KOOZ Could you please start by briefly telling us about the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition’s pavilion you commissioned titled “Have We Met? Humans and Non-humans on Common ground”? How can data-driven collaborative tools or technologies be used to “recalibrate the relationship between humans and non-humans” in design research and practice?

ARIC CHEN The underlying premise for this presentation - curated by my colleagues Klaas Kuitenbrouwer and Ellen Zoete as the Triennale’s Netherlands pavilion - is that we have to move beyond the human-centric worldviews that have brought us to the place where we are, meaning that our insistence that humans are at the top of the food chain and everything else - the rest of the planet - exists for our exploitation has to end. We need to see the planet in more collaborative terms, meaning with the plants, animals, microbes and other life forms we share it with. This is the principle behind the Zoöp, a framework developed by Klaas and others that we adopted earlier this year that brings non-human interests and voices into our organisational decision-making processes as a way of instilling more ecologically regenerative practices. And at the Triennale, we applied it as the basis for looking at three different sites: urban, rural and maritime, and commissioned tools, including those using AI, that collect data and even draw new webs of relationships at these sites. In this sense, technology becomes a collaborator, too.

KOOZ Can you please explain why designers should care or extend their research to other forms of life? Why should they care about interspecies relations?

AC As we all know, design as a practice has expanded in many ways over the years, to the point where if you ask 100 people what design is, you will get 100 different answers. But I think, fundamentally - whether you’re talking about objects and spaces or systems, interactions and speculations - design is about creating, negotiating and articulating realities. We have gotten used to thinking of this in purely anthropocentric terms, realities by and for humans. But as we realise how limited and limiting this is - to say nothing of catastrophically destructive - we should also remember that this point of view is a relatively recent invention, and there is something essential to be (re)learned from the other realities out there and how we interact with them.

KOOZ The Triennale awarded the Netherlands the Golden Bee prize for best pavilion, I was wondering whether you could tell us a bit about this curatorial experience and whether the subject tackled in the Triennale anticipates some of your current or future projects.

AC I think for Klaas and Ellen the pavilion was a way of expanding our work on the Zoöp and putting it to the test in this very public setting. The Zoöp, as I mentioned, is an organisational model that provides representation for other-than-human life. It started out several years ago as a speculative research project and has evolved well beyond that. There is now an independent, non-profit Zoonomic Foundation and Institute, and they have appointed to our board of directors a “speaker for the living” who participates in our decision-making on issues of ecological relevance as determined by a Zoöp working group of in-house staff. There’s a whole methodology to this, and it has been designed to be adaptable to all sorts of organisations, big and small, of really any type, even entire cities or regions. I think something like 20 organisations, mostly around Europe, are currently exploring becoming Zoöps.

So in this sense, the pavilion very much reflected some of our current and future approaches as an institution, and we were lucky to have had a lot of collaborators - designers, artists, scientists, other organisations - contributing to it. Some of the projects we showed were existing, like a mobile chicken coop at the Bodemzicht regenerative farm in the Netherlands, while others we commissioned, like a 3D data scanning device by the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

KOOZ Your emphasis on action really seems to reflect the current times, and this sense of urgency to address all these global emergencies. If I am not mistaken, you speak often about “enacted speculations”, it is a very interesting term. I was then wondering whether you could tell us more about it, what it means, and whether there is any successful “enacted speculation” that you know or are working on.

AC Yes, totally. This comes from the observation that in rightly confronting the many urgencies and crises facing our species and planet, we as cultural institutions seem to have gotten stuck on posing questions, raising awareness and issuing (oftentimes vague) calls to action. This is important, but can we do more? We know things have to be radically reimagined, and we are good at discussing, debating, and exhibiting the many ideas and propositions that are out there for reimagining them. There is no shortage of ideas. So why not enact them? Can cultural institutions become societal testing grounds?

So the idea of enacted speculations is to speculate about how things might be different and to try it out on ourselves, because we can. This goes beyond the incremental changes that are made in the “real world” to, instead, really utilise the capacities of cultural institutions to think in the more out-there terms that we need to be thinking in: To show what they might look like and how they might work - to make them real, so to speak, and see what we can learn from them in full public view. Becoming a Zoöp is an example of this. Another is a project we’re hoping to launch soon, which we’re calling The New Store. It is going to start out as our museum shop but without the mugs, keychains, tote bags and umbrellas. Instead, it is going to be a store that asks the question: Can there be such a thing as regenerative consumption?

This is, of course, inspired by the many designers who, in making more “stuff”, are questioning their complicity in the extractive and exploitative systems that are causing so much ecological and social damage. They are working to rethink how we define consumption and production and asking how we can design new forms of exchange and new ways of assigning value. Go to any design graduation show, Biennial or other such venue and you will probably find speculative projects addressing this, drawing on everything from circular and donut economics to biodesign, blockchain and reciprocal exchange models. Working with the retail consultancy The Seeking State, we hope to develop some of these into our “products” (in quotes because they might not always be objects or services as we normally think of them). Once you have changed the nature of the exchange, you change the space of exchange and the urban, social, logistical and other networks around it, and we’ll be exploring those implications with the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam.

Of course, some of this will seem a bit strange at first. I have to admit, the idea of us having a “speaker for the living” via the Zoöp initially sounded odd to me also. But that is the beauty, I hope, of enacted speculation. It is about testing the frictions between how things are and how they could be. Change is always weird at first, it is not “normal.” But at a time when we are constantly being reminded of all the horrible “new normals” we are going to have to get used to extreme weather, climate refugees, water wars, pandemics, etc. Can we not also work towards some positive “new normals” as well?

KOOZ Value attribution plays an important role in cultural institutions. It is not just about attributing value to material or immaterial artworks or designs, but also research topics, knowledge frameworks and so on. As mentioned earlier there are shifts in global concerns that impact curation and design. I am then wondering how much of these feeds not only in your curatorial practice, but also your artistic direction.

AC That is an interesting point about how curating is in many ways, whether we like it or not, for better or worse, about assigning value. Oftentimes the discursive value then gets translated into a market value, which is why so many galleries love seeing their artists or designers in museum shows. In my previous curatorial roles at the collectible design fair Design Miami and at M+, where we were building a new museum collection, it was fascinating to watch this work from both sides (though not at the same time, of course!).

But to try to answer your question, I should start by saying I have never been so much interested in curatorial practice per se, but rather the possibilities curation offers in different contexts, or framed in terms of your question, the different kinds of value it brings and assigns in different circumstances and working under different agendas. I guess this partly explains my spotty employment record, where I have worked as a curator across museums, biennials, design weeks, design fairs, tradeshows, and teaching. Each is different, with its own requirements and expectations, but also possibilities.

China, where I lived for 13 years, including in Hong Kong, was formative for me. When I first arrived there in 2008, curation was still fuzzily defined. The Chinese word for curator, in fact, meant something more like “organiser” or “planner”, meaning that a curator’s role was seen in terms of practicalities and logistics. Things have changed dramatically in China and now there is quite a developed curatorial discourse, with a lot of incredibly smart curators. But I really appreciated the openness of it all because for me it was less about applying Western standards and structures of curation to China than trying to understand the Chinese context and seeing what models of curation might come out of it.

In the case of Beijing Design Week, one of the main projects I worked on in 2011 and 2012 was the revitalization of an important historic district of traditional alleyways right by Tiananmen Square called Dashilar. Long story short, we tried to use curation as a way of investigating the neighbourhood to find ways of making it more socially sustainable in the face of redevelopment that we did not want to halt entirely - the area was in bad shape, and many residents wanted to leave - but that we attempted to slow down and redirect towards the benefit of the existing community and its history and culture. Looking back, this was perhaps the first example for me of curation as a testing ground.

I also loved the more straightforward curatorial work, like building the design and architecture collection at M+ in Hong Kong, where we tried to create a collection that could tell many of the lesser-known narratives of 20th and 21st century architecture and design in Asia while revisiting well-known global narratives from our vantage point in the region. It was about re-centring design and architecture histories.

I also had a lot of fun teaching. One of the studios I taught at Tongji University in Shanghai was called “Reverse Curating” and it looked at how we might sort of reverse-engineer the museum building boom in China. You may have heard that thousands and thousands of museums have been constructed in China in the past 10 or 15 years. I will not bore you with the details, but these museums are usually driven by economic, political, real estate and bureaucratic agendas, resulting in the actual cultural function falling by the wayside. What you ultimately end up with is a lot of empty, underutilised or poorly utilised museum buildings. These often architecturally daring (and difficult) buildings are not going to go away and so the studio took them as a kind of pre-existing condition and worked backwards to try to give them a social and cultural purpose, rooted in their context and other specificities.

KOOZ This naturally leads to the next question on your interest in collaborative practices, even in the face of current global crises. It seems you are going to address this subject in the next London Design Biennale. Can you tell us more about it?

AC Our work (as Het Nieuwe Instituut, which has been appointed Artistic Director) for next year’s London Design Biennale definitely resonates with this conversation and the point about playing with curatorial formats and approaches. When the Biennale organisers initially approached us, it was of course a great thrill and honour. But I was very honest with them, and maybe I have just been around the block too many times, but I was not sure how interesting it was to just come up with a theme and ask the Biennale’s various national pavilions to respond to it. But what if we could play with this format? This could get interesting.

So, if we consider how global challenges require global cooperation but globalisation as we have known it since the 1990s is coming apart, can we use the Biennale’s national pavilion model to create an alternative geopolitical landscape driven not by the dynamics of conflict, competition and exploitation, but collaboration instead? In other words, could we propose a theme of collaboration and instead of asking the pavilions to simply react to it, can we encourage them to collaborate with each other?

Bio

Aric Chen is General and Artistic Director of Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Dutch national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture in Rotterdam. American-born, Chen previously served as Professor and founding Director of the Curatorial Lab at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai; Curatorial Director of the Design Miami fairs in Miami Beach and Basel; Creative Director of Beijing Design Week; and Lead Curator for Design and Architecture at M+, Hong Kong. In addition, Chen has curated dozens of museum exhibitions and other projects internationally, served on numerous boards and juries, and acted as advisor to the UABB Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture\Urbanism, London Design Biennale, Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial (New York), and Gwangju Design Biennale. He is the author of Brazil Modern (Monacelli, 2016), and has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Wallpaper*, Architectural Record, and other publications. Chen received his BA in architecture and BA in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MA in the history of design from Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt in New York.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.