Last year, The New New brought together 24 artists, technologists, thought leaders, writers and designers from across Europe for a six-month fellowship on visions for an inclusive digital future.

The Bertelsmann Stiftung and Superrr Lab are continuing to work with four of the 12 projects to enhance their impact and assist with networking, fundraising and outreach. Today we are talking to Karla Zavala Barreda and Adriaan Odendaal from the Rotterdam-based design and research studio, internet teapot.

During their New New fellowship, internet teapot worked on a community co-designed critical board game which grew out of their ongoing project, Algorithms of Late Capitalism. In the game, players are members of a community of cyborgs living under the technocratic regime of the Sentient Machine Cult. Exploring themes of conformity, datafication, rebellion and algorithmic othering, the game prompts players to find collaborative ways of reinventing the regime’s systems.

SUPERRR: What is the current status of your New New project?

Adriaan: By the end of the fellowship, with the help of 38 collaborators, we had come up with the concept, content, mechanics and rules for a complete board game.

Karla: We printed and play-tested this prototype and are now in the process of refining and finishing the design. This year we aim to physically publish and promote it, as well as make it available online in a free print-to-play format.

SUPERRR: What has changed for you since the start of the fellowship? What new paths have opened up in the meantime or directly through the fellowship? Have your assumptions changed at all?

Karla: Covid-19 presented a particular challenge for co-creating an analogue game as we could not do workshops on-location and in-person, but this apparent obstacle also meant we were able to connect with and invite people from all over the world to join its development. As a consequence, the project has been immeasurably enriched by a real diversity of experiences and perspectives and we’ve gotten to know people we might not otherwise have met.

Adriaan: The relationships built through the network of the New New organizations is also something we treasure, and we’ve been able to participate in several amazing events, including the AI Festival hosted by the Goethe-Institut.

SUPERRR: Who would you like to work with in the future? What successes would you still like to achieve?

Karla: During one of the project workshops we were fortunate to collaborate with Tshimologong Precinct in Johannesburg and more recently, we did a zine co-creation workshop with Alta Tecnología Andina (ATA) and Fundación Telefónica in Lima. Collaborating with individuals and organizations from our own countries and creating connections between them and the network we are building in Europe is something we want to do more in the future.

Adriaan: For us, the workshops themselves already made the project a far greater success than we could ever have imagined. Looking ahead, we would like to see the finished board game in the hands of as many players as possible as well as being available in public places such as libraries and civic centers. It would be amazing to see it eventually have a life and impact beyond our own involvement.

SUPERRR: Can you share with us three learnings from your project or the fellowship process?

Adriaan: Exploring complex topics related to the design, development and deployment of digital technologies in more engaged and reflective ways is possible by facilitating discussion and ideation spaces designed for playfulness and creative expression. Reframing these topics through popular mediums, such as games, opens up the discussions more, allows a wider public to participate and draws in people who might not have joined otherwise.

Karla: It’s also important to consider people who are often excluded from these discussions as experts — both in terms of their experiences using and living with technology, as well as in terms of the unique knowledge and skills they bring to any discussion. From this, we have also learned to consider our own roles in these kinds of discussions less as experts and more as facilitators.

SUPERRR: Thank you so much for this insight into your project and all the best for your next steps! ✨

The fourth project that is part of the Bertelsmann Stiftung and Superrr Lab support program is Chayn Italia, an intersectional feminist tech project for survivors of domestic abuse and frontline workers across Italy. Elena Silvestrini, Silvia Di Cesare and Claudia Fratangeli of Chayn are presently very busy with concluding the current phase of Radia, a training project aimed at operators of anti-violence centers in Italy which shares ways of combating digital gender violence and good practices for the conscious use of technology to empower people.

Last year, The New New brought together 24 artists, technologists, thought leaders, writers and designers from across Europe for a six-month fellowship on visions for an inclusive digital future.

The Bertelsmann Stiftung and Superrr Lab are continuing to work with four of the 12 projects to enhance their impact and assist with networking, fundraising and outreach. Today, we’re talking to the people behind two of those projects.

Combining investigative journalism, academic research and artistic languages, Camila Nobrega’s Beyond the Green strengthens narratives around social-environmental justice by exploring feminist perspectives on the megaprojects that affect our lives, bodies and territories.

Makan Fofana and Hugo Pilate’s Banlieue du Turfu aims to overturn widespread and persistently negative conceptions of the French banlieues by crafting an imaginary that revels in their nonconformity and reveals them as crucibles of creativity and untapped potential. Through school workshops and public jam sessions, Makan and Hugo are creating within the video game Fortnite a collaborative and immersive world that underpins and informs their project’s vision.

SUPERRR: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today! Could you update us first on the current state of your New New project?

Camila: Beyond the Green has a new home, beyondthegreen.media. This home is being organized according to the content I have already produced, including the results of partnerships that occurred in recent years, and I am now discovering how many rooms this house will have, adjusting objects and ideas. In that sense, it is also a repository. With this website, I am making space for what has happened so far as well as creating a place to receive new content. So this is Beyond the Green’s status at the moment: taking care of the house and strengthening its structure so it can sustain the next steps. The same can be said for the partnerships planned for the new phases, which will develop exchanges and joint research-investigations on social-ecological transformations from feminist perspectives.

Makan & Hugo: After The New New fellowship, our project continued to grow and we ran a series of four workshops on the imagination of the Banlieue du Turfu. Through Fortnite, we were also able to launch other collaborations on a larger scale. These took the form of ten peer-learning sessions organised at the Gaîté Lyrique on the proposal for an alternative metaverse called the Agoravers, artistic residencies on audio-visual production, and access to a two-year European grant to translate our prospectivist practice on Fortnite into a pedagogical tool. After a rather intense year, we are now looking to define a strategy and a more stable economic model that will best unite our skills, our desires and the opportunities we encounter in the field.

SUPERRR: What has changed since you began the fellowship last year? What new paths have opened up and how have your initial assumptions evolved?

Camila: The best thing about the fellowship was having the chance to improve the narrative of the project. The idea had already existed for years, guiding my work and the content which developed through partnerships, but it still didn’t have a very clear structure. I had different investigative journalistic projects and research projects in various formats, ranging from academic research to video explorations, and a lot of writing. But the material lacked a space — a home — in which to bring together their trajectories that were already united by a shared, invisible gravity. Now this common force is becoming more visible, both through the narrative from which the project grows and in the establishment of an online home for the material.

The mentorship I had during the fellowship from the amazing Brazilian designer Kelly Saura was essential in this process. Working on the project’s visual development was almost a kind of therapy for Beyond the Green — through it, the project could understand its own path, come to terms with its identity crisis and finally rebuild itself. On the other hand, I had to step back from the video editing that I thought in the beginning would be the priority. Without this house, this strong structure, there was no point in making videos that would be released to a kind of isolation. I changed my priorities and have no regrets.

Makan & Hugo: The fellowship allowed us to share our workshop offer and it is from those very workshops that we subsequently developed the Agoravers. The format of our workshops has also evolved as we have absorbed and responded to the demands of different actors: the System D Festival, the Gaîté Lyrique, the Agora de Nanterre, as well as our vision of the world.

Makan: I wouldn’t say that our hypotheses have not been validated, but rather that practice has allowed us to iterate our initial hypotheses. For example, I thought of building the society project in a workshop, but it is too complex. I thought co-creation was the right formula to generate creative solutions in-situ, but it isn’t always the case. I also thought I really liked workshops, but now I want to follow a more artistic direction.

Hugo: Yes, we did indeed ask ourselves lots of questions concerning the place of worldbuilding in the workshops and people’s interest in it. We realised quite early on that the type of participants we were attracting were more interested in inventing stories within the world of the Banlieue du Turfu than inventing the world itself, although the line between the two activities is often ambiguous.

SUPERRR: Who would you like to work with in the future and what successes would you still like to achieve?

Camila: Journalists, researchers, artists, feminist and queer activists, ecotransfeminists — I want to work with people who are equally obsessed with tracing the chains of power that underpin socio-environmental transformations. As I don’t have a single identity myself (and nor do I intend to reduce myself that way), I will continue to nurture the partnerships I already have that work at the borders of these disciplines and across different formats, while continuing to seek out new ones. Critical and multiple perspectives are essential, so contributing to spaces of exchange and collective production on these themes through texts, videos, photography, workshops and other formats is my main goal.

Makan & Hugo: It’s clear to us that this project will evolve more as an art studio over the coming year, so strengthening our ability to connect the creative industries to local policy issues is a big challenge for us.

Makan: I would like to work in Japan, write a novel or make a film. Overall I would like us to do more festivals, more art projects. I would like to get closer to the creative industries.

Hugo: For me, I would like to develop our practice through different partnerships to better understand the impact that it, and similar approaches, can have on frugal prototyping, narrative power and digital tools.

SUPERRR: Can you share with us three learnings you have experienced in the course of your project or the fellowship process?

Camila: Sure. Independent projects always need more time than we plan, because they usually start from time and energy we give before we have a sufficient financial structure in place. Patience and persistence are necessary. Pausing to avoid freaking out is also part of it. Securing the structure as much as rethinking the project can sometimes be more important than following the path you initially outlined but which may not always lead to what really makes sense. Finally, combine flexibility with consistency. For me that means having the space to open new doors and pursue novel ideas, but without the risk of becoming lost in too many things at the same time.

Makan & Hugo: We adored working with Yuvraj Jha, the artist who helped us visualise the Agoravers, and learned a lot. We increased our knowledge of the metaverse and its potential impact on societies and I learned to talk about the project in a less poetic — but more accessible — language for potential partners.

SUPERRR: Thank you so much for these insights into your projects and all the best for the next steps! ✨

Join us for an hour of thought-provoking proposals on diverse and inclusive digital futures: October 7th, 6pm-7:15pm CET, online.

Imagine what would happen if all the propositions we make today were to be realized tomorrow? Which grievances would we center, which people and their realities would we focus on, and how sustainable and holistic would our solutions be then? What would be different?

You can sign up here via Zoom. 👈

For the closing event of The New New fellowship we have invited around of visionaries to share ideas, imaginations and interventions for better futures with us. During this event we will hear thought-provoking proposals, thinking along technical, political, artistic-cultural, environment and social lines. The speakers will have 3 minutes each to present their proposition. We are looking forward to welcoming you!

Speakers and Line-up:

• Camila Nobrega (Beyond the Green): Guts and grounds: from where our bodies thread
• Andrew Mallinson and Cami Rincón (Syb): Queered Potential
• Tayo Awosusi -Onutor (RomaniPhen): Knowledge archive: Keeping and producing knowledge — the feminist Romnja* Archive
• Kyriaki Goni (Networks of Trust): Beyond speculation: How to make (digital) futures possible
• Jac sm Kee (FeministInternet.net): Tending to wildness: field notes on movement infrastructure
• Claudia Fratangeli (Chayn): The blurred lines of physical and digital: engaging with the complexities of tech-enabled abuse
• Adriaan Odendaal & Karla Zavala Barreda (Algorithms of Late Capitalism): Inclusive game design: Lowering the barrier for participating in digital futures
• Maria Martelli (Just Wondering …): The future is here, ongoing, and multispecies
• Fieke Jansen (Data Justice Lab, Cardiff University): The bright future of shifting values
• Hugo Pilate (Banlieue du Turfu): Odyssée turfuriste — Towards the golden age of the world’s banlieues

Julia Kloiber & Markus Overdiek talked with them about their projects, and discussed prospects for more just and equal futures.

Our first question is our toughest: How would you describe your project to people who don’t know much about synthetic voices?

Frederik ([multi’vocal]): [multi’vocal] is an ongoing art and research project. Its intention is to question and explore the politics and aesthetics of synthetic speech, as well as its sonic qualities, which include how voice relates to questions of age, gender and geographical region.

Stina ([multi’vocal]): We also look at the paralanguage of synthetic speech — the tonal qualities that are not necessarily concerned with the words being said, but rather how it is being said.

Not everyone will know what synthetic speech is. Could you describe it with a concrete example?

Frederik ([multi’vocal]): Synthetic speech is speech that hasn’t been recorded before. We start with a text input from which one can generate audio — most often using deep neural networks. Most of the time, synthetic speech models are trained with a large number of recordings from a single voice actor, which is done to make something that’s similar or akin to the voice of that specific voice-actor. Our approach is different in the sense that we continuously integrate new speakers into the process — and thus give the algorithm a hard time by presenting new ways of seeing a given string or sentence.

What issues motivated and inspired you to start your project?

Stina ([multi’vocal]): One of the things that made us start wondering was listening to Siri, Alexa and Cortana. All these female-identified synthetic voices are given names with female identities. The representation of human voices is deeply shaped by those binary ideas. It made us curious to find out why — and to investigate if it could be any different.

Cami & Andrew, how would you describe your project shortly?

Andrew (Syb — Queering voice AI): Syb is a voice interface created by and for trans and non-binary people that recommends or connects them to media created by their community. In our very first workshop, it became clear that we wanted to centre the idea of trans joy. Too often, discourses and conversations around trans people, specifically in the wider media, tend to center their trauma.

Cami (Syb): The purpose of it is to support the embodied wellbeing of trans and non-binary people. Not only that — it should also be a use case in how to uplift trans and non-binary people and redress the structural imbalances and injustices they experienced. Finding out more about this was part of my research and the interviews that I conducted.

Could you tell us more about the participants and how you started the process?

Cami (Syb): Initially, the workshop built on the research that I did for my master’s thesis, which has now been published as “Speaking from experience, trans and non-binary requirements from voice activated AI”. Through research and interviews, what I found was that, beyond representation, the most salient needs of the trans people I interviewed had to do with surveillance, capitalism and privacy. Coming from this, we established workshops with three requirements: relevant use cases, competent representation (meaning truly separating the body which the voice is from and the gender), and a community-driven horizontal process. Everything we see today in our project Syb is driven by this process. It was special as it really took off, with a lot of trans people participating.

Andrew (Syb): The week of the workshops, which was an open call to the whole Creative Computing Institute in London, was probably one of the most intense of my life. It was in equal parts extremely rewarding, joyful, extremely demanding, busy and hectic. What was so interesting was to create a space centering on trans and non-binary peoples’ needs. They want to occupy this space as a collective of people. It was just a really thrilling process.

Cami (Syb): Another thing to add here is that we consulted a trans designer and co-created personas for the workshops with her. We did this in contrast to mainstream productions — which want to be inclusive, but are grounded on the views of cis-people.

Let’s talk about your design process. Who participates and what does the [multi’vocal] process look like? Did anything Cami and Andrew have shared about their own process and the tool they are building resonate with you?

Frederik ([multi’vocal]): We are five people in our collective, coming from very mixed, interdisciplinary backgrounds and our project is also a kind of vessel for doing many related things. One of the initial ideas, which was a bit more romantic, was to actually make a synthetic voice. We were like: How tricky can it actually be? And then you find out that it’s complicated, and there’s a lot of stuff to it. But one of the first big things we did was to collect data through different design interventions from anonymous people reading sentences aloud — 1,400 sentences cover most of the phonemes in the English language. When a lot of Danish people, where we are based, are trying to speak English, the performativity of language and speech becomes even more apparent. It makes you reflect on being a consumer of voices, which I think was a big thing.

Stina ([multi’vocal]: A lot of synthetic voices are recorded by one voice actor in a closed setting and we had several Aha! moments where we confronted the idea of the binary, accent recognition and paralanguage. It’s why we collected voices at festivals, where we had access to a lot of different accents and ages. We’ve done an audio paper on the methodologies we used, which also highlights some biases in relation to how synthetic voices are trained due to similarities, and the difficulties in getting a proper outcome with these differences between voices.

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Who do you look up to when you start your design process?

Cami (Syb): When I was doing my research, there’s a couple of people who come to mind. The first, who really came up again and again, is Dean Spade, a lawyer. He focuses on law and critical trans politics as well as the limits of law and violence within administrative processes, which I think can be very well translated to the issue of data violence — specifically, to trans people and violence that occurs within datasets and data systems. One of the things he talks about is a threefold approach to activism:

1. Lots of approaches are abolish-oriented because they are fundamentally unethical and incompatible with liberation.
2. Other approaches are more reformist-oriented and want to work within some systems that aren’t fundamentally harmful — but they cause harm to make these better.
3. It’s also possible to create alternatives.

Thinking strategically, design requirements that the industry should take into account start with privacy as the most salient, followed by other things, such as non-consensual data collection, which should be abolished. When we think about alternatives, that’s not something which realistically is coming from big tech — which is why we want to work on creating those alternatives, little utopias, and imaging new worlds. That geared the direction for Syb.

Andrew (Syb): Talking about being in rooms, where it’s not necessarily for people with this specific background in tech, that’s really the position that I come from. I’m not like that in the slightest. I studied sculpture at university, I graduated four years ago, my background is fine art. A lot of my education and teaching was around how to consider space politically, socially, ethically. These are the questions that informed the way that I perceive the world and the work that I do. And that was my mentality and viewpoint when I came on board. So thinking about people who seem to me really important, there’s Paul B. Preciado, who is a trans philosopher, who is incredible and really changed my perspective on how I approach technology. All the learning that I did on a fine art course, the work of the feminist internet and my interest in feminism, in queer theory — all of these things just tie into this idea of how we can imagine and speculate on more interesting, ethical, better futures. We should all be able to contribute to the ethical, socially-conscious production of technology and what can be voiced about futures.

Frederik ([multi’vocal]): Just to add to what Andrew was saying. One thing that I found fascinating doing this project is the idea of being in technology and how you approach it. It becomes very blurred and it’s also something that’s always so contextually-defined. I enter some spaces where I’m totally from, and there are others I am completely disconnected from. You can burn your fingers there. But it’s really fun to approach elements of technologies as a co-creator, because everybody’s just fumbling around. Maybe it’s a bit naïve, but if everybody is in that boat, it’s also a matter of just being content with fumbling and having the attitude towards it — and I kind of like that.

Stina ([multi’vocal]): There’s value in creating multiple alternatives to these tech monopolies. Otherwise, what we hear in public spaces, in synthetic voices, and synthetic voice design is all the same. That’s why we experiment with open source instead of using black boxes as the tech giants do. To come back to our inspirations, Lawrence Abu Hamdan has done some amazing work on voice and listening. His 2012 project “The Freedom of Speech Itself” is an audio documentary which through sound and forensic voice analysis critically investigates tools that claim to determine the origins and authenticity of asylum seekers’ accents. One of the things that makes his work so brilliant is that he is revealing how accent and voice are political. It is a politics not only of speaking, but also of listening — and it has been used wrongfully in so many ways. This shows again that technology is, of course, not neutral. And of course, there is Holly Herndon, who is mentoring us, which we’re very excited about. She is a great inspiration because she looks into voice design from a really artistic and sensitive way.

Who do you reach out to with your work?

Andrew (Syb): At one of our workshops, we were confronted with this question of who we are doing this for. We came to the conclusion that it is designed by and for trans and non-binary people and communities, while at the same time being for anyone who wants to expand their understanding and knowledge of gender expansiveness.

Frederik ([multi’vocal]): One of the big things that we are doing right now is building voices for a record release that will come out this fall. A big part of what’s driving that is like what Andrew is saying — anybody who wants to participate. We’re also trying to make it more approachable and engaging for people that might not come from an academic or machine learning or any other kind of background. One of the ways that we approach this is through research that we’ve done showing the absurdity of training algorithms to speak like humans, and the glitches that appear in the way that we interact.

Stina ([multi’vocal]): We probably have a pretty broad group of people that we want to reach. One of our aims in participating in all these festivals, having our voice box installed at many universities and organizations of different kinds, is to reach a really broad group of people and have them reflect upon what kinds of voices do they want in the future and actually start getting them thinking how it could be different.

What will you take away from The New New fellowship, and how does it help you to achieve your project goals?

Frederik ([multi’vocal]): There are many elements to [multi’vocal] and we also have our other jobs going on. So just the fact that there are people who find this important and intriguing and worth listening to, adds a lot, especially when you get corona-pigeonholed into something where you’re trying to find meaning in the process. It’s also very nice that we get some funding, because it means somebody believes in it. Moreover, the meetings we’ve had on zoom and hearing about the work and the ideas of the other fellows. Some are very closely connected to us, even if they’re in a completely different realm, and you get inspired by their way of working. That’s something that I didn’t see coming.

Cami (Syb): I don’t want to speak for Andrew, but we have talked about that exact thing. Getting funding was obviously great, it was very exciting for us to be able to take Syb into a second iteration. Getting to know the other fellows is another benefit. A lot of their projects are quite different, but there seem to be common threads, at least ideologically speaking, when it comes to digital spaces and digital futures. Those ideologies, those narratives, are not the dominant ones. So it’s been really inspiring to connect and network with other people and just to see the creative ways that people are coming up with alternatives.

Andrew (Syb): I guess I’ll just echo what everyone said. It feels like there’s a set of shared values that have arisen within the meetings. Because the projects are so different, everyone is moving along different paths, but there’s this communal goal of trying to do something better. There’s a sense of community that I wasn’t expecting. I really, really naively thought it’d be like other schemes where it’s like, “Here’s your money, good luck, now go”. But it’s not like that at all. That’s incredible. I talk to friends quite often about the fellowship, and people I work with, and I really sing its praises. It’s been really lovely.

Stina ([multi’vocal]): Just to hear about these other projects that are so inspiring and similar — and then yet so different — is great. And, you know, mind-blowing and giving so much inspiration. But also the carefulness with which you have been asking, “Okay, but what do you need in order to progress?” and “What can we do?” It’s really a continuous caring for the project, which really is wonderful.

What was your motivation for starting Algorithms of Late Capitalism?

Adriaan: In 2017, we did our master thesis research together and we focused on the topic of algorithmic literacy. That was just after the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was like a big watershed moment when a lot of discussion started happening around the moderation of platforms and the politicization of social media and echo chambers. During that time, we started doing research about algorithmic literacy from a perspective which, apart from computer science, also included approaches from cultural studies. This is why we started with a concrete project in which we developed a board game for algorithmic literacy.

Considering your work on AI literacy: Is education about the functionalities and use of algorithmic systems sufficient?

Adriaan: I think this is a very interesting while rather complex topic. There is definitely need for more structured and perhaps not overly pedagogical ways to give critical inputs and information to discuss these issues. It’s difficult to do it as a public literacy because there’s such high technical threshold and it gets complicated in terms of where the threshold for algorithmic literacy is and how much technical knowledge you need. Take for example transparency, of which a lot of researchers talk about. Transparency of algorithmic systems is really not that useful if you don’t have a critical audience. Our approach is that the more reflectiveness there exist, the more people are empowered to question situations in which algorithmic systems are being used.

You co-design a critical card game through workshops. Could you tell us more about this process?

Karla: We have worked with several methodologies for designing games. But crucial for this project is its co-creational approach. This approach implies that while starting with a first workshop about aspects of our daily lives, every other workshop and their setups were largely influenced by their predecessors. The workshops all together are in turn very relevant to the development of our critical card game — and depends on the knowledge and perspectives from all the different individuals who take part in our workshops.

Adriaan: We wanted to open up the design process to create a more inclusive way of design. After all, a game is a system where you have to follow the set of rules of the game and play according to its mechanics and these things are informed by the implicit values and views of its creators. In some ways then, game design is quite comparable to the development of algorithmic systems where software users are forced to behave according to sets of computational rules designed by someone else. Designing a game about digital technologies in a collaborate way, with different perspectives included in the process, thus offers a meta-level response towards creating discussions and ideas about more inclusive technological futures.

Karla: Of course, we use the knowledge that we have about important aspects from the field of game design. For example, that you need to create balance between parts of the game which are based on strategy and parts that are based on luck, and that you need to connect the rules to the narrative of the game as a whole. Including different perspectives from diverse people during the co-creational process enabled us to reflect more on the process of designing and to be more aware that our main function in the game design process is to serve as technicians or facilitators.

Adriaan: What’s also important for us is that beneath the card game as a final outcome, participants in the workshops have a good experience and get some space to reflect on certain issues.

Could you tell us a little more about the diverse people who take part in the workshops and about their motivation in doing so?

Adriaan: I think what we are lucky that our entry points to reach out to people are really funny, sparks curiosity, and enable you to work creatively — and all that with a low barrier. But we indeed were still surprised by the amount of people who joined our workshops.

Karla: For sure, the pandemic was a driver to overcome boundaries and geographical constraints — we have had people from Latin America, from different parts of Europe, from South Africa, and from the US. Some people from Australia wrote to us so that they can participate in one of the workshops — and we are also thinking about a collaboration with some friends in Hong Kong. Moreover, the workshop groups have been quite diverse from a professional point of view: Some participants are interested in algorithms or computer science, others are experts in game design, and then there are people, who are just generally interested in the topic of each particular workshop.

When you think of a digital world that is really beneficiary to all people: How would it look like and what features should it apply to?

Karla: It is important to realise that the internet also affects the environment, starting from simple searches on Google and going beyond to other applications that are largely based on energy consumption. When thinking about it from scratch on, the environmental impact is an angle to think of for this ideal digital world, where it does not consume too much energy — in contrast to the large energy consumption that today’s server farms rely on. Another thing is that in this fictional digital world and in contrast to today’s dominant players such as Facebook, the internet should be an open place with applications that are truly interoperable

Adriaan: Today’s internet is often only about making money. It is all under this capitalist logic of generating more revenue and usage — no matter what environmental impact this entails. So that’s why we were thinking of a more community-based approach for a different internet which is not profit-driven.

Such a design for a new internet would probably be more diverse — Karla, you are from Peru and Adriaan, you are from South Africa — what say have these two countries and the Global South in general in the current debate on the use of artificial intelligence?

Adriaan: From my experience, South Africa has a large IT-industry and a lot of innovation comes from there, especially from Johannesburg. But an issue is that there exists the aspiration from many of the start-up entrepreneurs to emulate the Silicon Valley model. There are also some interesting art and cultural projects around algorithmic topics and digital media going on. However, the link between these two is often missing. It would be interesting to see if such a link could bring a greater spotlight to local knowledge and enable its translation to competitive, yet more conscientious, software products.

Karla: In Peru, there exists an agenda for artificial intelligence where the government and ministries think of it solely as a technical topic and take the opinions of only technical experts into account. The ideas that circle around there do not really consider cultural, sociological or ethical insights — which would be really important for the societies in which these technologies are eventually deployed.

You state on your website that you believe that design can be used in a socially transformative way: How important is it have a positive narrative regarding the use of artificial intelligence?

Adriaan: We want to underline the human element in software development and that it is not only about mathematical models and computational problem solving. We want to emphasize that humans contribute to it and can give the digital sphere human-like elements, such as humour.

Karla: An important part about technology, especially artificial intelligence, is to remember that it’s made by humans and that their biases are inherent to the use of technology. Only when we are aware of that and when we don’t pretend that problems in the use of technology are always technical, we can avoid technological determinism and be aware of its cultural implications, which then helps us to develop and use technology that is more inclusive.

Could you give us an idea about how you as fellows perceive The New New?

Adriaan: We really enjoy that The New New allows us to be experimental and to try things we were not sure that they would work: It gave us a bit more space and the opportunity to free ourselves up to try and create something of which we can really be proud of. Moreover, all the in-between opportunities such as meeting the other fellows have been great.

Karla: Indeed. As we as fellows are a very diverse and international group, it’s very interesting to hear from other fellows about their work with local communities. This is very inspiring to us.

The open online directory feministcurricula.org maps and documents educational design initiatives that use feminist perspectives and pedagogies. The aim of the directory is to explore new, alternative ways of learning, teaching and practicing design. Its continuously-growing index of courses, workshops, classes and programmes features assignments, projects and reading lists to facilitate exchange and collaboration between designers, students, educators and researchers.

Superrr: Can you tell us more about you and your project feminist curricula?

Maya: feminist curricula was born out of my research on design education and feminist theory, in particular on how intersectional feminism can inform design education. Design as a discipline is patriarchal, androcentric and Eurocentric. As such, it reproduces and sustains different forms of suppression such as racism, sexism and ableism. In the past decade, there have been different programs popping up in and outside of academia and in different locations across the world. Since I am a design educator, I was interested in learning from other practices, so I started to look into what had already been done. There was, however, little research into and documentation of these practices, so I started thinking how to best make this research public and connect different people and initiatives with each other.

S: How did you find these people and initiatives then?

M: People were pointing towards interesting people or via Instagram — it was really random how I got to know who is working on what. The seed of feminist curricula was the thought of building a broader community of people working on similar ideas, exchanging thoughts and working together. The online directory was really born to map out and document educational design initiatives that use different feminist perspectives and pedagogies, and that look at alternative ways of teaching and educating on design. Teachers, students or activists who do this work inside and outside of academia can submit their work. Through this database, they can connect, profit from each other and make their individual initiatives and the groundswell of change more visible.

S: Super interesting, what are the next steps then?

What we now want to do, in the second phase, is to share stories about these programs and initiatives. I am working on a series of texts and interviews contributed by the educators which we will publish on depatriachise design and on futuress, a feminist platform for design politics, run by Nina Paim.

S: Feminisms and feminist perspectives are at the core of your work. Could you tell us more about your understanding and conception of feminism, and what that means for your ways of doing, working and being?

S: Thank you! This is a question which should be asked more and which we need to continuously reflect on. Feminism — or better, feminisms — can be described as a very situated lens or practice. It goes against the European, rationalist logic of a single definition. Feminism is multiple in itself and entails different worlds. There is no one way of doing and being, rather, there are many.

Feminist approaches and practices can take different forms and really depend on histories, resources, interests, contexts and legacies. But, banale as it might seem, they all do foster social transformation and look for more just futures for everyone. And I do think there are values shared in common for different feminist theories. For example, predominantly activist practices which strive for social justice and equality by stressing the importance of community.

Feminism criticises the universal notions of essentialism. It is not about the essence of being a woman, because that can mean different things — especially when speaking from an intersectional perspective. Religion, race, class, gender, ability… all inform the experience of being a woman. It connects to other social justice movements, like the movement for racial justice, the anti-colonial movement, the movement for Palestinian liberation. These are all, in my opinion, feminist causes.

S: Interesting. Are there some examples from the communities and initiatives you are working with that you would like to share — positive examples of collaborative feminist curricula informed by intersectional feminist perspectives?

M: Yes, there are many. The idea behind feminist curricula came from me and my interests, but the whole platform happened collaboratively: with f.ex. Good For A Gxrl Collective, Mathilde Avogardo, Iyo Bisseck and Elise Connor.

After immigrating to Switzerland, I was trying to figure myself out within the design realm and this new country. Back then, in 2017, I was questioning all the assumptions behind design and design practice and looking for people and initiatives posing the same challenges. Education is so profound in how it shapes our lives, societies and ultimately our futures. I was struggling a lot with design education. My undergraduate experience was not the best. In fact, and this experience is shared with many designers, it was very violent.

Then one of my best friends, a feminist activist and antrophologist living in Lima, shared an article by the Chair of Design and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism (FADU) at the University of Buenos Aires about the new course they founded. I was impressed because it showed how feminist curricula are not only in the margins but coming into the mainstream, influencing university spaces and ultimately the curricula. This is a great example from the academic sphere.

S: Impressive. And what about examples from outside of academia, like activist practices for example?

M: Institutions are slow to change, reluctant to decenter Eurocentrism and to foster change and critical transformation. There’s a lot of resistance from the ones upholding power. Outside of academia there have been different initiatives to create safer spaces — for example, the workshops and study programs that futuress is doing. They have three different online study programs which look at design from critical perspectives and they strive to democratise access to design history writing.Their fellowship, Against the Grain, brought together 44 designers, researchers and students from historically marginalised communities to learn and exchange online. It allowed for reflection on power and privilege within design, and was also about creating transnational solidarity. Within this digital study program were participants from across the world: Brazil, India, South and West Asia, people from diasporas based in Europe. This is just one example of how we can create different learning spaces for design and foreground epistemologies that have been erased, undermined or marginalised.

S: Thinking about the challenges when incorporating feminist perspectives into curricula, how does digitalisation inform these transformations positively, negatively and in between?

M: Activists have been using digital tools for a very long time to connect and amplify voices on social media. When I started depatriachisedesign, it was me bringing my thoughts to a blog — which was kind of a self-therapy. Through social media I suddenly started to connect organically with people who did the same. For example, I got to know Elise Connor and Mathilde Avogardo digitally, and together we created feminist curricula. I do really believe that we can use digital tools and social media for our own purposes.

However, we need to reflect critically on these platforms as well. We can look to the recent demonstrations on Sheikh Jarrah to see how Palestinian voices and activists have been silenced and shadow banned. Again and again, we see how technologies are used to counter resistance. So, it is not that I am just thinking “Wow, Instagram: a lovely place to hang.” We need different tools for our activism.

S: Feminist perspectives help in creating something new but also in deconstructing status quos and mechanisms, if I understand you correctly?

M: Yes, so one additional thing: digitalisation is amazing, as are the possibilities that come with it, like connections. But we also have to bear in mind that not everyone has access to the internet or has a smartphone. The internet enables us to create spaces but we have to be aware that these spaces are not automatically open for everyone — people who have no or limited access to internet, or no electricity at all. We need to consider that, too. The internet opens spaces but it also closes — so it is never the perfect tool.

S: When you think of intersectional feminism, your work and the New New fellowship, how is it all connected for you?

M: I am really grateful for the fellowship because it supports us with financial resources. It is so important in feminist practices to tackle questions of transparency and ensure that everyone is renumerated for their labour. You need the means to support yourself and the work that you do. Through the fellowship I can finance the project — it all goes to the people who contribute illustrations, solve technical issues, write texts… This is just amazing because otherwise it would not be possible. This is a really tangible thing. Less tangible is the community the fellowship is building — through the meetups, workshops, getting to know the other initiatives and projects. I am extremely grateful for how kind it is, how it is done with care. I really appreciate it. There are not many scholarships for this kind for the work we do, and we simply cannot take it for granted. Despite the challenges and extra layers of pandemic stress: thank you!

S: Thank you, dear Maya!

What was your motivation to start “Dark Matters Database”?

I learned about health inequity and the disparities that still exist in United Kingdom (UK) healthcare and across the world both during my studies and through personal experience. One striking example is that of medical student Malone Mukwende who, as a medical student, wrote the first-ever UK handbook that focused on the appearance of skin conditions on darker skin. I wanted to develop a tool which would actively help people from marginalised ethnicities and genders to advocate for themselves in healthcare settings, as well as to help clinicians provide more equitable treatment.

Could you tell me more about the current status of your project?

At the moment, I’m working on building the database and a website for it. With a team of designers from backgrounds that the database seeks to reach, I’m seeking to implement UX design which is actually helpful for people using the site. I have experienced discrimination within the medical system as a woman — but I am white and I don’t understand from a personal perspective the intersectional experiences of people of colour and/or people who, for example, are non-binary. The team will be able to establish the database and its website in a way that is most useful for the people it’s designed to support and that doesn’t cater to my own biases.

What do you think is the societal consequence of these overlooked illnesses?

Even in countries with a high-quality public healthcare system, such as the UK, many people still put off seeking medical treatment. They worry that they will not be taken seriously, or have anxieties because they or their peers haven’t been taken seriously in the past, or have even been harmed in their attempts to seek treatment.

That’s incredible, considering the resources we have available in the UK and yet people are avoiding accessing care because there’s a barrier at the point of consultation. This is rarely because staff members are ill-intentioned and want to create this barrier. It’s more often a lack of awareness due to incomplete teaching practices. This leads to a lack of understanding about existing inequities when it comes to how conditions can present differently in women, people of colour and transgender, non-binary or intersex people as compared to white men.

Thinking about all the situations in which people are not able to seek diagnoses or have not been given diagnoses, this means that thousands are not receiving the treatment that they need and deserve, and are suffering ill-health and death as a result.

Building a publicly available database about illnesses is in itself of great value. How would you like to raise public awareness for it?

Public health campaigns often fail to focus on underrepresented groups or do so in a way that doesn’t take into account cultural differences or well-founded historical mistrust of medical institutions. While it is the job of doctors to make the diagnosis, it helps a lot if as a patient you have the language and tools to help you advocate for your own healthcare outcomes and push for your symptoms to be taken seriously.

So in terms of public awareness, I would like to create a series of posters that are designed to mimic a public health announcement, with bold messaging and clear imagery. However, these posters would specifically focus on communities that are marginalised. I will also gather and publish statistics and interview-based data about inequalities in the healthcare system as an academic paper, which will form the third part of this project.

What challenges do you see when working with a lot of personal data?

The database is only useful when people submit to it. That’s why it is important that people feel safe in doing so. And while all the data is anonymised, I want to make sure that it is not exploitative of people’s conditions. All information gathered on the database will be publicly available for the benefit of marginalised communities worldwide.

It’s very important to consider precisely how to deal with personal data when you think about how easy it is to trace someone’s identity back from data points — even when anonymised. That’s why I don’t want to collect more than three characteristics: age, gender and ethnicity, with age being an optional addition. All images will be stripped of metadata. It’s very important here to be clear that what I am doing is not about collecting people’s medical history. It’s not that I want submitters to divulge all details — it’s about gaining very specific knowledge that can aid other people having similar health experiences.

For example, there exists lots of clinical literature about women who are suffering from symptoms arising from physical manifestations of psychological trauma or illness. Yet many of these women are simply told to shut up and get on with it. They shouldn’t express how they feel because society says that the role of women is to be quiet and compliant — an effect that is often compounded for women of colour.

That’s why the interview-based element of this project is so key. From these interviews, which will be conducted by individuals from marginalised genders and/or ethnicities, it’ll possible to find out more about the point at which treatment fails and people become so disillusioned drop out of the system.

Going a little broader now: Do you have visions for digital futures which are more just and equal?

The digital world is about power and attention, and there is so much power in attention. That is kind of the reason why I am trying to effect change — even if at a very small level.

When I think about digital futures more broadly, my interest is definitely centred around privacy, and the rare, non-commercial corners of the internet that are becoming so much more attractive. Places where people can rest and where they can make safe, fruitful connections on an equal footing with each other. These places are extraordinarily few and far between.

I think there is so much potential good online and in technology. Instead of that power remaining concentrated in a few hands, I would like to be part of a movement where people can equally share in those opportunities.

What things do you take away from the fellowship?

The fellowship is the best thing that has happened to me in a long time. For one thing, it’s giving me the ability to take a week every single month to work on my project, which in itself has completely changed and restructured my daily life. The support from The New New team, whom I can easily contact, is wonderful. Essentially, the fellowship provides a clear and supportive workflow which I really appreciate. Also, to learn how other people build their projects is extremely valuable. That everyone comes from such different backgrounds, cultures and countries is a huge benefit, and it’s humbling to see how people are dedicating themselves to these very important projects. Last but not least, the fellowship helps me keep focused on my ultimate objective — to help marginalised people advocate for their own health. Meeting all the other fellows reminds me why I am doing my work in the first place.

How did your project start?

Irem: After separately attending zine and illustration events, we finally went together to illustration fest in Berlin. Even in such an international city, we still noticed a lack of diversity in the creative scene.

So we decided to do illustration-related events of our own. We organised one of Germany’s first migrant, BIPoc and diaspora-led illustration festivals, with illustrators, musicians, authors and organisations from our communities, which was open for everyone to see them shine.

However, because of the pandemic, that was the only in-person event we did. So we decided to focus even more on building a community online.

Filipa: We found that online events were a much more accessible way to showcase a lot of illustrators who are marginalised or identify with being migrant, BPoc, and/or from the diaspora. We were able to approach topics more meaningfully than we first expected for the digital sphere.

Irem: And going online was a chance to connect with illustrators who do not live just in Berlin, but all across the world. It enabled us to reach out to, and hold conversations with, other diasporic or migrant communities with whom we share similar experiences and thoughts.

These are clear advantages in going digital with your work. But were you also able to create feelings of connectedness and belonging digitally?

Filipa: We used a micro approach and had many one-on-one exchanges, aiming at deeper connection with individuals instead of diving in with a lot of people at the same time. Also, working with illustrations that transmit a certain message helps people feel connected and understand topics that are sometimes harder to digest.

Irem: We often do projects with other illustrators and organisations who have similar mindsets, which makes it easier to connect. Not only that, but we open up our work to work with other fields such as writing and research.

We are looking forward to meeting in person and being able to round out the connections we have made online. However, we found that the possibilities of bonding in the digital space are far greater than we initially expected.

So ideally you want to bring together the best of the digital and the analogue world?

Irem: You have your digital persona and your real-life persona. Making a connection to the analogue world is important because you might otherwise get lost in the digital.

Filipa: Technology is there to enhance our lives, which is why we should keep it in check. Maybe this is too utopian, but we might just be able to become this global village that is a real community, inclusive and diverse. The digital space could be where this happens if we use it properly.

Inclusion and accessibility are really important to you — you live by them. From your experiences, what makes people feel safe?

Filipa: This is still a big topic for us. We want to empower people who, like us, identify with being migrant, BPoc and/or people from the diaspora. We want people to have a feeling of belonging and be able to share ideas in the communities that we build: we have their back in situations of discrimination. Our work creates a safer space. Our community is a place where people can express themselves without fear.

Irem: Knowledge sharing is another thing that plays a role here. The first New New workshop on speculative futures is a good example as it brought together people from diverse backgrounds and led them to learn together and share ideas. This is one way of creating such safe spaces.

What future do you aspire to when you think of the next generations who will bear the effects of our actions today? What are the features of this better world?

Filipa: The best way to advance our future is first to take stock of what we have. We need schools to tackle discriminatory ideas before they start to solidify in children’s minds. The educational system can play a key role in preventing discrimination and the digital space can provide teachers with the necessary tools.

Irem: At the same time, we recognise the need to regulate the internet when it comes to hate speech and cyber violence while at the same time preserving the right to free speech — especially when people such as activists are willing to stand up and show their faces.

So the ideal internet of the future would be more value-driven?

Irem: Couldn’t say it better. And for such a value-driven approach, we need more young people at the table when important discussions take place. Today’s young people are more aware of societal issues — just think of Fridays for Future. Their voices should be as valued as the voices of the elderly.

Would you like to show us two of your favourite illustrations and tell us about them?

Irem: Nesrin Tanç is an author and literary and cultural scholar who explores the work of writers who emigrated from Turkey, the wider Anatolian region and Iraq to Germany. She asked me to join her research project by creating illustrations. Since guest worker history is something that hardly plays a role in the German curriculum, I saw this as an opportunity to shine a light on the subject.

The illustrations are based on short stories by the Turkish social writer Fakir Baykurt who went into exile in Germany and described the lives of guest workers here. As soon as these people — who came to help rebuild after the second world war — arrived in Germany, they were discriminated against and segregated into ghetto-like buildings. It was crucial for me to find a way to portray guest worker history in a way that it is both accessible and engaging for today’s generations.

Filipa: This illustration was done by Mayha, a migrant from Thailand who has been here for five years now. She illustrates light-hearted stories of being misunderstood as a migrant in Germany. We see it as important that we create space for people like us, who identify with being migrant, BPoc, and/or illustrators from the diaspora. In this space, people don’t have to justify themselves and can let go of the burden of being expected be an intense activist. This comic is called ‘Same, same. But different’ and shows how similar Germany and Thailand are, despite being completely different.

How does the fellowship benefit your work?

Filipa: The first thing that comes to mind is being able to exchange ideas with people who are working on interesting projects with similarities to our own. This is also about learning from how other fellows work and improving our own practices. The fellowship workshops allow us to explore discussions about technology and its societal advantages and disadvantages more deeply, and the Algorithms of Late Capitalism fellows ran an additional workshop that relied on co-creation. These experiences are very empowering and make us believe that OUSA can grow beyond what we originally thought.

Irem: Agreed. Learning in the workshops and networking through them, as well as discovering other opportunities to connect with people as a result of the fellowship, is enormously beneficial to us. We now see far more clearly the directions in which we would like to steer OUSA.

Introduction: Beyond the Green is a journalistic experimental project which explores feminist narratives about megaprojects that affect our lives, bodies, and territories. It combines investigative journalism, academic knowledge and artistic languages together in a documentary process with the aim of unveiling power dynamics in an increasingly digital world. It aims to strengthen narratives around social-environmental justice. Ouassima (Superrr Lab) spoke to Camila (Beyond the Green):

SUPERRR: How would you describe Beyond The Green to someone who has never heard about feminism and environmental justice before?

Camila: Beyond the Green is a platform that uses social environmental perspectives and feminist lenses to bring visibility to mega projects that impact territories and bodies, especially in Latin America and the so-called Global South. It is a transdisciplinary project that sits between journalism, academia and art.

SUPERRR: Why did you start Beyond the Green?

Camila: It started in 2015, when I came to Germany as part of the Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fellowship. My idea was to find German collectives working with alternative journalism on environmental issues. I learned about some very interesting German initiatives connected with Latin America. However, when I asked about the connections between the projects happening here and struggles in the so-called Global South, I started to notice that deeper collaboration between Europe and Latin America, as well as more horizontal forms of joint action and reflection, are still rare.

Originally, I wanted to map what is happening here. But it changed a lot. I would say it actually became a different project, because now it is not a platform to connect different initiatives, but rather to build and circulate those narratives. If there is a dam being built in Brazil, what is the energy produced destined for, who benefits, what is the broader perspective? For me, the main point with Beyond the Green is to understand the connections we cannot neglect.

SUPERRR: Agribusiness consumes more than 30% of the total energy produced in Brazil, with a good part of this production going for export. How is it possible to understand power relations if we look at conflicts and environmental narratives in a fragmented way?

Camila: Discourse on environmental and social justice is very fragmented. Living in Germany for six years as a Latin American woman, I must keep this as my focus, trace these links. It has a lot to do with heteropatriarchy and colonialism, which still govern access to land, to communication, to the narratives that circulate on the internet…

SUPERRR: Could you tell us more about the example of the dam you are working on in connection with Beyond the Green?

Camila: As part of my PhD, I am researching the possible effects on people and the environment of the planned São Luiz do Tapajós hydropower plant in the Amazon region. For many years I reported on environmental issues for traditional media organisations. However, most still take hegemonic perspectives, for example focussing on global approaches to sustainable development, or presenting technologies as the salvation of social and environmental crises. I still work with them but also now with popular communicators in a variety of local territories. Together, we try to connect and build different narratives.

On the internet, algorithmic logic concentrates the narratives of those who circulate the most information. Yet it also makes possible connections between people in different territories, collaborations between journalists and popular communicators in different parts of the world. To find the spaces in between and dispute discourses, to see the power relations behind them, see beyond, to how communities wish to be — this is what Beyond the Green does, this is the idea behind it. And Brazil is my starting point.

SUPERRR: You said it is important to look at who is taking part in public conversations, who is (un-)heard, and why and how to disrupt existing hegemonies. Do you have an example where you thought “Wow, this is why I am doing it”?

Camila: Yes, many times. Official documents for this hydropower plant state that it’s in the public interest that more energy is produced. So the position of the government and the companies involved is that there is no other way, we need to build it. But when I visited I saw a completely different reality. People living there are not even included in the environmental licencing process until it is already under construction. It’s hard even to get any details.

The majority of people I interviewed there were women — firstly because they are under-represented in academic research, and secondly, because women lead many of the resistance actions there. They revealed to me different forms of technologies, complex community structures, nuances in communication. Through radio, local meetings, small newspapers, online and offline, these women have developed networks of communication over centuries — none of which are mentioned in the official documents that analyse how a territory will be changed. They are not counted by the patriarchal, capitalist tools used to assign value.
The people living there have been managing the forest for centuries. I mean, the forests are not just growing like that, but because of the people there. All the life that exists there would just disappear because of the dam and the connected mega projects. When I visited, I saw that many networks for defending the territories already existed. For me, as a journalist, it began a very deep process of questioning and repositioning my own work.

SUPERRR: What did that mean for you personally?

Camila: For sure, it changed my view of how knowledge is produced through academia, journalism, art. So many things are epistemically erased, there are different levels of violence. When you try to define from outside what is there, what these communities are about… it is so violent. How to make that visible is part of my research. It’s an ongoing process for me.

SUPERRR: Yes, absolutely. How is resistance also a part of your work?

Camila: What I try to do now is connect it with my PhD and journalistic work. I try to invert how these kind of conflicts are investigated, learn from and with different perspectives. I do not talk for people or “give them a voice”. It is better that we pass the mic and understand the point of view from which we speak. For example, when I have the chance to question someone from the government, I try to formulate questions from other perspectives. In Brazil we have a law allowing access to information. So when I am in this position either as a researcher or as a journalist, I also have to change what I am looking for. It is about re-understanding how to ask question. Because I think we sometimes ask the wrong questions. There are other ways of understanding time, collective memory, local knowledge… We ask what the problem is when we should ask whether a project should even happen

SUPERRR: Impressive. As you work from feminist perspectives, how does intersectionality come into play and is it important to you?

Camila: An amazing question, thank you for asking it. It’s one I’m trying to answer in my own research. I think feminist perspectives help me unveil power relations. It is not necessarily about women but rather making layers of power visible. For example, my understanding of epistemic violence and systems stems from feminist Latin American scholarship. Feminist and indigenous women are the most threatened not because they are vulnerable but because they are at the front. They raise their voices, dispute discourses and claim territories and spaces. It is not about vulnerability, it is the complete opposite.

Working closely with different communities, thinking collectively, is feminist perspectives in action. There are different forms of knowledge that aren’t necessarily documented or written down. Oral communication is one of the main forms in the Tapajós region. To communicate there therefore means visiting each community by boat and discussing the arrival of the dam.

SUPERRR: So they mobilized people by taking a boat up and down the river?

Camila: Yes, exactly. These communities are connected through the river, which becomes a means of communication in the sense that if these people were relocated, it changes a lot. It takes away a certain communicative possibility.

SUPERRR: Wow, communicating through the river — it’s a beautiful picture. What are your next steps, what is Beyond the Green in five to ten years?

Camila: I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. I hope that becomes a space that gives visibility to different narratives online and offline, and to women and non-binary people. That it becomes a space to produce other forms of journalism, where we learn from each other, understand the limits of our own points of view. Where texts, videos and photography are produced that focus on these mega projects, for now in Latin America, starting from Brazil.

SUPERRR: So why Germany?

Camila: It was not planned to be honest! But Germany is one of the leaders on environmental policy, with goals for reducing carbon, a transition of renewables… What relationship does Latin America have with this country that shapes environmental discourses and narratives so much, when the region exports food, minerals and other commodities? Discussions about power, coloniality and gender were taking place. Could a truly international community exist? I came with big expectations and found many frustrations. Colonialism, racism, sexism play a big role in shaping who has the right to talk, to write, to decide what is knowledge and what is not.

The New New has been a nice experience, because my trajectory means I am part of many networks and involved in collective means of production. And although the project involves a lot of people, a PhD is lonely. So to have the chance to work on Beyond the Green really connects things.

SUPERRR: That sounds superrr. Thank you so much for this inspiring interview!

Illustration: Anna Niedhart, Rainbow Unicorn.

Originally published at https://superrr.net.

Superrr: How did the project start?

Makan: There is an official version to the start of the project, and an unofficial version. The unofficial one is that I had depression and had to start again from zero — rethinking myself and my environment, abandoning some of my values and knowledge (left-wing political culture, neighbourhood culture, religion, hip-hop) because it didn’t work for me anymore. I wanted to do my own project, inspired by philosophers like Socrates, Nietzsche and Plato. I didn’t ask anyone for advice — not my friends, not an organisation — because I expected they wouldn’t understand my approach. I also expected answers like ‘Your project is not clear, ask a social worker or the job centre for help.’

The official way the project started is a mix between philosophy and entrepreneurial practice. After two years, things were going better and I joined Station F as a start-up manager. It’s an incubator in Paris, which bills itself as one of the biggest in the world. Station F was bubbling. It was the centre of the French start-up scene and everyone wanted to see the next big thing emerge from there — which is to say, the future comes from there. I live in the Paris region, an hour and a half from the centre and one day, on the train, I thought to myself, ‘Why do I need to travel an hour and a half to enter the future? Why can’t the future start in my neighbourhood?’

Superrr: So it was also an empowering journey?

Makan: Yes, you could say that. I like the term used by the philosopher Nietzsche. He talks about the will to power. I was looking for power. Not the power of the people, not political power, not power by force, but something softer that takes into account my vulnerability.

Superrr: How did La Banlieue du Turfu come into being?

Makan: I told myself that in order to develop La Banlieue du Turfu, I needed specific help, a programme that would allow me to give shape to my ideas. So I joined Time 2 Start, a six-month start-up programme for entrepreneurs from the suburbs. But it wasn’t the right space for me I think. I would say that philosophy, reflection is more important to me than selling a minimum viable product. In the world of start-ups, you have to go fast: pitch in one minute, define things concretely. But I couldn’t because I had a thought, a vision in the making, and not a product or a prototype. At the end of the programme, I wasn’t discouraged. On the contrary, I took out a student loan and entered a design school, Strate, after having been turned down twice by other design schools. The third application was the right one, I was lucky.

For my diploma project, I was interested in the idea of the future in the neighbourhood. That’s when I realised that to have a future means leaving the neighbourhood. Getting out is a sign of success. It’s how you show you have succeeded materially and symbolically in the eyes of society. So this means that banlieue + future is an oxymoron. They are antagonists, opposites. Banlieue + dreams is also another antagonism that structures our thoughts: ‘To fulfill my dreams I have to get out.’

I completed my year at Strate and then met Max Mollon, a researcher and designer who introduced me to design fiction as a methodology. I worked with Max for a year, and in collaboration with a Microlycee we carried out design fiction workshops around the theme of the suburbs of the future. The students produced their own narratives.

At the same time, I wrote an essay about La Banlieue du Turfu. I met Hugo after and together we created four workshops to prototype La Banlieue du Turfu with participants in the game Fortnite. One day, Hugo sent me the call for The New New Fellowship. It was the first time I’d applied to a call for La Banlieue du Turfu. I was not confident and tired of regularly failing.

Superrr: That‘s super interesting and makes me wonder: when you imagine La Banlieue du Turfu, are there even still banlieues in the first place?

Makan: That’s a very good question. As a designer, I wouldn’t allow myself to make decisions for the people who live in the banlieues, but I do have a perspective.

The first thing is that my cartography no longer separates the centre and the periphery. This is the foundation. Then you have to know that the Earth is a suburb of the Milky Way, so all Earthlings are suburbanites. This cosmic marginality has not prevented life from proliferating.

Secondly, the suburb is born in the world. It is already of the world, it is not ‘outside’. In my opinion, you can’t say of Hollywood, Miami or Dubai, ‘It is too good’ or ‘That neighbourhood is rotten.’ Just because somewhere is more affluent doesn’t mean it has to become the sun in our minds. In the collective imagination, Hollywood is indeed symbolically better than my neighbourhood, but in reality the most elevated places have the least oxygen.

When I’m in the suburbs, I’m in the cosmos and part of the long term. The French banlieues are no more than 50 or 60 years old, and there is no point reducing my existence to such a short span. I am part of the human species, which has a long history. La Banlieue du Turfu seeks neither a structural change nor a change in architecture. No. It is a civilisational change. As soon as you change the relationship between the centre and the periphery, between the barbarians and the civilised, the world changes too.

Superrr: Hugo, what is your perspective on the project?

Hugo: The impression we sometimes got when organising the workshops was that for people not from the banlieues — and it was partially my position at the beginning — La Banlieue du Turfu consisted of making things ‘less bad’ in the banlieues. Unless we’re talking about this vague and somewhat limiting concept of urban culture, like rap, art or sport, it’s not about taking inspiration from them. At first, I was sceptical of the power of the imagination, but it’s through observation, listening to each other you realise, ‘Well yeah, we have to start taking an interest in the ways the suburbs have their own Turfus.’ This is one of the elements that was really interesting in our workshops.

Superrr: Talking about the workshops, could you share any of the young participants‘ visions with us?

Makan: I can tell the dominant narratives I encountered. The first narrative tells of the banlieues through lack. ‘We don’t have this, we don’t have that.’ It is pessimistic. There is a second, optimistic narrative which tries to respond to this pessimism by saying, ‘There’s no problem in the banlieues. People are creative, they are entrepreneurs.’ For me, that’s not a narrative, it’s a reaction to the bad image. Then there’s the third narrative that we’ve already talked about, which is the myth of success. ‘To succeed I have to get out of the neighbourhood.’ It’s an obsession. It comes up all the time — from the mouths of young people, parents, politicians, the media, music and films.

Once, at the very beginning of La Banlieue du Turfu, I did a workshop with a class, coming to it empty-handed. I took a flip chart and wrote: ‘Qu’est ce que la banlieue du turfu pour vous?’ (‘What are the suburbs of the future, for you?’). I said, ‘Now we’re going to talk about the suburbs and the future. What is it for you guys?’ Nobody knew how to answer. When someone spoke up (I will always remember this because I was very surprised), a student said, ‘A bigger flat. Basically, a big house.’ So the future of the banlieues is its opposite: a middle-class neighbourhood. The future of the suburbs was a blind spot in the neighbourhood’s culture.

Another example: a student came to class sad, saying ‘I don’t want to work, my boyfriend just dumped me.’ We said, ‘Well, tell us about your experience and let’s inspire you.’ We came up with elements from African culture, especially the fetish. One group of students invented a story in which fetishes became an institution. Another imagined TV news which didn’t broadcast bad news. And another student invented a fantastic, phantasmagoric story set in his suburb for which he invented an ecological currency, a Poké Ball, in which you grow plants that become the method of exchange. That was cool too. It was a good story, without too much technology because we changed the methodology. It’s more fantasy, which was good, but more difficult when thinking in terms of probable scenarios.

Superrr: Hugo, would you like to give us some context and insights as well?

Hugo: To put it in context, the project had already begun to develop as a participatory platform of the imagination and alternative Turfus. And when I discovered this work I said to myself it would be fun to prototype it or shape in another way, for example by using a video game like Fortnite. On the one hand the game allows us a fairly tangible interpretation of the concepts that emerge from the discussions in the workshops. On the other, using a world-famous platform for this kind of fictional world creation reveals equally interesting cultural biases. And so, we did some hybrid workshops that drew on both worlds where the first part had a theme like the links between La Banlieue du Turfu and Mars, or what an Afro-Cyber-Feminist Turfu suburb would look like. Participants were asked to imagine what this meant to them, design micro-stories that they could perform in the video game, and then build them virtually.

Superrr: Could you give us an example?

Hugo: We started with sentences like ‘In an enchanted alternative suburb, celebrities participate in neighbourhood development through the kebab shop.’ Or ‘School dropouts can discover other skills through the symbiosis they cultivate. They can also study and work whenever they want, thanks to the poetic trees, which recite songs and other texts all day long.’ These examples allow us to capture, in abstract, La Banlieue du Turfu — in ways which often start from a hybridization of the familiar and the magical, but which we don’t necessarily recognise in this context. For example, the kebab shop is a private-public place and an establishment where many people meet. Or the shisha bars. Just by using the adjective ‘symbiotique’ propels participants into an alternative world.

Superrr: It’s beautiful. So there are different types of visions, as you said, techno-optimistic, utopian, dystopian and something in between?

Makan: In everyday life, the dystopian narrative is the most common, the usual. Then you have the optimistic counter-narrative. In the design fiction workshops co-created with Max, there were techno-optimistic stories, or rather phantasmagorical stories. But that’s normal. In the end, creating new narratives is not easy.

Superrr: Thank you very much, Makan and Hugo. And a final question. Which three emojis best describe your current emotional state?

Hugo: 🛠🐙🌿

Makan: 🙏👩‍🚀🧙🏿‍♀️🧝🏽‍♀️

Entretien: La Banlieue du Turfu

Makan et Hugo (Banlieue du Turfu) avec Ouassima (Superrr Lab)

Turfu est un terme d’argot français signifiant futur. L’objectif de ce projet est de créer des futurs spéculatifs pour les banlieues françaises qui contredisent les récits dominants de pessimisme et de privation. Non seulement ces idées fausses sont trompeuses, mais elles font obstacle à la réinvention et à la revitalisation de ces quartiers urbains. Un entretien avec Makan Fofana et Hugo Pilate.

Superrr: Comment le projet est né?

Makan: Il y a une manière officielle du début projet et une manière officieuse (unofficial.) La manière officieuse c’est lorsque j’ai fait une dépression alors je devais tout recommencer à zéro pour me repenser et repenser à mon environnement en abandonnant une partie de mes valeurs, (la culture politique de gauche, la culture quartier, la religion, la culture hip-hop) de mes connaissances parce que ça ne marchait plus, pour moi. Je voulais faire un projet de manière autonome en m’inspirant des philosophes, tels Socrate, Nietzsche et Platon. J’ai demandé l’avis à personnes, ni à mes amis, ni à un organisme d’accompagnement, parce que je m’attendais à ce qu’ils ne comprennent pas ma démarche. Je m’attendais aussi à des réponses comme “ton projet n’est pas clair, demande de l’aide à l’assistante sociale ou au Pôle emploi.”

Ensuite au bout de deux ans, quand ça allait mieux et j’ai intégré « Station F » en tant que start-up manager. Station F est un incubateur à Paris, qui se présente comme l’un des plus grands incubateurs au monde ou d’Europe. À Station F ça bouillonnait, c’était le centre de la start up nation à la française et tout le monde souhaite voir la prochaine pépite française émerger de la bas. Ce qui signifie que le(s) futur émergeront de ce lieu. J’habite en région parisienne à 1h30 de Paris et un jour comme ça dans le train, je me suis dit pourquoi j’ai besoin de faire 1h30 de transport pour entrer dans le futur ? Pourquoi le futur ne pourrait pas commencer directement depuis mon quartier ? C’est la manière officielle dont le début du projet à débuter. Un mélange entre philosophie et pratique entrepreneuriale.

Superrr: Il s’agit donc aussi d’un parcours de renforcement des capacités ?

Makan: Oui oui on peut dire ça. J’aime bien le terme du philosophe Nietzsche. Il parle de volonté de puissance. J’étais à la recherche de puissance mais pas la puissance du peuple, pas la puissance politique, pas la puissance par la force, mais quelque chose d’autre de plus doux qui prennent en compte ma vulnérabilité.

Superrr: Comment la Banlieue du Turfu s’est développé ?

Makan: Ensuite, je me suis dit que pour développer le Banlieue de Turfu j’avais besoin d’une aide spécifique, celle d’un programme qui me permettrait de donner forme à mes idées. Alors, j’ai intégré Time 2 Start, un programme de start-up qui dure 6 mois pour les entrepreneurs des quartiers. Mais ce n’était pas le bon espace pour moi je crois ou je dirais plutôt que la philosophie, la réflexion était pour moi plus important, que de vendre un MVP minimum viable product. Dans le monde des start ups, il faut aller vite, pitcher en 1 minute, définir concrètement les choses. Mais je ne pouvais pas car j’avais une pensée, une vision en germe et non un produit ou un prototype. Donc à la fin du programme, je ne me suis pas découragé, bien au contraire, j’ai fait un prêt étudiant, puis je suis entré en école de design, à Strate, après avoir essuyé deux refus d’autres école de design. La troisième candidature à été la bonne, j’ai eu de la chance.

Pour mon projet de diplôme, je me suis intéressé à la conception du futur dans le quartier. C’est là que je me suis rendu compte que le futur, c’est sortir du quartier. Sortir du quartier est le signe d’une réussite matérielle et symbolique. C’est comme ça qu’on montre qu’on a réussi matériellement et symboliquement aux yeux de la société en sortant du quartier.

Donc ce qui signifie que banlieue x futur est un oxymore, des antagonistes, des opposés. Banlieue x rêve est aussi une autre antagonisme qui structure nos pensées d’humains contemporains. “Pour accomplir mes rêves je dois sortir du quartier.”

J’ai validé mon année en design et ensuite, j’ai rencontré Max Mollon un chercheur et designer qui m’a fait découvrir le design fiction comme méthodologie. Et donc, j’ai abandonné le design thinking parce que le design fiction ça correspondait plus à ce que j’ai cherché initialement avec la banlieue du futur. J’ai travaillé avec Max pendant un an, et en collaboration avec un Microlycée nous avons réalisé des ateliers de design fiction autour de thématique de la banlieue du futur. Les étudiants ont produits des récits

En même temps, j’ai écrit un essai sur la banlieue du turfu. Puis j’ai rencontré Hugo et ensemble nous avons créé 4 ateliers pour prototyper avec des participants la banlieue du turfu dans le jeu Fortnite. Puis un jour Hugo m’a envoyé l’appel à projet de The New New Fellowship. C’était la première fois que je postulais à un appel à projet pour la banlieue du turfu parce que je n’avais pas confiance en moi et que j’en avais marre d’échouer régulièrement.

Superrr: C’est trop intéressant. Cela me fait penser à .. si tu imagines le Banlieue de Turfu, c’est à dire, il y a des banlieues en futur où il n’y a pas. Si c’est l’imagination qu’il n’y a pas de banlieue pas du tout?

Makan: C’est une très bonne question. Moi en tant que designer, je ne me permettrait pas de prendre des décisions pour tous les humains qui habitent en banlieue, mais par contre, je propose une perspective.

Et dans cette vision-là, la première chose, c’est qu’il y a plus dans ma cartographie de séparation entre le centre et la périphérie. C’est la base. Centre et périphérie ça veut dire banlieue et Paris, province et Paris ça veut dire Europe et Afrique ou Asie ça veut dire un quartier américain comme le Bronx et Manhattan par exemple.

Ensuite, il faut savoir que la Terre est une banlieue de la voie lactée, donc tous les terriens sont des banlieusards. Et cette marginalité cosmique n’a pas empêché la vie de proliférer.

Ensuite que la banlieue est née dans le monde, elle est déjà dans le monde, elle n’est pas « hors ». Ce n’est pas à l’intérieur ou à l’extérieur qu’elle est là. À mon avis on ne peut pas dire que Hollywood ou Miami ou Dubaï, “la bas c’est trop bien” et “au quartier c’est pourris.” Ce n’est pas parce qu’un espace est plus doté économiquement qu’il doit se transformer en soleil dans nos esprits. Symboliquement dans l’imaginaire collectif en effet Hollywood c’est mieux que mon quartier mais en réalité les espaces les plus élevés sont les espaces montagneux.

Quand je suis dans la banlieue, je suis dans le cosmos et je m’inscris dans le temps long. Les banlieues françaises n’ont pas plus de 50 ou 60 ans, ce n’est pas la peine de réduire mon existence à un temps si court. Je fais partie de l’espèce humaine, qui existe depuis un certain temps.

Ce n’est pas seulement un changement architectural ou un changement d’architecture que recherche la banlieue du turfu. Non, c’est un changement civilisationnel. A partir du moment où on change les rapports entre le centre et la périphérie, entre les barbares et les civilisés, du coup, le monde change aussi.

Hugo: C’est que l’impression qu’on a eu lors de l’organisation des ateliers: on a l’impression parfois que le fait de travailler sur la Banlieue du turfu pour des gens qui ne sont pas de banlieue — et c’est un peu le positionnement que j’avais peut-être eu au début aussi — consistait à faire en sorte que ce soit “moins mal” en banlieue. C’est améliorer la qualité de vie en banlieue, c’est jamais pour s’inspirer de la banlieue. A moins qu’on ne parle de ce concept flou et un peu limitant de la culture urbaine: de rap, d’art ou le sport, la les gens sont près à s’inspirer. Au début, moi, j’étais un peu sceptique sur le pouvoir de l’imaginaire mais quand on fait face à ce type de raisonnement, on se dit bah ouais, c’est vrai qu’il faut qu’on commence à s’intéresser au sujet de la banlieue comme ayant ses propres Turfus à proposer. C’est plus par des constats, s’écouter les uns les autres et c’est un des éléments qui a été assez intéressant à travailler dans nos ateliers.

Superrr: On a parlé de votre vision de banlieue de Turfu, il y a des visions des jeunes, est-ce qu’il y a des exemples que vous pouvez partager avec moi ?

Makan: Je peux raconter les récits dominants que j’ai rencontré : Le premier récit raconte la banlieue à travers le manque. “On n’a pas ceci, on n’a pas cela. Il nous manque ceci ou il nous manque cela.” C’est un récit pessimiste.

Il y a un second récit qui est un récit qui essaie de répondre à ce pessimisme. Un récit entre guillemets optimiste, qui dit « en banlieue, il y a pas de problème » Les gens sont créatifs, ils sont entrepreneurs ? En réalité pour moi, ce n’est pas un récit, ça. c’est une réaction. La réaction à une mauvaise image de l’environnement.

Et puis, il y a le troisième récit qu’on a déjà abordé c’est le mythe du succès. Pour réussir il faut que je sorte du quartier. C’est une obsession. Ça revient tout le temps comme une obsession dans la bouche des jeunes, des parents, des politiques, des médias, des musiques, des films.

Une fois, au tout début de la banlieue du turfu j’ai fait un atelier avec une classe, en venant en cours les mains vides. J’ai pris un paperboard et j’ai écrit : qu’est ce que la banlieue du turfu pour vous. J’ai dit maintenant, nous allons parler de la banlieue et du futur. C’est quoi pour vous, les jeunes ? Personne n’a su me répondre. Et lorsque quelqu’un m’a répondu, je me rappellerais toujours, (parce que j’avais était très étonné), une étudiante me dit, « c’est un appartement plus grand, une grande maison simplement ». Voilà donc le futur de la banlieue c’est quoi, c’est son opposé : un quartier bourgeois. Le futur de la banlieue était un angle mort de la culture du quartier.

Par exemple, une étudiante est venue en cours attristé. Elle a dit « je ne veux pas travailler, mon copain, m’a quitté. On a dit « bon, on va te donner des aspirations et raconte nous ton expérience. Et comme nous avons proposé des inspirations de la culture africaine et notamment le fétiche. Le groupe d’étudiantes a inventé un récit dans lequel les fétiches étaient devenus une institution. Une autre aussi a imaginé un journal télévisé dans lequel on ne pouvait pas avoir de mauvaise nouvelle. Et un autre étudiant qui a inventé dans sa banlieue un récit fantastique, fantasmagorique, par exemple, qu’il a inventé une monnaie écologique, un Poké Ball. Là-dedans tu mets des plantes qui poussent et après c’est la monnaie. Là aussi, c’était cool. C’était un récit bien, pas trop de technologie parce qu’on a changé la méthodologie, mais c’est plus fantasmagorique. Ça à dire que c’est plus dans la fantasy ce qui était un bon point côté fabulation mais plus difficile si on pense en terme de scénario probable.

Superrr: Hugo, veux-tu nous donner un peu de contexte et d’idées ?

Hugo: Pour remettre un peu en contexte, le projet Banlieue Turfu, avait déjà commencé à se développer sous forme plateforme participative, plateforme d’imaginaires, plateforme pour penser du Turfu alternative. Et quand j’ai découvert ce travail, en fait, je me suis dit que ça serait rigolo de pouvoir le prototyper ou lui donner forme autrement, par exemple en passant par un jeu vidéo comme Fortnite. D’un côté le jeu nous permet de donner une interprétation assez tangible des concepts qui émergent des discussions dans les ateliers et d’un autre, utiliser ce genre de plateforme mondialement connue pour ce genre de création de mondes fictionnels révèle des biais culturels tout aussi intéressants. Et donc, on a fait des ateliers un peu hybrides qui s’inspiraient des deux mondes où la première partie avait un thème comme les liens entre Banlieue Turfu et Mars, ou à quoi ressemblerait une Banlieue du turfu afro-cyber-féministe. On a invité les participants à imaginer ce que ça voulait dire pour eux et ensuite concevoir des micro-récits qu’ils pourraient interpréter dans le jeu vidéo et les construire virtuellement.

Superrr: Interessant.Tu peux nous donner un example?

Hugo: Pour vous donner une idée, on partait de phrases comme “Dans une banlieue alternative et enchantée, les célébrités participent au développement du quartier à travers le kebab symbiotique.” Ou bien “Les décrocheurs scolaires peuvent découvrir d’autres savoir-faire grâce au symbiote qu’ils cultivent. Ils peuvent aussi étudier, travailler quand ils le souhaitent, grâce aux arbres poètes, qui récitent des chansons et autres textes à longueur de journée.” Ce genre de phrase nous permet de capturer une essence abstraite de la Banlieue du turfu qui partait souvent d’un mix de magie et d’hybridation de termes qui nous sont familiers, mais qu’on ne connaissait pas forcément dans ce contexte. Par exemple, le kebab comme lieu privé-public et établissement où plein de gens se retrouvent ou la chicha, qui sont des lieux qui existent, mais en mettant juste l’adjectif symbiotique après — souvent en fonction des discussion qu’on venait d’avoir- ce nom, ca propulse les participants dans un monde alternatif.

Superrr: C’est magnifique. Donc il y a des visions, comme tu as dit, techno-optimiste, utopiste, dystopique aussi et quelque chose entre les deux?

Makan: Dans le quotidien, le récit dystopien est le plus répandu, le récit habituel. Et d’un autre côté tu as le contre-récit, plus optimiste. Et dans les ateliers de design fiction co-créé avec Max, il y avait des récits techno-optimistes ou des récits plutôt fantasmagoriques. Mais c’est normal, finalement créer de nouveaux récits ce n’est pas facile.

Superrr: Merci beaucoup, Makan et Hugo. Et une question à la fin: Quels sont les trois Emojis qui décrivent le mieux votre état émotionnel du moment?

Hugo: 🛠🐙🌿

Makan: 🙏👩‍🚀🧙🏿‍♀️🧝🏽‍♀️