to exist but they also um had a dialogue with the people that are around that place from t-sellers to uh uh some some people that even leave on the street nearby uh to understand whether [Music] this would be something that they would welcome and then what they also did was they extended this conversation to other groups in the city so for example and so beats the atoms is a maker space um and they organize the workshop for other maker spaces so that uh to to understand whether there would be opportunities for other wood stoves to be installed in the city or interest or right but also for the maker spaces in istanbul to share what they have been doing with its atoms so it created this um dialogue i think across similar practices um i suppose but but also uh you know with processes like we're always learning and each one of them was a um a project in its own right where it's it differs so much from one to to the other but there's always this structure the the design the let's say the the project and then the hosting community and then the project is the result of that dialogue i hope this answers your question yes come on don't be don't be shy i know we're on zoom and it's uh difficult to to empathize but maybe uh but do you the i've seen many questions online just feel free to jump in uh i have a question um i just this is probably a this is a probably a horrible source but i saw a tick tock that was talking about uh this philosopher's saint uh augustine and it was his uh back in like the third and fourth century i believe it was his critique of the theater where he didn't like it because he thought like it was giving the viewer emotions that they haven't earned through uh real life experience but uh i think uh like looking at the work that you've produced would you then argue that like this is not true and in fact like talking about the vr is that these other mediums outside of real life experience could actually open it up to something you couldn't normally feel or connect with that's a really good question um so yeah this is something i discussed a lot with with yeah with callum for example um and um but but other other participants too um so on the one hand um the extent to which um the experience that you get through a um a medium like vr or ar um is anything like or but the the experience of real life of course that's that's one question but um and the reality of that of that experience but also like what's the purpose of um uh you know this effort of uh of shifting your perspective in the case let's say you know in callum's work as i explained there's this um you become in the beginning you're a scientist and then you enter a tunnel and uh when you exit that tunnel all of a sudden you're of a different scale and you're an extremophile yourself and you you meet others and so on what's the point of it right um what is to be learned in in this and here is when i i i really turned to to fiction because i think that um those questions have been asked a lot of around literary um fiction so when you uh when you read a book um about a reality that uh that doesn't exist right um do you learn anything in that process um so there's this uh author that i really like mary lou ryan she's a theorist of literature and literary fiction and she says that um yeah the the narrative fiction always begins with a de-centering gesture right you you the author creates a new universe and creates a reality around that universe and then he makes a pact with the reader saying okay we both are going to behave as if this other universe was real um for the pleasure of our experience we will go through this we'll pretend it's real then we'll come back to the actual world to the real world knowing that what we've done was a fictional exercise um however there's a lot to gain from that experience i mean think about margaret atwood how uh your ideas around freedom may have changed after you've watched some of her fictions or um with many other fiction writers so there is a after the experience of of the fictional it is it is clear that we gain a critical perspective on reality because we have considered ideas and possibilities that we we haven't conceived of um in the in the real world um before that so i think it does allow us to see from a different perspective um and i do think in terms of an emotional lexicon i'm not sure i think we would have to ask someone who is more of a specialist um and whether um yeah but but i think it's it's a really interesting reflection to something to think about for sure we have time for one more question anybody wants to jump in i'll jump in um so when you were discussing empathy on a psychological standpoint you expressed how meaning and understanding over time has kind of altered so i was kind of wondering what your standpoint is and the understanding of how with the increase of exposure to such like different technologies and social medias and such how um how that has kind of impacted the taking on so much more in the day and age is our brains not able to adapt or evolve to understand empathy or has empathy changed over time because of that because of our um exposure to sorry could you because of what sorry i lost you sorry sorry yeah no so the question was more um with an influx of technology and um just kind of mental exposure in just content that we are always taking in over time and the increase of that is that overloading us in a way that empathy is now being absorbed in a different manner um yeah well what's interesting about empathy is that it's meant a lot of different things in different moments in time right um so for example in the 1950s it was really associated with advertising for example um and i think more recently it's interesting how it um it has been used even in political campaigns um as a term so because the term itself is so fluctuating i think um it's it's a difficult one to grasp what we what what we were doing here was to to say um there was something interesting and fertile in in this first iteration of the term right in um this possibility of feeling into other bodies and and um and this possibility of othering ourselves and we thought that would be important um today because um it could work as a tool uh as a design tool right to to think and help us think of collectivity of community of citizenship in um in broader ways than just the then just human-centered um and it would provide us with i think a field for imagining different different ways in which design could operate like that um the digital saturation and i think the atomization of society uh well it was already um on the rise and i think kovitz definitely accelerated that that process but it's interesting that uh on the one hand yes we've became increasingly isolated and and digital i mean there was a process of digitalization that happened through kovit but also there was um a physical uh permanence that that also happened at the same time right um and i i have watched around me obviously now before before before kovid we thought of ourselves as much more mobile much more uh volatile presences right and nowadays i think we are again um very conscious of the distance that really exists between us uh in different countries or you know um so there's also an attunement i think to to the place we're in and um i think we've gained a new kind of attention we've we're paying a different attention to to the context that that maybe surrounds us and of course uh i'm very conscious that we who are here on zoom are in a very privileged um position but for those of us who have been able to to cope with the situation i think it has al also led us to to rethink what we mean by place and by um by local and so but there's an interesting paradox i think between living this extreme digital life but at the same time uh being um so so being incredibly nomad digitally but very rigidly fixed territorially in a way i don't know what that will produce exactly but for example in our observations in istanbul it led to for example uh yeah a lot more people um growing their own food um it led to pieces of land that had been abandoned for a long time being cultivated for the first time um i don't know exactly how to but i think it's really pertinent question um thanks yeah i mean again thank you uh so much for for the questions and for for the conversation to to the students and to mariana this was super uh super inspiring um i think um you know i i i really commend you for this incredible endeavor this project on on on the role of empathy uh in the way that it can be thought of and and leveraged today to to to to ask questions i i love the way that uh in in your in your presentation in the beginning you you talk about like the the necessity or the requirement for yourself to start from a position of doubt uh that quite beautifully i think throughout the presentation you never quite seem to be interested to resolve to conclude you know to to neatly packaged into this sort of enlightenment model that you were sort of starting off from or criticizing in the beginning so i think that's really uh really special um especially when i think you bring up the difficulty of or the impossibility of uh of embodiment right across multiple dimensions across multiple scales across uh different um ecologies uh but also i would argue uh across different um uh human beings uh i think uh often unfortunately i think the the empathy is jeopardized by uh a movement of of that tries to sort of diminish uh the differences and sort of uh flatten uh the the inequalities and any impulse and this impossibility to actually live in someone else's uh or acquire someone else's point of view uh and it's used as a way of sort of um i don't know i'm thinking of like um color blindness uh which is an idea of avoiding the confrontation with the impossibility of seeing from someone else's position so i i think it's really amazing to see how in all of the projects and your prompts and the in the way in which the uh you've set up the creatorial project of the biennial and other projects that there is never really an ambition to get to uh at this common ground where we finally are we get to that sort of stable ground where i get everything of that other entity whether it's a different uh human being or another scale microscopy scale et cetera so i think that's really exciting and and maybe on a totally different um conversation i you know i'd like to extend this impossibility of of getting to the to the stable ground uh for for our students you know um think of this as a as a this abroad program that comes to italy uh and uh investigate the historical cultural and uh material context of abort for example in this case castigliano darshan tuscany and like i think within our discipline there is often this ambition of perhaps empathize with the side or to uh to to to to to reach some sort of like root of a site where you you you can establish a single narrative for for what that site looks like or what it's supposed to act like or uh what it's supposed to feel like you know at all different scale so uh if in your practice it seems to be predicated around the idea of this ongoing project that never really ends and only opens this sort of cascading of collaborations uh and this is an impossible question so please forgive me for doing this but like how does an architecture student thinking of like uh sort of projecting an intervention a design intervention a community intervention can operate in such paradigm without sort of creating something fixed their own one could argue privileged imagination of that community rather than sort of this open emergent and transforming system yeah so yeah thank you that's a that's a great question we what we do for example at the decorators in terms of like very practical methodologies we we have this method of deep listening that we develop so through radio often where we set up mobile radio we go out to places and we interview many people on on the go so normally we make this radio public so that um there is um some value um in in the interviewing process so um we make it public and honor open honest um sometimes we also um my colleagues caroline and suzanne especially they've developed this methodology of handing over the the microphone let's say to other groups who then interview other people so again this cascading of um of listening um so that you can reach beyond even your um immediate we immediate um circle because often we we can only reach a number number of people so there's this um this effort but i believe in the in the current paradigm it's also about i suppose it's just my suggestion that maybe thinking about other forms of listening so for example one project that i didn't show you today because it's also in the making but you can see it in on the 24th of april um in this uh not quite finisage that we're organizing there's a project by orcan telhan and ellie so orkan is an artist and elie is a group of architects based in spain and their their what they've decided to do was to collect soil from all the gardens all the boston's in istanbul not all of them but a selection of them that quite representative and then they extracted in collaboration with the university um in istanbul they've extracted the dna of those soil samples then they identified different microorganisms that were present in those soils then then they um did like an ancestry search really you know compared their database with other databases and began to identify uh certain cultures and microbes and bacteria that exist in the soil and um they all of a sudden they could name them and they could know a little bit about where they came from and all of a sudden they they had a huge bank let's say of information which they are now transforming into a series of stories about uh this microbial culture and then the project that they've decided to do um has both an architectural scale and a gastronomic scale let's say the architectural scale is they're building a kiosk to communicate these stories of microbial uh life in the gardens so when you think of a city or a borgo you normally when you think of citizenship you think of other humans like you that live in the city of course you know but the mic you know what they are arguing for is that these microbes that live in the soil are so important for the future of the city and they should be taken into consideration so there's this kiosk about sharing this information but they're also giving out a fermentation kit um and so this is they've designed a microbial fruit which is essentially like a spatial design at the gastro scale which allows for three micro microbes to live together and the way that they will exist in the future is that they will exist in the gut of each um participant uh so you as a visitor you become a guardian of this microbial culture and you you allow it to thrive into the future and you can also imagine if you put it into balza which is a fermented drink and then the next bose is always made from the previous bowser you could make this culture leave for a long long time so what arkhan does is he introduced an ellie sorry they introduced this idea of rewilding and gentrification but they introduce it to the gut which is which is great so it's also about maybe not thinking of of architectural outcomes as as as big scale interventions maybe they can be tiny i think i don't know that's lovely uh really i think i speak for everyone to uh really thank you for for joining our community and for uh giving us lots of inspiration uh uh all different skills uh for for our uh for the continuation of the research and i hope that we can uh one way or another share with you uh to continue the conversation um thank you it was really a pleasure to be here thank you for your questions as well of course um so until we are able to see you in person again uh thank you and thank you all for for joining us

Channel: Syracuse Architecture (Syracuse University School of Architecture)

Views: 46

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Architecture, florence, syracuse, istanbul, empathy, design, responsibility, syracuse university

Id: f13DPOyyc9k

Length: 83min 6sec (4986 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021