“The Ragpicker Meets the Composter: Maintenance, Repair and Transformation” – Kristina Lindström & Åsa Ståhl
2016-12-20 DCRL Semester theme: Design and Repair, Winter Semester 2016/2017
6–8pm
Venue: Freiraum Lüneburg Salzstr. 1 / 21335 Lüneburg
For long technological development has primarily been guided by ideas of progress, novelty, invention and development. What if we instead direct our attention towards processes of decay, erosion, breakdown and mouldering? What kind of practices and making does that invite for? What stories would we then be able to tell?
These are some of the questions that Lindström and Ståhl will discuss during their talk. The discussions will be based on their most recent work called Plastic Imaginaries - the ragpicker meets the composter in which they have used a combination of participatory and speculative approaches to explore different ways living in the aftermath of previous plastic imaginaries.
Kristina Lindström is a senior lecturer at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University. She works in the intersection between participatory design, speculative design and feminist technoscience, with a focus on public engagement. In 2014 she defended her practice-based thesis, done in collaboration with Åsa Ståhl, on the relationship between making practices and publics. Since then their collaboration has continued in the artistic research project HYBRID MATTERs and a share post-doc at Umeå Institute of Design where they among other things organized a symposium called “Care – maintenance, repair and mending in a time of post-industrialism”. Kristina has exhibited nationally and internationally matters such sms-embroidery, obsolescence, e-waste and most recently plastic imaginaries.
Åsa Ståhl, PhD, is an artist and a researcher at the Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her work draws mainly on feminist technoscience and participatory design in the inquiry into how humans and nonhumans can live well together. After the practice-based, interdisciplinary and collaborative PhD-work that Ståhl did together with Kristina Lindström, they have continued to explore publics and making through public engagement in postdocs at the Umeå Institute of Design as well as the artistic research project HYBRID MATTERs. Their most recent work is on plastic imaginaries, which is also in dialogue with scholarly work on care and repair. Ståhl regularly presents, lectures and exhibits her individual and collaborative work nationally and internationally.