the habitat
a posthumanist design fiction project for making kin with nonhuman
january - june 2022
‘the habitat’ is a Design+Change project which originates from the will to create positive change in the current situation of climate and ecological emergency. The project starts with the climate crisis and connects it to the Anthropocene era and the human exceptionalist mentality. It further develops around the possibilities of forming non-anthropocentric and nonhuman-centered mentalities and world-making processes. It aims to highly emphasize the human dependence on nonhuman existence and well-being. Therefore, the ultimate purpose of the project is to de-center humans and challenge the human exceptionalist mentality. To achieve that; practices of making kin with nonhumans are explored and practiced throughout the project. This Design+Change project builds its framework within the theories of posthumanism by Braidotti (2013) (2017) and Barad (2008), the vitality of matter by Bennett (2010) and gets inspiration from multispecies ethnography and design, discusses the possibilities of making kin (Haraway, 2016) with nonhumans. Building on the theoretical framework, my own lived experiences of sharing my domestic environment and my attempts to interact, and interconnect with fungi persons, strive to show interdependencies of life, the assemblages weaved in intertangled lives of humans and nonhumans and to overcome human exceptionalist mindsets and lifestyles. Tsing’s (2021) notion of ‘life as an interspecies relationship’ and concepts on assemblages has been extremely important for me. ‘The habitat’ seeks to also question the dichotomies of nature/culture, animate/inanimate. The discussion of the nonhuman agency has also been essential throughout the design project.
‘The habitat’ displays a journey, an intimate autoethnographic mental expedition, rather than being a monolithic and finished product. During the process I have also developed my own tools to interact with nonhuman, fungi. As a result of this confusing journey, I have created a platform, ‘the habitat’ to gather all my outcomes, documentations, insights in the form of an interactive website. This website would play the role of a storyteller, act as an archive and a map of assemblages. The website for now, is just the tip of intended aims and a demo version, destined to grow and expand more again with attentiveness, and care. I believe that understanding more than human worlds, practicing nonhuman centered design, and making kinship are essential for human survival in the Anthropocene age.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
———. 2017. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” Journal of Posthuman Studies 1 (1): 9–25. https://doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.1.1.0009.
Barad, Karen. 2008. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 120–54. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race,and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
———. 2016. “Making Kin.” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 99–103. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Describe your image