FORTHCOMING:
Co-editor of BIO/MATTER/TECHNO/SYNTHETICS - Design Futures for the More than Human (ACTAR 2023),
in collaboration with Amber Farrow, Maria Fuentes, Susan Kolber, and Marta Llor
Abstract : FROM MUSE TO MAKER: Design at the intersection of nature and artifice.
Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics (B/M/T/S): Design Futures for the More Than Human re-presents the theoretical and design work of twenty-one women who create, make, ideate and manipulate at the intersection of nature and artifice. Their desire to grow, collect, draw, instrumentalize, virtualize, fabricate, interrogate, and critique all manner of things lies at the origin of their questions, motives, tactics, and projects. Their work charts a new path to design inspiration and productivity that is both embedded yet reflective, within their disciplines yet without, and central to them yet marginal. Their visions are conceived to ‘project’ new futures for us all; some which are bright, others which are dark, some which include us, others which do not. Historically, women have not had the responsibility of design progenitors. Indeed, the authors collected in B/M/T/S have but recently shed their role as muse, inspiration, and subject of interest. But three decades ago, academic discourse and political conservativism still furthered the idea that ‘genius’ in western art was born of male prerogative. In rather sharp contrast, the essays here included bear witness to the changing role of women in the arts and to the ways in which they have challenged, subverted, and even ignored the tenets of this binary history. The texts, images, fabrications, installations, and conversations collected in B/M/T/S offer up a version of the female gaze that transcends the very premise. They reveal and actualize a counter tradition in contemporary design that implicitly dispenses with the singularity of optically centered determinants of art.
Franca Trubiano