Invisible: beyond the plinths — Design Campus Dresden

Week: WEEK 6
Date: 21–27 Aug 2022
Theme: Immaterial: Beyond the plinths
Tutors: Martina Muzi (IT, NL)

Artefacts can be cultural geographies if explored through the invisible technical, cultural, social, and geopolitical systems behind their existence. Preserved by museums, artefacts from different cultures, places, and time periods. Made of different materials and techniques, artefacts are starting points to understand our global history. And, most importantly, to critically question some urgent aspects of our shared reality.

The workshop is a design experiment which takes a journalistic approach towards the artefacts contained in the collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. The space of the workshop will take the form of an experimental exhibition set where the invisibilities behind the museum’s plinths will be materialised, visualised, performed, or narrated, individually or in groups.

As a collective body of participants, we will select and investigate specific artefacts, share our personal relations to them, and explore their hidden narratives, materials, technologies, phenomena, migrations, and politics.

The stories behind the artefacts together with the visual and material narratives experimented with during the course of the workshop will create a new space in the rooms of the Dresden Campus in which what is unseen, unheard, or unknown can take form.

Participants are required to bring their personal toolbox — for physical or digital realms (investigation and making). If for example you envision working with images, sound, video or 3d scans please bring your tools, machines, or software; if you envision working by collecting materials from the environment please bring a large bag or tools needed to explore natural or urban contexts. You might need a lens, a scanner, or a synthesiser depending on your way of working and your interests.

We invite participants:

Young professionals such as designers, musicians, architects, artists, digital media, historians, writers and students of similar disciplines.
Interested in experimenting at the intersection of journalism, design and geopolitics from inside to outside the museum.
Curious to explore moving images, set design, objects and their invisible narratives
Able to speak English at a professional level

Martina Muzi (IT, NL)

Martina Muzi is a designer, curator, and educator based between Italy and The Netherlands. Her multidisciplinary practice extends between the private and the public, the physical and the virtual, the informal and the institutional. She investigates how different social systems shape future scenarios of design. Her work engages critically with design through its complex material logistics, its geopolitical cultures, and its effects on social formations from the family to the market and from the atelier to the school. She is the curator of the GEO — DESIGN exhibition platform at Design Academy Eindhoven where she is also the leader and tutor of the Bachelor Department Technogeographies Studio. She has made documentary and speculative films for the Venice Architecture Biennale, Vitra Design Museum and for M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong (as a member of Space Caviar) and co-curated the exhibition X is Not a Small Country at MAAT Museum in Lisbon with Aric Chen.