[Re-]Thinking Curating Design and Craft: Self-organised spaces

Welcome to the fifth conversation about contemporary curatorial practice operating in relation to Design and Craft! 

This series of events, inviting Swedish and international curators and other cultural producers, presents and discusses various aspects of curating in relation to these fields. Through a series of examples, different approaches, contexts, methods, effects and results are discussed, highlighting diverse perspectives and experiences.

In this seminar, we focus on curating self-organized platforms and examine why designers today see a need to create alternative spaces that counter existing institutional frameworks. Through two examples of platforms, Futuress and Munnen, we discuss why and how these have emerged, how they are curated and organised, what issues they address, and which communities they engage with. We invite the speakers along-side the seminar participants to discuss what spaces design practice needs today and speculate on what alternative futures they could be part of forming.

Participants: Mio Kojima, Johnny Chang and Sara Kaaman, introduction and moderation by Magnus Ericson and Christina Zetterlund.

Photo: Munnen

Kite making for Palestine at Munnen, located at Byälvsvägen 18 in Bagarmossen, Stockholm.

Co-director of Futuress, Mio Kojima will present this intersectional feminist platform that is a hybrid between a learning community and a publishing platform. Viewing design as a social and political practice, Futuress’ mission is to radically democratize design education and amplify marginalized voices. Through various free public programs, they problematize the role of design and foster critical thinking, bringing people together and supporting their community to craft their own narratives. Sara Kaaman and Johnny Chang are two of the four initiators and co-organisers of Munnen (The Mouth), an artist-run miniature culture house, reading room, and community radio. Established in 2023, Munnen hosts events, workshops, and collective making, working with publishing in an expanded sense through printed matter, art, poetry, food, walks, and listening. The reading room gathers books, pamphlets, and zines on social movements, community organizing, feminism, queer culture, farming, poetry, cooking, craft, diaspora, black studies, and socially engaged art and design practice.

Image: Futuress

Futuress texts.

Mio Kojima is a German-Japanese design educator, publisher, and researcher focusing on knowledge politics and social justice in design. Her practice draws on collaborative, intersectional feminist, and decolonial approaches to critically examine the spaces and conditions of educational and community-based environments. Through this lens, Mio’s work aims to broaden the values and experiences centred within these spaces, fostering more just spaces to meet and learn. Mio’s research and teaching practice often work with propositions, scripts, prompts, scores, and other formats that aim to critically discuss practices and expand hegemonic ways of doing. In recent years, Mio has given lectures and workshops on design politics, publishing, and feminist educational practices. Along with Maya Ober, Mio is co-director of the Futuress platform.

Johnny Chang is an interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across visual communication, publishing, lecture performance, writing, and teaching. His practice is interested in the sense making (and breaking)—or poetics—of visual and material languages in relation to social-historical conditions, weaving open, affective worlds centring collective, resilient capacities for sensing, feeling, and being. Chang’s artistic research attends to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to collective knowledges that emerge from diaspora liminality, community memory, and social movement archives. He studied at ArtCenter College of Design (BFA 2010) and Konstfack (MFA 2019), was part of the Brown Island Artist Collective, is a co-organiser of Munnen, and occasionally publishes under the imprint Something (Something).

Sara Kaaman is a Stockholm-based graphic designer and artist. Her practice explores the intersections of publishing, performance and print technologies. Working from embodied and feminist approaches to design, she examines publishing as a transformative and liberatory action, shaping meaning through materiality, embodiment and collective processes. She is a longtime member of Girls Like Us, a queer feminist magazine that merges art, politics, and pleasure, and co-organises Munnen. She is also part of MMS, a research collective tracing labour histories of womxn in graphic design. In 2020, she co-edited Natural Enemies of Books – A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography. Trained in graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and holding an MFA in Choreography from Stockholm University of the Arts, her practice challenges traditional design methodologies, embracing notions of improvisation, liveness, collaborative production and performative publishing.

Christina Zetterlund is Craft and Design historian active as independent curator as well as educator and researcher at the Department of Design, Linnaeus University. Magnus Ericson is Head of Applied Arts, IASPIS and a curator and educator working across Design, Architecture, urbanism, and Art.

[Re-]Thinking Curating Design and Craft is a series of conversations presented by IASPIS, developed and implemented as a collaboration between Christina Zetterlund and Magnus Ericson.