Remaking Everything: Confabulations with the Termites on a Design School
Zoy Anastassakis, Rio de Janeiro State University (ESDI/UERJ)
Thursday, December 2, 2021
12-1pm Eastern
CLICK HERE to watch the recording.
Evoking the termites that occupied the campus where she teaches in Rio de Janeiro, Zoy Anastassakis suggests that the crisis affecting universities can be re-envisioned as an opportunity for resurgence and the collective production of spaces for living together in difference. From 2016-2017, students, alumni, professors, and employees at the Rio de Janeiro State University’s School of Industrial Design (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial [ESDI]) started a movement called “ESDI Aberta” (“ESDI Open”), investing in alternative ways to live in difference, in response to the administrative and financial crisis that affected not only the design school and the whole university, but all institutions of public education in Brazil. The “Esdian experiments” of ESDI Aberta were joined by Donna Haraway and Tim Ingold.
Please join us for a conversation with Zoy Anastassakis, PhD, Brazilian Designer and Anthropologist. Between 2016 and 2018, she was Director of the School of Industrial Design (ESDI) at the Rio de Janeiro State Univerity (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [UERJ]), where she works as an Associate Professor. At ESDI, she coordinates the Design and Anthropology Laboratory (Laboratório
de Design e Antropologia). Together with Marcos Martins, she is co-author of a book
on ESDI’s experimentations from 2016–18, in Bloomsbury’s series “Design in Dark Times.”
Moderated by Nicole Labruto, Assistant Research Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
The latest in our 2021 monthly series on Race, Ecology, and Design .