NON+

This is a collaboration with the Dutch fashion designer and material researcher, Conny Groenewegen, and the Italian designer and material researcher, Maurizio Montalti. NON+ is conceived as an experiment (incubated in the CPT) in academic knowledge production and autonomous art and design practice. Driving this collaborative experiment is the desire to fuse scholarly philosophy with creative practices outside of academe with the goal of designing technicities for philosophical thinking that are engaged in a world racked by crisis. In the end, NON+ weaves together these two modes of research-creation to generate critical and speculative work (art/design/curation) that challenges humans to rethink the relation between technological acceleration and ecological devastation.

The name NON+ derives from the abiding fascination of researches and practitioners to add prefixes to fields they wish to critique, reimagine, or move beyond. In the case of design: anti-design, re-design, un-design, post-design. NON+ is a prefix that can accommodate all forms of negation, refusal, and antagonism. In English, NON+ has the additional advantage of signifying that the group’s work is nonplussed with design as it is currently practiced and imagined.