Messy Matters Research Exhibition

Collaborative contribution from Laura Winge, Lene Hald and Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard at the Messy Matters’ Exhibition, at the PhD Course Messy Matters 2016 at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Campus Karlshamn, Sweden. Together we developed the ‘Interactive Manifesto for Polite Visiting’, tested response-ability with Cat’s Cradle (‘A Game of Cat’s Cradle’ is a title from Haraway) and Louise designed the ‘Escape Button’ to leave the game if you did not fit.
During the last years, feminist research has been exploring and developing spaces for matter/materiality. A whole new vocabulary is needed to explore, think, and write about heterogeneous material-discursive practices:
“Messy matters course provided space for playful material explorations of texts and thoughts of contemporary feminist technoscience. We are not looking for answers or definitions, we are eager to do hands on work with theoretical concepts. We are going to diffract them together with textiles, knitting, embroidery, microelectronics, wood, water from the Baltic Sea, pieces of metal, algorithms, photos etc as some suggestions for material explorations.”

INTERACTIVE MANIFESTO FOR POLITE VISITING
Take your pencil, please interact with us:
1. Be patient
2. There are always possibilities
3. Be open but critical
4. ‘Know’ why you want to visit
5. Be attentive to your hosts
6. Have time
7. Be curious, be creative…
8. Play…
9. ‘Un-know’ why you are visiting
10. Re-visit (when/if needed)
11. Participate, use yourself
12. Be intuitive, creative and anthropological
13. ‘Design-Play’
14.
etc…