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Kaverikuva – KINSHIP PHOTO // ART & IMAGINATION

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Kinship Photo is a moment of contemplation. It is an exploration of the physical and virtual spaces through a Collaborative photogram. The Kinship procedure creates shadowlike images that turn the power structures of photographing upside down, and broaden the meaning of friendship.

Kinship photo is made for a festival participant who are tired of conference calls and seeks for a way to connect.
With this piece two people meet: one of them online and the other onsite at the festival premises or in a nearby location. With the help of gentle instructions and a material Envelope they explore the physical space of their close surroundings. The aim is to find elements, places, or ways of being that both participants feel kin of. When a mutual agreement has taken place, the two people with the chosen kinships get exposed onto a light sensitive paper. During the procedure, all parties have to stay still and focused. It is an opportunity to breath deep and contemplate on the closeness and distance between themselves and other beings. When the exposure is done, the picture on a light sensitive paper remains as a memory of that shared moment.

With this simple gesture we believe it is possible to create and explore new spaces and places that are not only virtual or physical, but genuinely both. They are experienced, shared Moments facilitated by light within communication technologies, and marked by light being trapped on photographic paper.

We, Dominik Fleischmann, Emilia Pennanen, Jenni Toivonen, Kristiina Mäenpää and Tatu Heinämäki, are from the MA Photography program at Aalto University ‘s School of Arts, Design and Architecture . Together with artist and mentor Maija Annikki Savolainen we have developed a photography-based work for the festival which includes multiple Collaborations between human participants and other beings. Our shared interest in photography is to explore its possibilities as a world-making practice.

Please sign up to take part in the project through this Google form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc_NvujGdO1t-T4Eh_TGGYTvuUymKhIjpm0jIh6Orq7zDOXgg/viewform

Website: instagram.com/kinship.photo.gram/

Related Untitled Agenda Theme : Reimagining human

 

Photos: Kinship Photo Group (c)

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Ancient wisdom as a way of reimagining the future by Hajira Qazi [US] // CONVERSATION

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The story of the Evolution of Man involves a forever-forward march towards progress, which inherently implies the abandonment of a less-enlightened past. We are made to believe that the only way is the one forward, and that those who cling to traditions are less-evolved: developing, still in progress, in need of guidance and aid. In this story all other ways of knowing, being, and thinking are marginalized and disregarded as irrelevant and as having nothing to offer to modern, industrialized societies walking through the path forward.

On the other hand we see how colonization, limitless growth, and industrialization have wreaked havoc on our planet and our societies. Instead of a utopia, we are experiencing an increase in natural disasters, violence and political unrest, loneliness and depression. We need another way ahead, one that is open to exploring alternative ways of knowing, being, and thinking.

Undoubtedly, innovative ways of addressing these global problems are needed. But perhaps insights may also be gained by looking at our abandoned past.
What can we learn from civilizations that respect and lived in symbiosis with nature?
What can be replicated of a world without borders, which witnessed a free and fair exchange of resources, ideas, and people?
How might we recenter our cities and societies around that which is held sacred, as ancient people did, rather than on profit, progress, and consumption?
What does it mean to be a human who carries the wisdom of millennia, rather than one who is constantly re-inventing anew?
These are ideas we will discuss and explore together in order to arrive at more concrete ideas about how ancient wisdom can inform our visions for the future.

Hajira Qazi is a PhD Researcher in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Her research is centered on how conceptions of the Sacred can inform an alternative worldview that moves away from the consumeristic aspects traditionally associated with design towards design that Fosters resilient and Cohesive societies. Past work and research interests include participatory design, decolonization, and design for political change.

 

Twitter handle: @arijah_q
Website: maymoon-design.com

Related Untitled Agenda Theme: Reimagining human

 

Photo: Hajira Qazi (c)

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Reimagining Sustainable Living by Hanne Österberg [NL] // CONVERSATION

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The conversation hosted by Hanne Österberg will reimagine innovation, focusing on services that enable individual choices when it comes to smart, sustainable and healthy homes and lifestyles.

Energy efficient buildings are at the center of major policy plans all over the world. How can private companies foster a transition towards more environmentally friendly technologies for our houses? And how can we begin to shift discourse from solely sustainable housing to sustainable living? At the end of this session, participants would have used known facts and figures to identify gaps and build a mindmap of solutions and ideas.

During this ongoing global pandemic, people are evidently placing higher values ​​on health wellbeing over financial profit. We are all in a unique moment in history to reflect on how sustainable our lifestyles are.

Hanne Österberg, Exploration Lead at the Chief Innovation Office of the ING Bank in the Netherlands, is a design management professional with 15 years of experience from both the consultancy and the client side.

Hanne’s reflections concern public awareness towards practical ways of sustainable living. She asks herself what her company, active in this sector, can do to motivate people to make changes in their houses to become more energy efficient. She realizes that the private sector, along with the government and individual citizens, have a role in successfully carrying out this transition. Given her role within a private institution engaged in this sector, Hanne acknowledges the role private actors have in fostering awareness among citizens on this topic.

 

Related Untitled Agenda themes : Reimagining climate, Reimagining economy, Reimagining cities

Photo: Hanne Österberg, linkedin.com/in/hanneosterberg

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Re-imagining an Anti-Racist World by Fred Brown [US] // CONVERSATION

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As the world becomes more interconnected than ever, slow adopters of collaborative problem-solving techniques run the risk of being left behind. By 2050, seventy percent of the world’s population will live in an urban corridor. With the confluence of population growth and the desire to live in urban corridors, there is an increased risk for vulnerable populations with the need for new, rapid development to accommodate growing communities. These populations can be supported by centering equity in the work.

Implementing an Equity Framework necessitates the understanding of equity, the practice of institutional assessment and the intention to address structural inequities because of systemic racism.

  • Equity means fair treatment, access, opportunity and advancement for all people. It requires the purposeful identification and elimination of barriers that have prevented the full participation of some groups.
  • Institutional Racial Equity assessments tease out tangible practices demonstrating adherence to principles and behaviors which foster systemic shifts in organizational culture. These lead to the cultivation of cross functional teams that outperform homogeneous ones.
  • Structural Racism is a system of beliefs and practices that, through omission or commission, move people to perpetuate damages against marginalized groups whether or not they intend to. Its foundation consists of social, economic, and political paradigms that require systemic thrusts to move institutions from optimization to cultivation of ecosystems, with human beings at the center.

The proposed ecosystems model seeks to promote racial equity analysis through the creation of new experiences within institutions, leaders, managers, staff, and customers. These would lead changes through innovation and producing viable wireframes that are agile and iterative. We believe that fostering ecosystems will lead to a shift from traditional systems to change models to co-designed models based on a Human Centered Design approach. Organizational and institutional leadership should be particularly involved in experimenting with this idea of ​​re-creating an anti-racist world.

Fred W. Brown Jr. is President & CEO of The Forbes Funds [TFF], a philanthropic organization focused in strengthening the management capacity and impact of community non-profits in the Pittsburgh area. The Forbes Funds (TFF) has a 35 year history of advancing well-being by helping human services and community-based non-profits build their management capacity, increasing the impact of their mission work.

In 2020, The Forbes Funds’ board approved a racial justice equity framework for all of TFF’s work. This framework includes investing in diverse leadership, increasing the capacity of minority-led organizations, and developing scenario planning and collaborative capacity of organizations within the region. Since the onset of COVID-19, TFF has held nearly 1,000 virtual meetings and engaged nearly 11,000 individuals in the region and across the state, Nation, and globe.

 

Twitter handle: @FredBrownPgh   @TheForbesFunds
Website:  https://forbesfunds.org/

Related UNTITLED Agenda Theme: REIMAGINING human, REIMAGINING power

 

Photo: Fred W. Brown Jr., twitter.com/fredbrownpgh

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Elina Iida Sofia Hirvonen, Freelance Journalist [FI] // PEOPLE

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Social media has reshaped forever the way we communicate and get information. Nevertheless, the actions of the big companies behind them often raise a lot of criticism: what if social media belonged to the people?

 

Elina Iida Sofia Hirvonen @interneiti
Freelance journalist, for example
for Ylioppilaslehti, Helsingin Sanomat and Image.

 

What could be reimagined within the social media world?

Elina criticizes the entrepreneurial side of it, wishing that these platforms could belong to the people and not to companies: the current structure influences how information is spread among the population and does not foster equality. Current social media structures and algorithms are making profit out of people’s most intimate feelings and experiences, and it’s creating conflicts and affecting the media as well. 

How would Untitled help to develop your vision?

Elina sees Untitled as an opportunity to discuss how the ideal social network should be built, debating on which instruments would be necessary to undertake challenges such as ensuring privacy for all the users.

Who needs to join the Alliance to make this envision true?

Involving informatic experts for consultancy would allow to realise the technical side of the idea.

Image: Elina Iida Sofia Hirvonen, @interneiti Instagram

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Ontological Politics

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Any social or political envisioning is constrained by an invisible frame: by the implicit values and views on which it is created, most importantly its view of the nature of human beings.

A big vision begins with a vision for the “Being” of human beings. We need to go back to basics if we are to rediscover our imagination and create possibility for ourselves and our societies. Any social or political envisioning is constrained by an invisible frame: by the implicit values and views on which it is created, most importantly its view of the nature of human beings. For example, much of modern economic and political thought rests on the assumption that you or I know what we want (think markets, democracy etc). However, most wisdom traditions teach us that discovering what we want is actually very hard and takes deep practice and reflection.

In this session, participants will enquire into the nature of “Being” for human beings and how this would translate into a big vision for humanity and a new framework for progress. A mixture of play, embodiment and reason will be used in this workshop like session.

The session is led Sylvie Barbier and Rufus Pollock, the co-founders of Life Itself. Sylvie Barbier is a performance artist, entrepreneur and educator who loves to create powerful embodied experiences.  Her life ambition is to become a witch! Rufus Pollock is a researcher, technologist and entrepreneur. He has been a pioneer in the global Open Data movement. He is the founder of Open Knowledge. Formerly, he was Shuttleworth Fellow and Mead Fellow in Economics at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge and is currently an Ashoka Fellow and Fellow of the RSA. (Bio source: Life Itself)

Website: Life Itself
Twitter: @forlifeitself @rufuspollock

Related Untitled Agenda Theme:  Reimagining human     

 

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Dan Lockton from Imaginaries Lab [NL] // ALLIANCE

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Imagining new ways of living through imaginaries and mental models – that is what Dan Lockton focuses on in his work. Imaginaries Lab led by Dan is one of the founding members of Untitled.

Dan Lockton @danlockton @imaginari_es
Interaction designer, Assistant Professor, Future Everyday, at TU Eindhoven’s Industrial Design department. Dan has previously worked at the Royal College of Art (UK) and Carnegie Mellon University (US).

What could be reimagined now?

Dan’s aim is to experiment with alternative ways of life and other life models. Design methodologies are involved in analyzing the correlations between social and environmental benefits. This can be done by defining connections between varied fields such as behavioral and decisional sciences, or human-computer interaction and cybernetics.
How can we live in a more sustainable way? Which lifestyle patterns impact our environment the least and which ones offer a potential solution?

How could we experiment with alternative life models?

The challenge here is to turn alternative futures into tangible realities, something that does not yet exist but is treated as if it were already among us. Potentially, “living laboratories” could be created where communities of people are immersed into different realities, worlds with rules and structures different from those we are used to. By doing so, it is possible to closely observe the alternative models proposed, making them directly accessible to people.

How do you imagine the “living laboratories” will be in ten years’ time?

To date, we’ve seen this kind of experimentation only at a mere technological level, for example within our homes with IoT and smart homes. But if the experimentation was conducted within “living labs” instead, shifting the focus at a social level, the scale could be extended, for example, to entire districts within cities. The “labs” could actually be visited and experienced by communities of people, to better understand their flaws and strengths. Social models are often discussed at a national and administrative level but appear vague and evanescent at a practical level. For this reason, they are perceived by people as distant, both temporally and mentally. Therefore concretizing solutions and allowing people to make their contribution in a participatory way could fill this gap.

Image: Dan Lockton, design.cmu.edu

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Dichotomies at the Border of Fiction by Gabriella Gómez-Mont [MX] // CONVERSATION

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Who are we as the world around us changes? At the intersection of our subjective lives and our collective worlds lie profound dichotomies. And at the threshold of aesthetics and science, culture and politics, symbolic infrastructures versus solid urban forms there are still a host of territories to explore as well. All in a continuous yet contested relationship; traveling beyond that fragile, stubborn and siloing quality of language, concepts, fields, disciplines, bordered cities, individual bodies. But what possibilities can be found in the gaps, in that in-between, often turbulent and symbiotic territory where our truths and our fantasies clash and merge? At the border of fiction…

At one end lies fake news, alternate facts, profound and systemic biases, a human mass without individual agency. At the other end lies a more malleable reality, entangling us in invisible, unique and mysterious ways – in ways that once perceived and interiorized might allow us become more imaginative in how we live with each other, how we belong to each other.

Join the session with Gabriella Gómez-Mont, the former Chief Creative Officer of Mexico City, where she founded and directed Laboratorio para la Ciudad (‘Laboratory of the City’) the experimental and creative think tank for the Mexico City government, reporting to the Mayor. She has also worked as a journalist, documentary filmmaker, visual artist and experimental curator.  She is now in the process of launching Experimentalista: a novel type of urban+creative studio, already working with several Mayors, cities and organizations across the world.

Related Untitled Agenda Themes:  REIMAGINING human     

Featured Image: Gabriella Gomez-Mont at TEDGlobal 2013 in Edinburgh, Scotland. June 12-15, 2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
Image: Gabriella Gómez-Mont, live.worldbank.org

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(c) Hugo Lefèvre

“What if we build a new world from the perspective of the marginalised?” by Tundé Adefioye [BE] // ART & IMAGINATION

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This was a session at Untitled Festival 2020.
As much of the Western world reckons with the contemporary realities of colonial legacies, this session invites participants to experimentally reimagine how the transformation of incumbent societal structures may profoundly impact historically marginalized individuals.

Reimagining an anti-colonial and anti-racist society includes understanding that the resources at the center of society today are resources that have been taken from individuals who have been oppressed. How can those resources now help the marginalized? The key focus of this session would be exploring how these very resources can be taken from the center to help, engage and mobilize the margins instead of always focusing on the center.

Furthermore, we will explore how these resources can be re-allocated in a way that does not take away so much energy from those who have been historically marginalized and oppressed. Given the ongoing pandemic and environmental issues we need to create safer, brave spaces that allow for innovation, healing and strengthening of communities that have been systematically under resourced and marginalized.

As a City Dramaturg at The Brussels City Theater, Tundé Adefioye will bring his artistic insights into this experimental session. Participants will be challenged to consider how to build new societies not based on colonial bureaucracies and how people can be truly served equally in a post-colonial world.

In addition to being a city dramaturg at KVS in Belgium, Tundé Adefioye is a founder of the Urban Woorden, a non-profit that uses poetry as a tool for youth engagement. Over the years Tundé has led and participated in numerous creative events across Europe, especially working with local communities to create spaces for diverse demographics to express themselves, empower themselves, and to feel inspired to be the best version of themselves. He has also given several lectures and speeches, notably including: a series of 6 guest lectures for the Luca Leuven School of Art, a keynote speech at the 2018 IETM plenary meeting in Porto Portugal, and a keynote at the Wales Arts International conference.

From 2017-2019, Tundé wrote, co-coordinated and implemented for the innovative EU Creative Europe project MindUrStep. In 2019, he made his directorial debut with Contact Theater Manchester, with the piece ‘Old Tools> New Masters ≠ New Futures’.  He sits on the editorial board of the VUB Poincaré book on Migration and Racism [2019-2020].

Related Untitled Agenda themes : Reimagining power, Reimagining human

Photo: Hugo Lefèvre (c)

 

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Bodytalk by Simo Vassinen, Maria F. Scaroni, Roope Mokka (DE, IT, FI) // PEOPLE

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Bodytalk research team Simo Vassinen, Maria F. Scaroni, and Roope Mokka, investigates the crossing points and possible new unions of futures research with dance and physicality – with a specific zoom into rave and club culture. The team’s underlining idea is that the repetitive physical release conducted alone to monotonous, high tempo music in a shared space that we know from raves and clubs can offer new perspectives and mindshifts for digesting societal realities and imagining better futures also in other contexts.

Dissolving the ego, one dance at a time, alone together. 

The shared educational-professional-hobby-activist background of the Helsinki/Berlin-based Bodytalk team combines e.g. futures research, contemporary dance, performance, co-creation, methods of participation and empowerment, workshop moderation, techno music and club culture, journalism, event management and political philosophy. Simo Vassinen (DE/FI) has a combined background of futures research, journalism, translation, dance, performance and choreography. Maria F. Scaroni (DE/IT) is a dance artist, initiator and teacher of experimental dance and physical practices, and space-holder for raving, bodywork and community caregiving. Roope Mokka (FI) is one of the founders of Demos Helsinki, futures researcher and urbanist with a parallel storyline in underground culture and community-driven artistic projects. The three members also share a long-lasting affair with dancing and club culture. 

Bodytalk is supported by The Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes’ Together Alone project. #togetheralonefi #instituutit

Related UNTITLED Agenda Tracks: Reimagining Human

Photo: Socially distant Technodrift in Berlin, April 2020, Maria F. Scaroni

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