Johannes Equizi
Keywords: Towardsprimordi
Johannes Equizi (1996) was always fascinated by the act of creating fictional scenarios, from micro-daily habits to worldwide systems. His research interests linger over themes of emancipation, participatory collective processes, storytelling and speculation. Johannes Equizi's practice combines different mediums, from writing over welding to performances and coding but always focused on learning by doing and mutual sharing.
At the moment he is reflecting on what would be the role of a designer in the construction of utopias. Do utopias remain unreachable once envisioned and shared to a public or do they start to hold a potentially real development? Such questions and a continuous interdisciplinary research are guiding and shaping his practice, on the threshold between tangible and speculative.
Graduation Project
Throughout all the centuries, humans developed their communication and technology to express, in various ways, their presence and values on the planet; caves' hand-stencils, shells as primordial spoons, standardized alphabets, machines et cetera. Humans continuously reorganized their existence, habitats and reciprocal power relations. Along such path they reached the model of a dominant capitalistic mass-society. But within this model, are humans still aligned with the radical meaning embedded in their marks, gestures and languages? Does undertaking an exodus from this status quo mean to radicalise their existence by inhabiting life differently? Would humans, by reconnecting with the origin of their presence, embrace new alternative relationships and collective dreams?
I perceive as an urgency turning this mass-society into a mass of decentralized societies, organized as a network of spontaneous collective aggregations. My graduation project, Primordi, is the first chapter of an imaginary society, part of this open network. An attempt to glimpse an alternative base of existence embracing values such as self-sufficiency, open-source, collective joy and emancipation.
Through an eclectic installation of drawings, poems, clothes, models and videos, the habitat of Primordi is revealed: from daily use utensils to prototypes of convivial shelters over values, stories and rituals. Could the Primordi characters be recognized as future nomadic hunter-gatherers? Do they already inhabit the margins of the current surroundings? On the threshold between tangible and speculative, subversive and unifying, futuristic and nostalgic, Primordi intends to be a catalyst vision to trigger collective awareness and imagination; a bridge to question contemporary gestures, words and values towards a “not-yet” other society.
DIARIO D'ESODO - EMANCIPATORY GESTURES OF IMAGINATION
Thesis
Diario d'Esodo (Exodus Diary) is a written analysis upon the contemporary social and spatial tissue and the potentialities contained in the interstices of its mesh. Narrated by the fictional Primordi characters Carola and Pablo, the chapters of this philosophical research-journey move from the capitalistic/authoritarian paradigms of space and behaviours towards the analysis of the state of exception as a possible spatiality for collective emancipation.
This thesis intends to be a theoretical framework to contextualize and develop the Primordi project, an attempt to cross-over theories and visions of thinkers like Foucault, De Cauter, Hakim Bey, Gilles Clément and Colin Ward as a base to critically build alternative scenarios. The last chapters of the journey, but not least as there is no arrival, reveal glimpses of different ways of inhabiting life by enhancing mutual synergy, independence and self-organization; a tangible speculation upon our 'not-yet' present.
click here to read Diario d'Esodo