In December 2023, I have been invited by Malte Wagenfeld to give a Masterclass at the MDIT, Master of Design, Innovation and Technology – RMIT (Melbourne).
Considering the state of design in Australia, where policy making and public management have common interests towards ecosystems conservation, animal welfare – and Design for Other Species is already a fundamental topic in Academias and Universities, I have decided to work with a spectacular group of students around the notions of animal senses, teroarchitecture and terolinguistics in the context of Marine animals.

Although Western culture has inherited the Enlightenment notion of vision as the driving form of knowledge, to date it is estimated that only about 5% of the marine environment is known to us. Everything else remains obscured from view, a great unknown.

Invented in the Victorian age, the aquarium as object embodies the nature/culture divide, and continues to constitute an ocean diorama, a self-contained world and a techno-natural assemblage, home to a living collection mirroring our own personal yet fictional marine world.

For this masterclass the aquarium was reimagined as a listening glass. A drinking glass is transparent but may contain water, as does the aquarium. But it can also be used as a device to listen to voices through a wall, voices that would otherwise remain unheard. In this exhibition it is evoked so that we might instead be attentive to voices, both human and non-human.

From a curatorial point of view, the works presented are the result of a week spent believing that other ways of understanding otherness – in this case represented by marine creatures – are possible, beyond vision. Marine animals have complex, non verbal ways of communicating amongst each other. Just as we use verbal languages, they use other, yet-not-well-known superpowers.

Getting closer to their ways of perceiving the environment requires an incredible twist of the way we are accustomed to observing and representing our world. And to do so, the involvement of senses and the power of synaesthesis are fundamental tools designers need to develop in the next future to become active game changers towards regenerative practices – ontologically oriented – for the sake of our shared planet. They need to embody the fact that there is no separation between nature and culture, between humanity and other species. When a species dies, an entire world disappears. When a penguin disappears, so does his taste for fish, his way of looking at the snow or being in the wind.
The spatial performance presented here is constructed in 5 acts: guided by the teams, one’s sensorium will be the medium used to foster understanding of different ways of being.

With:
Atharva Dinesh Patil, Lochelle gonsalves, Dominic Goulding, Nicholas Hadji-Michael, Coral He, Caroline Lee, Mietta Kazoglou, Fitriani Revanda, Isabel O’Sullivan, Tom Price, Michael Taylor, Manilitphone Thephavanh, Ellyn Wong, Yulie Wu. Tutored by Dr Angela Rui and Dr Malte Wagenfeld. The project has been developed thanks to the Milan Melbourne Exchange Program.

Acknowledgements:
The project has been developed thanks to the support of The Annemarie and Arturo Gandioli-Fumagalli Foundation and the Milan Melbourne Exchange Program.