RESEARCH

For 10 years, first as an artist and now as a researcher, my work has followed one subject: relationality, the understanding of life as a web of relations.

In this understanding nothing stands alone. A person, a community or a place exists through its ties to others, to the land and to what came before. Many peoples have long organised life around this knowledge. Among the Indigenous communities I worked with in Colombia, it was suppressed within living memory, and it is now being recovered.

I study what that knowledge asks of us today: how people who do not share a background, a language or a legal status come to act as a “we”, and how design can work from relation. Remembering matters here as much as innovating.

My research is qualitative and practice-based. It starts from a question, my own or a commissioner’s, and moves through 3 phases.

Fieldwork. I spend time in a place and combine interviews and observation with making together, on the premise that knowledge is held in practices and in the body as well as in words. I treat the people I work with as holders of knowledge.

Analysis. I look for recurring patterns in what people say and do, and read them against the literature on decolonial thought and participatory design.

Translation. Findings take 2 forms: a written account an organisation can act on, and a public form, an installation, a festival or a film, that a wider audience can enter and respond to. In Sensing-Thinking the WE, each visitor’s portrait joins the archive, so the public form keeps producing material.

We are more connected than we think.