S.U.R.’s Portfolio
Intento 1.0: A Decolonial Attempt
November 2023Aalto University
Project page
Intento 1.0 was an exhibition of a living archive based on research initiatives engaging with Latin American contexts present at Aalto University, organized and produced by S.U.R.
The exhibition displayed a curated collection of Master's and PhD’s theses, mainly from Aalto Arts, that engaged with specific territories and practices derived from Latin America. The constellation of works embraced the details, thoughts, memories, and experiences that are entangled with specific geocultural localities. They were mapped into three categories, Territory, Familiarity, and Making, which provided a framework to observe and recognise potential decolonial forces latent in the works. Through creating a dialogue among these various possible ways of doing and thinking, we aimed at raising value to alternative attitudes towards knowledge production systems.
The works were presented on a wooden and cotton structure co-created with You Tell Me Collective, a group of students and young architects based in Finland who promote building through peer learning and activism. The structure, called “casita” (little house) was created to be easily assembled and disassembled, move, and adapt to different locations.
Intento 1.0 also consisted of accompanying events. Water poems and Liquid layouts workshop: Part 2, held by Kollektiivi in collaboration with Debt for Climate Finland, was a water-inspired workshop around reflecting about our relationship with water, writing poems, and visually explore how to communicate with a more critical perspective. A live panel of the podcast Diseño y diáspora hosted by Dr. Mariana Salgado, exploring the challenges, possibilities, and implications of incorporating decolonial approaches into sustainability discourses and Finnish Design education. Finally, a closing party organised together with Latin American Film Festival in Finland, Cinemaissí, showcasing dj’s playing mainly Latin American rhythms.
Collaborators
Cinemaissí: Diego Ginartes, Lois Arma / Debt for Climate Finland: Upu Laukkanen, Taru, Pargol, Amjad / Diseño y Diáspora: Mariana Salgado / Edible Landscapes: Alejandra Alarcón / Kollektiivi: Adelaida Ávila, Milja Komulainen, Hau Lok Lo / Muchachos Bar / You Tell Me Collective: Seela Pentikäinen and Siiri Hänninen
Crafting the Beast
Workshop and interventionMarch 2022
Aalto University
During the Stop Cutting Arts protest at Aalto University, we invited fellow students to join us to collectively craft a beast through textiles and sewing. In the context of a global tendency of neoliberal approaches towards education, we wished to highlight the importance of defending those spaces in which other forms are cultivated. The beast is the figure that allows us to embody and explore otherness.
Through the actions of the collective body, and through threads, needles and textiles we build the beast. The assembly of the uncomfortable and the knitting of the terrifying allows us to reflect. Together we ask, how can the University move away from its normative position and rather engage with decolonial transformations?
Extract from our reflection text: “If on the one hand there is the human or even the superhuman, God, the State, masculinity, the North, the white, the heterosexual subject, the civilized and the progress, on the other there is the beast, which is considered as animality, nature, femininity, the South, the slave, the non-white subject, the abnormal, the underdeveloped and the barbaric. But the beast does not seek to be accepted or recognized. On the contrary, they keep on walking along the marshy margins, entangling themselves with alternative ecosystems. And by this way, the beast is gestating, perhaps with other creatures, new ways of inhabiting the world.”
El agua vale más que el oro/Water is worth more than gold
Publication and performanceJune 2023
Debt X Climate
For this zine, S.U.R. collaborated with our friend Annabella Cajas from San Juan, Argentina, who shared the story of how her hometown was devastated by mining. What began with promises of jobs and prosperity ended in cyanide spills, environmental destruction, and widespread poverty. The city of Jáchal, with 25,000 inhabitants, sits downstream from the mega-project, and has lost much of its farming livelihood, while only a handful of locals work in the mines.
The zine was designed to reflect the lure of gold through golden paper and folding, and it has been distributed at climate protests and gatherings, as well as performed publicly by S.U.R. members.
About Collaborator
S.U.R. is one of the co-starters of Debt for Climate Finland. Debt For Climate is a global movement that seeks to recognise the unequal responsibility towards the climate crisis that exists between the Global North and the Global South. www.debtforclimate.org/
Islands of Kinship
WorkshopMarch 2022
Islands of Kinship
Climate Justice in Art Institutions: How to Infiltrate ⤵︎ was a hands-on workshop exploring how we might smuggle climate justice into the structures of Art institutions. Together with participants, we imagined infiltration strategies inspired by natural entities like fruit flies, polypores, lupine, termites, and siphonophores. Using clay, yarn, crayons, and other simple craft materials, we prototyped these ideas in tactile ways—treating making as a method for thinking. Through group exercises, drawing, and play, we collectively reimagined what institutional change could look like, mixing ecological metaphors with practical strategies for action.
About Collaborator
Islands of Kinship interconnects and transforms the practical functioning of six mid-scale visual art institutions across diverse European regions (Prague, Bratislava, Bitola/Skopje, Cologne, Helsinki, Riga) in an innovative collaboration model addressing issues of inclusion, kinship and togetherness, democratic exchange and the ethics, emotions and practical solutions for environment-friendly institutional operation. islandsofkinship.org
Intento 2.0: The Decolonization of Design
November 2024Aalto University
Project page
In 2024 S.U.R. hosted Intento 2.0: The Decolonization of Design, a three-day seminar and panel discussion exploring the intersections of Visual Art, education, colonial legacies, and environmental justice, through a critical and pedagogical lens. The event was an open, porous and inclusive space of reflection for the co-construction of knowledge.
Held at Aalto University, the seminar counted with the participation of Fabián Villegas from Contranarrativas, an anti-colonial visual education collective based in Mexico and the Caribbean. Each session was centered around one of three axes: Decolonization and Decanonization of Design, This Was Designed on Stolen Land, and Sustainability for Whom? The discussions addressed topics such as challenging the myth of visual culture as neutral or apolitical and how to create counternarratives that challenge the dominant paradigms; the notion of resources and how “sustainability”—when rooted in extractivist and anthropocentric models—fails to be truly anti-colonial or anti-racist; and the role of the artist/practitioner in climate justice, exploring frameworks that are reparative, redistributive, and rooted in non-Western epistemologies.
Each session concluded with a hands-on workshop aimed at processing and reflecting on the exchanges of the day. We collectively created an Extended Glossary, that explored alternative ways of imagining and defining relevant notions of the seminar through craft and unexpected materialities. The seminar culminated in an open panel discussion, offering space for dialogue, connection, and synthesis of the week’s provocations between practitioners, students, researchers, and teachers. An open collaborative bibliography, that continues to grow, was created and shared with all the participants.