DEPT.
is a project by
Donato Ricci,
Calibro,
Duncan Evennou, and
Benoît Verjat.
DEPT. is a participative research project aimed at describing the present conditions of the environments we inhabit.
DEPT. aligns, in a series of itinerant Public Workshops, a set of practices and techniques coming from Digital Social Science, Design Research and Performative Arts.
DEPT. looks for new public modes of attention to ordinary objects accounting for the ways these objects circulate around us and to the way we circulated around them under five relational dimensions:
OUT THERE, exploring the invitations of material signs to act in the public space;
IN HERE, engaging in the rituals of domestic spaces through the stories of their objects;
HEREUNDER, digging into the emotional responses to the city's most unwanted beings;
UP HERE, probing the subtle landscape of human dreams and hopes;
IN BETWEEN, seeking for new transitive exchanges with cultural institutions.
DEPT. asks the workshop participants to become co-inquirers and to re-ground themselves into their own “now” as a response to a progressive saturation of the projections of and towards the “future”. It questions the way we make our present reality being represented to eventually engage in transformational future commitments. It operates on the current states of the individual and collective life, in the very moment where expectations and memories are activated as transitions and transactions.
For each dimension of the inquiry, we aim at identifying and accounting for the fragments that provide subsistence to ourselves, as individuals and as heterogeneous unstable collectives.
DEPT. is based on an experimental triangulation of different research methods and practices. It explores how the performing arts, social sciences and design practices can otherwise express contemporary conditions. The inquiry is not meant to passively observe our present realities. On the contrary, it proposes an active process which starts with a call to hold on and then proceeds towards active manipulations and forms of expressions. It proposes to establish new roles, emotional feelings and political responsibilities.