Post Design Tangle CHAPTER 3: COMMUNITY

Graphic designer Maya Moumne will join us at the tangle representing Studio Safar – a design and art direction studio based in both Beirut and Montreal. Across seven time zones, Safar (meaning “travel” in Arabic) creates cross-cultural and interlingual visual communication. Besides co-founder of Studio Safar and their eponymous biannual culture journal, Maya is also the editor-in-chief of Al Hayya Magazine, and brings an inherently political view on design to the tangle. In her participatory talk, Maya will share her urge to liberate visual culture from decades of European and American hegemony by exploring notions of communication across cultural and linguistic barriers and engaging in social and political discourse, as active agents of cultural production.

Thinking beyond disciplines of design, performance, game, clubbing, and fitness, Kexin Hao's practice is a marriage of design and performance. At the tangle, the Beijing born, Netherlands based visual artist and designer will invite us all to investigate themes of body, rituals, health, labour, and collective memory. Using a vigorous, multi-layered visual language, Kexin’s works is a constant swing between intimate close-up on personal stories and zoom-out to collective narratives; between a past of political heaviness and a flashy modernity rendered in humour and sarcasm.

Joining us from Helsinki is Tommi Vasko, representing the autonomous educational platform Trojan Horse. In collaboration with participants, they organize summer schools, live-action role-plays, workshops and reading circles exploring the boundaries and preconditions that define the field where architects, designers, and artists operate today. Trojan Horse aims to create flexible yet steady structures, that support critical design discourses. We are excited to experience their playful, participatory framework, resulting from a collective effort, shared between facilitators and participants.

In a hybrid practice that spans the physical and the digital, Copenhagen-based studio Wang & Söderström will reflect upon how the world is changing through technology. Occupying the liminal realm between physical and digital, the studio's ever growing, ever shapeshifting body of work seek to describe and give form to an entanglement of shifting power structures and perspectives in a rapidly changing “phygital” (physical+digital) world. In their latest work, the book Royal Chambers (just out on Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing), Wang & Söderström posits an expanded idea of home, of care and connection from micro to macro, to shine light on a more integrated and nuanced notion of life and living.

Visual communication designer Maša Poljanec will join us in Copenhagen to represent the design and publishing collective Oaza from Zagreb. Since 2013 the six founders of Oaza have been engaged in a collective practice spanning design, research, curation, publishing and more. Next to commissions and collaborations Oaza investigates topics of interest through self-initiated projects. They are currently grappling with alternative models of production and natural resources within their research project “Made In”. Another project, “Designers 1930 – 1980: Context, Production, Influences”, investigates the opaque female history of design in Croatia.

Iranian-American designer Bijan Berahimi is the founder of the creative multispace FISK: a studio, gallery and store located in Portland, Oregon. Since 2009, when FISK began as a graphic design collective while Bijan was studying at California Institute of the Arts, it has become an ongoing project based around culture, community and commerce through the lens of art and design. In 2020, FISK launched JOON Magazine, which captures the arts scene in Portland and showcases the impact of design and print. Bijan approaches graphic design with a playful and open mindset. His practice champions a wide range of ethnicities, voices, and backgrounds and is in dialogue with local and global communities.