forms of resistance | one year thesis project | June 2010 - Current | Supervisors: Jenny Althoff, Christina Zetterlund, Ramia Maze | Collaborators: One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws (Change for Equality) Campaign, AIN'T I A WOMAN Campaign and Design Research Unit at Interactive Institute.

‘Forms of Resistance’, an experimental research platform shaped over the past year, explores the role of ‘designer’ in socio-political intervention:
-Who is the designer/researcher in various stages of this form of practice-based research?
-How can she depart from her source of design knowledge in order to develop situated knowledge and reshape/resituate design for/to resistance and emancipation?
-How political forms of experience can be redistribute again through various positions/
performances/transformations?

‘Forms of Resistance’ develops an approach to design that is both critical and investigative. Using both analytic frameworks and practice-based research, this experiment is developed by non-disciplinary collaboration with groups of women activists in Iran and Sweden on the subject of domestic, public, physical or state violence.
Furthermore, through a ‘politics of translation’, the project itself makes a personal resistance to expectations of how a researcher should portray such subjects or make the research meaningful in ‘design’ aesthetics, which may too often be complicit with societal mechanisms traditionally excluding or repressing excluded ones.
Co-editorial sessions at Konstfack spring show which are considered as another layer of the whole project. The idea of considering the exhibition as another fieldwork and not as a place to exhibiting results or outcomes of a process which is done in ‘other’ space/time with/by ‘others’, is the main intention behind this experiment. Couple of people were invited to participate in one of the sessions which will be held from 19th to 29th of May 2011 during Konstfack Spring Show to construct a constellation out of materials which are available to them at the exhibition space. All these materials are collected during one year research from May 2010 up to present. In fact all materials included texts and images are a translated version of all bare materials that were produced before. These sessions are space/time for people who want to translate these given materials in a new order in from of a book.
The co-edited book will be available to download later via this page.

More at: www.formsofresistance.com