GRANT HOLDER 2016
What has the grant meant to you and your career?
I got the scholarship during my first year at my Masters at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. I had just started to explore the field of speculative design and moved to a new city which was scary, exciting and stressful. The scholarship helped me, not only to be able to afford living and studying in London, but also to trust that I was doing the right thing, and to dare to venture into a new world and field. It softened some of the doubt I experienced in choosing a less commercial and more experimental path.
What are you up to today?
I graduated last summer and now live in Berlin. I’ve started a studio practise called Nonhuman Nonsense together with Leo Fidjeland. We are exhibiting around the world, we’ve spoken at the United Nations, and are currently working on several new works creating narratives and experiments around themes such as biodiversity, space (de)colonisation, stones, the Anthropocene, deep time and mosquito kinship!
What are your two cents on design today and tomorrow?
We live in urgent times, my hope is that design can be used as an opportunity to stay with the trouble - to remain critical and to create other stories, worlds, and modes of being. Working in the embryonic stages of system transformation, I believe speculative methods in particular can be key to open the public imaginary to pathways of redefined relationships to animals, objects, ecology, technology, and the uncanny specters of in-between and beyond. Design as one piece of the puzzle to break the death grip of the sixth extinction.