Event Series Learning With Others – Book Talk: Field Essays Éloj Kréyol

Book Talk # 4: Thurs Nov 28, 19.00 – 21.30 hrs

Field Essays: Éloj Kréyol

With: design-duo dach&zephir (Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach), Rolando Vásquez, associate professor in sociology at University Utrecht/University College Roosevelt.

Moderator: artist/researcher Sophie Krier.

Location: Research Station, Willem de Kooning Academy, Wijnhaven 61

Admission: free, the presentation is open to the public

How can we decolonize design, and its curriculum? The fourth issue of the experimental editorial series Field Essays brings to the fore the research Éloj Kréyol by design-duo dach&zephir (Florian Dach and Dimitri Zephir). Initiated in 2015, Éloj Kréyol is an attempt to reconcile, reactivate, and transmit neglected artisanal and cultural lifelines in the genealogy of the French Caribbean archipelago. Field Essays is a research platform that explores peripheral practices probing unknown territories, methods and works. It is initiated and led by artist / researcher Sophie Krier and released through Onomatopee.

After a short introduction by Sophie Krier on the process of making the book, designers Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach will share the cultural, ecological and economical stakes of their field research in Martinique. In a short statement, respondent Rolando Vázquez, associate professor in sociology at University Utrecht / University College Roosevelt, will be asked to share the questions, which the book raises, from the position of his field of work, decolonial aesthesis. A concluding round table will open up questions regarding the book’s content, form, and motives to the audience.

dach&zephir is a design studio based in between Paris and Guadeloupe, transforming History, habits, and cultural contrasts into objects/things. They define themselves in between the industrial world and the research part in design. They aim to create a space where spreading is in fact reassembling, where cultures, stories, habits and technics become a way of creating. Stories and History are their entry point in design, from domestic behaviors, memories or cultural heritage there is always more than a “pretty shape” in their projects. For them objects are “a medium of the mind”, if we pay enough attention to it, it can tell you something, ask you something or make you realize something.

Sophie Krier is a relational artist, researcher, educator and editor. Through her work she interweaves biographies of beings and places, and conceives tools and situations for collective narration and reflection. Her practice moves between intense periods of fieldwork and editorial/publishing activities (book- and filmmaking, exhibition design and moderation). Between 2004 and 2009 Krier led the undergraduate programme designLAB (Rietveld Academie, NL). On invitation of University College Roosevelt (NL), Krier developed Art & Design Practice, an undergraduate programme on visualising ideas in the spirit of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Since 2008, Krier leads Field Essays, a series of hybrid publications, which enables listening pauses between practitioners and thinkers across disciplines.

Rolando Vásquez contributes to the movement of decolonial aesthesis and thought. He is associate professor of sociology at University College Roosevelt, affiliated to the research institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) and the Gender Studies Department of the University of Utrecht. With Walter Mignolo he has coordinated for ten Years the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School. In 2016 with Gloria Wekker et. al. he wrote the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam. His work seeks to transgress the dominion of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and modernity/coloniality. Developing the questions of ‘precedence’ and ‘the end of contemporaneity’ he seeks to contribute to decolonize institutions and subjectivities, epistemologies and aesthetics.