A conversation about Plastic with designer Shahar Livne and environmental humanities scholar Heather Davis.

Shahar Livne is an award winning conceptual material designer. Livne's lifelong fascinations in nature, biology, science, and philosophy developed into an intuitive material experimentation way of work during her degree studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Shahar brings life to unique stories through objects and installations centered around materials as carriers of narratives. Some of Livne's projects deal with obscure materials such as blood, man-made fossils, crystallization and more, today we are going to be focussing on plastic, and Shahar has put me in touch with Heather Davis who I am thrilled to have here as our second guest today

Heather Davis is Assistant Professor and Director of Culture and Media at The New School in New York City. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Davis is the author of over 80 articles, book chapters, reviews, and catalogue essays. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022) traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable.

LINKS

Shahar Livne: https://www.instagram.com/_shaharlivnedesignstudio_/

https://www.shaharlivnedesign.com/

Shahar Livne, Metamorphism: https://www.shaharlivnedesign.com/metamorphism

Heather Davis: https://heathermdavis.com/

Heather Davis, Plastic Matter: https://www.dukeupress.edu/plastic-matter

• Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, French philosopher and historian - Heather spoke about her writing on the endless possibilities of matter and material. Plastic as a material is deeply connected to wanting to manipulate matter at the most fundamental levels
• Zakiyyah Iman Jackson: https://scholars.duke.edu/person/zakiyyah.jackson#:~:text=Her%20research%20investigates%20the%20fundamental,and%20rhetoric%20of%20Western%20science Thinking about the emergence of the category of the human, and the way it emerges through the hierarchy of humanity. The forced plasticity of the human body in various forms of black suppression. Various humans as abject other that carries the weight of plasticity.
• Pollution Is Colonialism - book by Max Liboiron
• Heterotopia: https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/
• Geo Design, https://www.designacademy.nl/page/5809/geo%E2%80%94design
• Pinar Yoldas, Ecosystem of Excess.
• Crimes of the Future
• The podcast Heather referenced at the end about adaptive capabilities: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/garbage-patch-kids/id1554578197?i=1000641946004

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Claire Baily is a London-based artist, researcher, and educator whose work navigates the intersections of art, sustainability, and material innovation. I had been following Claire’s research on Instagram, after knowing her as an artist working with an array of materials, with amazing technical casting ability.. And then seeing her document a shift away from Petrochemicals, resins etc, looking at what a sustainable making practice might look like in the context of the climate emergency, documenting her experimentations with new materials for casting. I enjoyed the way she was sharing the research, the tests and the trials online - developing more sustainable art production systems with regenerative resources at their core, she is focusing on developing bio-based materials and processes that can be viable alternatives to existing making methodologies dominated by petrochemicals.

Claire suggested Sarah King as our second guest for the conversation.. Sarah is a circular economy researcher, sustainability and innovation consultant with experience in project management, design led research, and systems change. For the last eight years she has worked closely with businesses and academic institutions to educate and identify innovation opportunities in response to current environmental challenges, supporting the development of new technologies, products, and services. Her areas of scope include the built environment and construction, plastics and packaging, textiles and apparel, and sociocultural behaviour change. Recent projects include the culturing of pure Bacterial Cellulose for use in the apparel industry, food waste composite materials for interior panelling, and natural pigments for utilisation with digital processing techniques.

Links

Claire: https://www.clairebaily.com/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaZNJHTKnISc_3qDtrvlDlsbt0S0pMjc86KwWqx9wbRp9MWsV78-i3k6dao_aem_FlxJwHA1EmzgFcSs0Whekg

Claire on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clairebaily/

Sarah: https://www.earthliprojects.com/

Sarah on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarah_earthli_projects/

Materials Club: https://steamhouse.org.uk/news/materials-club-biomaterials-101/

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/materials_club/?hl=en

Steamhouse Birmingham: https://steamhouse.org.uk/

More on the HS2 project in collaboration with British Ceramics Bienial: https://www.britishceramicsbiennial.com/news/from-waste-to-resource/

Centre for Ecology and Art Goldsmiths: https://www.gold.ac.uk/research/centres-units/research-centre/centre-for-art-and-ecology/about-us/

Olivia Aspinall: https://www.instagram.com/do_not_go_gentle_/

Material Futures at CSM https://www.arts.ac.uk/subjects/textiles-and-materials/postgraduate/ma-material-futures-csm

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Original writing commissions by Mater: https://mater.digital/

Get in touch with any thoughts, questions, or even suggestions for future episodes: info@maddierosehills.co.uk

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Emii Alrai & Amanda Pinatih discuss material artefacts, memory, belonging and museum practice.

Emii Alrai: https://www.instagram.com/emiialrai/?hl=en-gb

https://emiialrai.com/

Amanda Pinatih: https://www.instagram.com/amandapinatih/?hl=en-gb

https://madepinatih.com/

Design Museum Dharavi: http://designmuseumdharavi.org/Design_Museum_Dharavi/Dharavi.html

Guna Guna, When things are beings exhibition at Stedelijk https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/production-static-stedelijk/images/_whats%20on/tentoonstellingen/2022/When%20things%20are%20beings/WhenThingsAreBeings2022-EN-FINAL24112022-SMALL.pdf

A Lake as Great as its Bones: https://emiialrai.com/A-Lake-as-Great-as-its-Bones

Royal Armoury Museum https://royalarmouries.org/leeds

Horsehair with Nicola Turner & Mick Sheridan on The Mater Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-mater-podcast/id1749226924?i=1000665067091

Emii Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, and critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Her material explorations weave in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire, the power of hierarchy and the static presence of history. Clay vessels, gypsum forms and steel armatures punctuate the labyrinth-like spaces Alrai creates, mimicking museum dioramas and romanticised visions of the past.

Amanda Pinatih is an art historian, curator and PhD candidate. As Design Curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, she brings new perspectives to the museum’s vast design collection. Her experimental working method is driven by an interest in developing new formats for knowledge transfer, while her exhibitions and projects explore the intersections of social, political, (de)colonial, environmental and economic issues. Simultaneously as a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam, Pinatih is researching the affordances of Indonesian objects around social and political contestations of belonging for diasporic communities with roots in the Indonesian archipelago, both in the museum, at home and in artistic practice.

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