OUR PEDAGOGY

archival activation

teachings that sustain engagement with intellectual/spiritual/familial ancestors across time + space.

the Archive is an arrangement of power¹ that shapes what can be ‘known’, what can be cited, what circulates as ‘fact’, and therefore the stories, materials, and matters with which futures are built. tracing thought-lineages and discredited knowledges through dialogue with archives— institutional, oral, personal, and other— is to acknowledge them as crucial sites of intervention. archival work is also about developing a non-linear relationship to time + storytelling. we cannot co-author futurist worlds² without being in close relation to the past(s).

1) Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe, no. 26 (2008).

2) thinking-with Raafat Majzoub, Institute for Worldmaking.

relational worldmaking

collaboration through entanglement with humans + beyond-humans.

we assert that entanglement is the nature of All¹. our worldmaking practice follows an ethico-onto-epistem-ology² that acknowledges the human + beyond-human relations which shape + are shaped by how we make, think, and be. these beyond-human relations include but are not exclusive to: supernatural beings, fungi, data centers, sandscapes, industrial machinery, river-bodies, archipelagos, architecture, and other matter-forms.

1) Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

2) ibid.

critical curiosity

research, thinking, and discernment that is perpetually in-process. 

we ask unanswerable questions to open up fields of speculation without grasping for comfortable resolution. our research questions are lifelong inquiries— we are always in a spiral retelling¹ of the impossibilities that trouble, shake, and baffle us. our research methodology is errant², guided by sacred curiosity. thinking critically about this curiosity means questioning/undoing our assumptions,³ especially through relational/communal/ecological dialogue, where differences (can) make visible the invisible structures of our thinking.⁴

1) Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

2) Ibid.

3) Errantry Media Lab, "Errant Design: Design(ing) Without Solutions—An Exploration of Associative Principles for an Errant Design Practice," in Commons in Design, ed. Christine Schranz (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023), 139–157.

4) James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).