On 5th November, Caradt researcher Eva Fotiadi (PhD) gives a presentation at the international online seminar, ‘Design as Collective Improvisation’, on behalf of the The OtherAbilities and the ‘What Do I Hear?’ artistic research project team.
A poet stands in the open air and declaims. This declamation is at once about the current situation, and about all situations. It’s about how every act is poetic, in the sense of making, poiesis, and every act is also local. At their best, design and building are like this too.
Design begins with a situation in which people, materials, and tools are gathered together at a construction site. Relations between people are complex, mediated through language and body-language. Relations with materials are constrained by what the materials allow, through ‘affordance’. As Louis Kahn asked the brick: ‘What do you want, brick?’ Relations with tools are perhaps the most complex. As Martin Heidegger proposed, using as an example the humble hammer: when we use this tool, it is ‘ready to hand’, that is, it is simply an extension of our bodies, our arms. But when its head flies off, the tool becomes unusable: suddenly it is ‘present-at-hand’, a mere object of no use, intruding on our consciousness.
On a construction site, co-designing and co-building in real time, all three – people, materials, and tools – are important. People interact, converse, work together, and mutually influence one another. Materials are available or not, resist or accede, and ultimately determine what is possible. Tools are essential. They can work with, or against, our developing purposes.
e[ad] Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño, Pontificia, Universidad Católica de Valparaíso.
Faculté d’architecture, d’ingénierie architecturale, d’urbanisme, Université Catholique de Louvain.
Click here to view the Seminar website
They also have a Call for papers
Eva’s curatorial research into inclusive exhibitions is supported by Caradt. She is exploring possibilities for making exhibitions accessible to sensory diverse audiences, using tools for sensory translation developed with the ‘What Do I Hear?’ team.
‘What Do I Hear’? is a collaboration between The OtherAbilities (Amsterdam) and Vibra Fusion Lab (London, Ontario, Canada). It is supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Stimulerings Fonds Creatieve Industrie, and Ontario Research Council.
‘Could experimental sensory translation of art works improve their accessibility for sensory diverse exhibition audiences?’
Eva Fotiadi is a researcher within the Situated Art and Design research group and a theory tutor at the St Joost School of Art and Design, where she is also a member of the Diversity Dialogues platform
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