• About
    • Imagine Otherwise →

    Imagining Otherwise encompasses current and past projects at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, and strives toward socially transformative educational and design practices and more equitable futures.

    The project started in October 2018, against the backdrop of massive feminist mobilizations, such as NiUnaMenos, Women's March, and Feminist Strike; and the rising demands from the students for design education that counters patriarchal-colonial narratives. Inspired by the research and activism of Palestinian design educator and researcher Danah Abdulla, we joined forces to start imagining design otherwise—a practice that is critical, situated, reflexive, and socially transformative.

    Believing in the transformative potential of design and echoing Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar's words, we began asking ourselves: “How can design be infused with a more explicit sense of politics?” How can we participate in the recentering of design education by specifically situating it in relation to structures of inequality, sexism, racism, and colonialism? And how can we disrupt hegemonic epistemologies, ontologies, and systems from within a Eurocentric institution, and strive toward more equitable, pluralistic futures?

    On this website, you can delve into different projects realized since 2018. They do not attempt to answer the aforementioned questions, nor to provide universally replicable solutions. Instead, they invite you to open your mind to alternatives, and to open up spaces of potential for change—as expressed by feminist activist and writer bell hooks: “a space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible.”

    Team
    Co-directors: Mayar El-Bakry, Maya Ober and Laura Pregger

    Imagining Otherwise was co-conceived by Maya Ober and Laura Pregger. In 2019, Mayar El-Bakry joined the team to co-curate Educating Otherwise, a continuing education program.




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    MAKING SPACE: Reimagining Practices & Collective Dreaming


    Intersectional Lab in Arts and Design at the HGK FHNW: Exhibition - Public moment of Mediation Programming

    Mediation →


    Public Engagement →

    Understanding design as a human intervention into the world that could be capable of actively shaping it regardless of its original intentions holds powerful potential imbued with the transformative aspiration of change — a promise. Feminisms also constitute a zone of promises, embodying a lifelong commitment to the struggle for change. To practice feminism entails putting this promise in motion, as suggested by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, resisting, repeating continuously, making space, organizing, activating, and often failing.

    In the context of this exhibition, making space means the deliberate act of creating room —physically, metaphorically, and affectively. It involves allocating spaces for reimagining artistic, designerly, and institutional practices, centering and amplifying voices, ideas, and ways of making beyond the prevailing norms. The showcased practices aim to fuel ongoing discussions on how art and design are conceptualized, taught, learned, organized, and practiced within institutional boundaries. They prompt reflection on the type of institution we aspire to build and inhabit — one committed to the promise of a “better life in an unjust and unequal world,” fostering more equitable relationships, providing support for marginalized people, and challenging entrenched histories that resemble impenetrable walls, echoing Ahmed’s words.

    This collective dreaming serves as both a methodology and an action — an active refusal to accept the status quo and an engagement in imagining otherwise, fostering a desire for them to become possible realities—to address, nurture, and act upon. Lastly, dreaming encapsulates a convergence of artistic, designerly, educational, pedagogical, and institutional efforts undertaken by students, invited guests, lecturers, and the school’s director. The presented works, dreams, syllabi, and ideas offer a polyvocal but not exhaustive representation of practices emerging during the Intersectional Lab’s activities from September 2022 to April 2024, with the hope that these practices will serve as conduits for transformative possibilities.



    Curation →

    Participating Students:
    Ambre Bork
    Anouchka Enzinga & Jean Küchenhoff
    Gabi Soliman
    Hannah Grenacher
    Jeanne Rosset
    Lizz Keller
    Luzia Maureen Graf
    Lynne Kopp
    Malena Schmid
    Nico Jenni
    Nisha Greisser & Lenn Siegenthaler
    Marina Klein-Hietpas & Julia Vegh & Seraina Keller
    Anna Azzola & Idil Mercan

    CONTENT NOTES:

    This exhibition describes and problematizes violence and discrimination based on age, disability, gender, origin, race, and/or sexual orientation.

    Intersectional Lab in Arts and Design:

    Project Lead: Claudia Perren
    Institutional Program: Laura Pregger
    Education Program: Maya Ober
    Mediation Program: Mayar El Bakry

    Advisory Board:
    Griselda Flesler
    Hazbi Avdiji
    Nina Mühlemann
    Rahel El-Maawi

    Visual Identity and Graphic Design
    Korina Gallika

    Art Direction and Graphic Design:
    Mayar El Bakry

    Thank you:
    Alecs Recher, Chris Heer, Christine Kaufmann, Dana Abdulla, Dorothée King,
    Fleur Weibel , Gabriela Aquije Zegarra, Helen Pritchard, Kamran Behrouz, Lena Huber, Linda Ludwig, Nicolaj van der Meulen, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sara Ahmed, Seline Reinhardt, Simone Marie, Stefanie Rohrer, Sylvia Sobottka, Sophie Voegle, Yvonne Schmidt
    Front Desk and Services Team at the HGK

    Funded by the p-7 swiss universities grant
    Supported by the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel

    Mediation →