Mixtape Talks: Misuse & Refuse

If the power of design, images, and technology relies on the fact that material and visual culture shapes our experience, behavior, and interaction with the world, then what does it mean to appropriate, reshape and misuse the platforms, technologies, images, and products we are handed as users in our current consumer market?

When we forget about appropriate use, following instructions, and correct interpretations, or when we purposefully ignore them, the possibilities are open-ended and our interaction shifts towards exploration. This open exploration has generated an entire aesthetic and culture of pushing boundaries and broadening the limits of our understanding of the world around us.

Forms of resilience such as the pursue of the absurd, the mistake, the error can be productive. At the same time, we find a paradox by which irreverence and resistance are often fixed and marketed as a unique artistic gesture. In this sense, to what extent can art, architecture and design transform rather than produce, creating unexpected forms of resilience in everyday private use?

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:

Mireia Luzárraga - Takk Architecture

Mathew Shaw - ScanLAB Projects

Don Slater – Associate Professor in Sociology, LSE

+ Student Think Hub: Carlos Loaiza, Mae White, Haitam Daoudi, María Roig, Gala Belaúnde, Maria Ximena Sandoval, Raquel Fajardo, Carla Maria Rotenberg

Curated by IE A&D professors Clara Zarza and Ruxandra Iancu

ABOUT THE MIXTAPE TALKS

The Mixtape Talks evoke the practice of homemade song compilations as a metaphor for our current crave for unexpected intellectual conversation springing from interdisciplinary encounters in professional and social environments that are currently restricted.

In the aim of satisfying this craving, The Mixtape Talks bring together trios of guests from the fields of architecture and design practice, theory, and related side disciplines to fuel conversations around candent topics on the built and produced environment.

Throughout a series of three conversations in Spring 2021, we aim to emphasize the importance of discursive critical knowledge at IE School of Architecture & Design, mixing up theory and practice, student and faculty participation, online and onsite* presence, and diverse contexts, people and places.

Information and instructions on how to connect will be sent directly to registrants’ email soon!

Poster designed by, Federica Caso and Anurag Phalke, 4th-year students of the IE Bachelor in Design.

*Due to COVID-19 restrictions, onsite attendance is reserved for students and professors only.