Talk
Apolonija Šušteršič: Do you have time to participate?
Apolonija Šušteršič, Professor of Art and Public Space, will be keynote speaker at The Participatory Design Conference (PDC) held in Belgium.
The Participatory Design Conference (PDC) is a conference with a long history in bringing together scholars who present research on the direct involvement of people in design, development, implementation, and appropriation activities of information and communication technologies, spaces, artefacts, and services. This years theme, Participatory Design, Politics and Democracy, questions both the role of participatory design practitioners in the PD processes themselves and in the changing political landscape.
Professor Apolonija Šušteršič is invited based on her research work, the title of her presentation is Do you have time to participate? We share the mention of her lecture as shown on The Participatory Design Conference.
Do you have time to participate?
Participation is a form of Democracy and as such it will be discussed within this lecture, formed from the desire and awareness about ourselves, our society, about our living environment and our common space.Between Democracy and Capitalism is obviously a huge contradiction. If Capitalism now-days is seeking for the fast decisions serving to fast profits from which mainly the small circle of people would benefit then Democracy wants to include as many people as possible and create long discussions and processes of decision making that needs to be moderated, and formed after the final conclusion for the benefit of majority.
Apolonija will discuss the relationship between people and our living environment, the democratic process of building space when changing our cities and our neighborhoods, the understanding of spatial equality within the market-driven economy, the need for forming community in a time of mobility and exodus. She will seek out the invisible paradoxes situated in-between the text and the image. The lecture will emphasize and direct the discussion deliberately towards participation with local actors in urban projects. Such projects are a product of an interaction between people and their space, where space is complex composition of matter shaped by the social, political and economic forces.
The questions that arise from such paradoxes are directed to the critique of capitalism and market economy and try to open up other solutions and proposals. What would happen if we would try to ignore the time usually estimated for a specific investment to become profitable, for instance? Through her lecture, Apolonija would like to touch the problematic of so called “model of western democracy” that seems to find itself in the dead end of the lobbyist corridors and neoliberal politics.
Apolonija Šušteršič
is an architect and visual artist. Her work is related to a critical analysis of space; usually focused at the processes and relationships between institutions, cultural politics, urban planning and architecture. Her practice is imbedded within interdisciplinary discourse and usually includes collaborations with other professionals such as architects, urban planners, curators, sociologists, and local population. Together with architect and a professor at KTH (Stockholm), Meike Schalk she formed an operative unit, which occasionally produces research, projects, actions and discussions. Apolonija Šušteršič has a PhD from University of Lund, Malmö Art Academy, Sweden; and runs her own art / architecture studio practice in Oslo, Norway and in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a professor in visual art at Oslo National Academy for the Arts, Head of MFA Program: Art and Public Space.
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