SEBASTIAN
GUZMAN OLMOS

TAPPING WATER

Uncovering some of the complexities of the freshwater crisis through positioned (hi)stories enables more sensitive and relational ways of connecting local and larger struggles. Tapping Water holds space and invites dissident voices committed to critiquing resource commodification and mercantilism.

Water flows through all our aspects of life—our bodies, the food we depend on, the environment we live in, and the bodies we share it with. Through a constant circulation of intake, trans- formation, and exchange, we enact watery relations constantly, whereby often unconsciously. Water combines rest with resistance. The proposal seeks to create events that explore the various dimensions of water, from its environmental impact to its political and social dimensions.

POSITIONED REALITIES

Plural conditions for change are knocking on our doors. How we position ourselves is instrumental to fostering other ways of being and sensing—away from a western gaze that proclaims universality. While we actively embrace difference and the communal. Strategies for thinking about exits and alternatives beyond the modern/colonial order and its endless shortcomings.

Positioned Realities is a transnational assemblage of visual and spatial projects. Who operate within or between capital, class, race, gender and land—navigating across places, bodies and environmental dimensions. Reflecting, intervening, and delinking from dominant ideologies, frameworks, and continuities of Western historical reality.

This program is grounded in collective knowledge, political engagement, and articulating self-representation, decoloniality, and resistance narratives. Collaboratively, we are attempting to bridge gaps with other realities into one space: Haus der Statistik, to actively engage with our interdependence for the struggles ahead.

COLONIAL ORDER IN THE DEEP SEA

Deepsea mining is a green capitalism venture into unexplored territory and unexploited minerals. Resources commodification will finally encompass a planetary scale. One of the main zones of interest is the Clarion Clipperton Zone seabed division. As a unique geopolitical scenario that depicts a potential unknown chapter in the continuation of colonial practices by the global north.

**Research in progress.

ALL GOOD(S)

What do we make of the role of contemporary design in the climate breakdown era?

As extractive systems, created by some humans, are responsible for exponentially increasing the amount of materials exploited on a planetary scale—carelessly consuming more than 100 billion tons a year, as resource reuse is declining. We need to quickly bring into discussion how to apply modes and methodologies to shift into sustainable and circular practices effectively. To radically reduce the impact of the prevailing material and manufacturing culture, while simultaneously recognizing the importance of multi-species entanglement.

We live in a historical time where we encounter the limits of growth. Reform needs to accelerate for the sake of futurity. Through transformative approaches that deal with an increasing geopolitical sense of ecological urgency, design is no longer just a form of styling. Paying equal regard by creative imagination to social injustice and the modern commodification of nature—subsequently creating innovative learning landscapes.

(NON)DEPLETED AT GR_UND

Through a choir of critical but upbeat voices, the exhibition explores unconventional roads to material and systems. That enables different tactics, methodologies and perspectives—translated into research-based practice.

As the contributions transverse different material narratives, they explore modes of visually posing questions and opening up space for a multitude of perspectives—reaching a moment of reflection than a conclusion. An in-between state of transition and not yet knowing—where a statement does not has to be an answer. Letting go of the innovation-driven society’s expectations to claim solutions.