Widerständige Handarbeit

At the symposium ‘Resistant Handicraft’ on 4 December, HyperWerk invites activist designers to engage in a dialogue about resistant praxis and strategy. In diverse practices of caring, diligent work, we seek solidarity-based, life-affirming responses to the political and ecological threats of our time. The invited projects hack authoritarian institutions, document police violence, make soil-related practices audible, conduct research with local communities against ecocide, and embody ancestral knowledge in handicrafts.

The annual theme ‘Resistant Handicraft’, collectively developed by students of the BA Process Design at HyperWerk, highlights the diversity of partly inconspicuous, craft-based, creative and collaborative practices that resist authoritarian tendencies and ecological collapse. In radical solidarity and joyfully anti-fascist, we ask: Where can we put our hands to work collectively to fight for a future worth living?

10:30Lecture

FloodNet Echo: A Networked Gesture of Resistance
Carmin Karasic

What happens when the echo of an early web protest questions what resistance feels like today? FloodNet Echo revisits FloodNet, the 1990s online protests by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The lecture combines storytelling, media fragments, and interactivity to reactivate early web based civil disobedience. It asks how intention survives automation and what resistance means today, when activism meets automated social media systems designed to deflect it. FloodNet Echo connects pioneering hacktivism to the present, showing how even small, intentional digital actions can still hold power, purpose, and presence.

Carmin Karasic (USA/NL) is a multimedia artist and learning architect whose work bridges digital activism, technology, and adult learning. A founding member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, creators of FloodNet and pioneers of electronic civil disobedience, she explores how art and code can challenge systems of power while fostering critical digital literacy.

11:10Lecture

Fugitive Resistant Handcrafts versus the State, and versus Empire
Tobéchukwu Onwukeme

A new dawn of technological asymmetry between the “state” and its people has befallen empire; from oil/mineral extraction to policing tactics; abuse of power comes as no surprise at the hands of state apparatus. However, within the new “black box” of the state apparatus lies new “intelligent” technologies:communication surveillance mechanisms, hyper-resolute facial recognition systems, precision weapons manufacturing andtools of extraction. This lecture examines critical methods to interrogate what constitutes the technological black box. Can we envision a set of “Counter Operative Measures” enhanced by Fugitive Resistant Handcrafts?

Tobéchukwu Onwukeme is a Researcher, and Computational Designer at Forensic Architecture, developing methods in Spatial Reconstruction, and Computional Acoustics.

12:05Lecture

Investigating violence and its structural conditions
Border Forensics with Elio Panese and Stanislas Michel

Border Forensics is an agency developing methods of spatial and visual analysis to investigate practices of border violence, wherever it occurs. In this talk we present a recent investigation on the death of Roger Nzoy Wilhelm, reflecting on the violent policing of the boundary of race and the way it materialises within societies. Border Forensics’ counter-forensics approach is situated at the intersection of human rights work, research, technologies, arts and architecture. Its work supports struggles for truth and justice and opposes State institutions’ opacity and struggle for truth and justice.

Stanislas Michel is a researcher at Border Forensics. His work focuses on developing statistical and spatial counter-tactics to document and challenge different forms of violence at borders.

Elio Panese is a researcher at Border Forensics focusing on police violence and forms of violence experienced within the Swiss Asylum Dispositif.

https://www.borderforensics.org/

14:45Audio Performance

Soilbased practices
Timon Nils Essoungou Bony Malong

This sound collage assembles archival materials and recordings gathered across the streets, fields, and dancefloors. The piece traces the layers of land and life: textures of soil underfoot, communal rhythms of shared spaces, and vibrations of environments shaped by labor, movement, and resistance. The soundcollage becomes a terrain of its own—one where the politics of land use, the intimacy of cultivation, and the echoes of collective struggle meet. It listens to how land carries memory and how communities cultivate resilience.

Timon Nils Essoungou Bony Malong is an organic farmer. His fields of interest can be summarized within the term of soil-based practices. The term soil-based practices encompasses all activities related to the soil, the land, and its use and position. This includes farming as one of these activities, but also collective organization against imperialist land grabs, the occupation and struggle for spaces, redistribution/mutual aid, seed banks and sustainable food production.

15:00Lecture

Rehearsal for surviving moves – a (re)learning of ancestral olive farming in Kabylia
Yamina Sam

This presentation is dedicated to the conditions and possibilities of indigenous farming and crafting practices, in the context of olive cultivation in Kabylia (Algeria). After opening with a short introduction on resisting olive farming and crafting practices in their social, environmental and political dimensions, it presents research tools for reclaiming and passing down these knowledge and crafting practices across spaces and generations. Mapping, drawing and reenactment, will be presented as ways of rehearsing and embodying ancestral transmission processes as resistant handcraft.

Yamina Sam is a teaching assistant and PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Geneva (UNIGE). Her fields of interest include decolonial epistemologies, political ecology and radical cartography. Her doctoral thesis examines colonial ecocide and the relations between human beings and olive trees in the Mediterranean basin.

15:55Lecture

Design in Craft, Traditions and Memories
Cherry-Ann Morgan

This lecture explores the role of design in craft as a vessel for tradition and memory, examining how material culture preserves and reinterprets heritage. Through the case study of artisanal practices in Trinidad Carnival we will uncover how craft embodies ancestral knowledge, identities, and evolving cultural narratives. The discussion will highlight the tension between preservation and innovation, and authenticity and representation with traditional techniques to create new meanings. By bridging past and present, craft-based design fosters continuity, adaptation, and storytelling, ensuring that cultural memories remain dynamic and relevant in an ever-changing world.

Cherry-Ann Morgan is a pan-African hybrid ethnographic creator based in Zurich, her practice combines research, artistic inquiry and storytelling traditions through a Black feminist and decolonial lens with a focus on intersections of culture, post- and decoloniality, the pluriverse and creolization.

https://sliceofcherrypye.xyz