⣠⢀⣀⢀⡀⡀ sofia irene ⠶⠚⣛⣉⠠⠀⣄⣀
⠚based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands
⣄sofiairene at me.com
ig ⣛@persophino
Around the fire
January 2024
From writing my Master thesis, I went down to my utmost interest
and it stayed for good.
I talked about the aesthetics deployed in fashion instances,
enmeshed with the world-building of video games.
Those worlds use motifs about the near-future scenarios,
as a hyperbolized strategy
to capitalize on what we fear will come
when and where, climate crisis is no longer an allegory.
This contortion of a narrative continues to prove true
for these industries
and on this earth.
Is that a depiction of survival?
A lens to see things
closer from the ground.
I set to launch Survie Resources.
An mish to enable my practice,
a platform that can sustain conversations,
between individuals who can bridge real-life problems with actual material
tools and overarching solutions for the debris that comes with climate crisis.
How do we capitalise on rain when its too much?
Is it the wind speed that we ought to dynamize?
Is it the excess of heat that needs transmuting?
Down-sizing,
compact living,
reducing and reusing,
pattern recognising yet altering.
How to counteract monolithic projects such as The Line in Saudi?
Propagate Low Tech Magazine how-to’s.
Adopt the seminal Pattern Language from Christopher Alexander.
Knee-deep into the water like Brogen Berwick’s From ship to shop.
Bring scissors/knife, closed shoes, pen and paper for Gaia’s foraging.
Create intersections from the countryside into the city like Hyperburgers.
Makeshift a smokehouse, grind grains, dry herbs like Elemental Cooking.
To prepare for new patterns of action, reaction,
to counterbalance, or defuse violence,
such as the House of Ukraine in Rotterdam does,
by teaching how to weave camouflage nets.
The frontlines are blurred and borders are shifting. Yet our actions don’t.
Like Alexander’s Pattern Language,
these prescribe a problem,
a pain,
and then offer a solution.
Alexander’s text was published in ’77,
even back then, homogenization and loss of agency was a preoccupation.
In the spirit of creating such resources,
making these accessible to ‘a larger audience’,
to whom whoever wants to grip to self-design over their roof and sustenance,
Survie Resources will create an index on how to enable tools
and access means for survival.
Outta nostalgia, or as an homage to,
the Whole Earth Catalog,
what could these tools mean?
To see the affects of the environment we inhabit, remote or city-like,
and to not see us flee.
The index will put into question what is the ethos of survivalism
in this context, your context,
as of now.
What prevails on the planet from 2020 onwards,
and future-cast for 2030.
Question the doomer.
Co-opt the tools of fashion forecasting,
and the overflowing image-generating of video games.
What pattern can emerge?
The index is the equivalent of gathering around a metaphorical fire pit to exchange and think together how to restore the affects of the collective body and cultivate a resilient one.
The index will contain and is not limited to:
Think-pieces on site-specific bruised locations and how to overcome them
How-to’s & Recipes
Interviews with iconoclast knowledge holders
Praises to the vernacular doing
Common-placing from planetary philosophy to herbal healing
…and well, more
Permit me to continue thinking together about these resources. To develop said index. To give shape to what is to come. Blooming and bursting. The index is not a theoretical claim, but informed by theory in praxis. A pragmatical assertion of what tools and means can bring about. It theorizes agency and signals how to enable it—day in, day out. Modernism as a reaction to WWI, a seismic shift, turn of the century’s second decade. Entering the twenty-twenties of this century, so far, shift-shaped communications, hyper-individualism is peaking and isolation validates autistic behaviors, what Berlant named the good life. How will we look back by looking ahead now, to this decade and not not assume these times as problematic? Survie means sur vie, more to life.This research trajectory should assume a positionality within the cultural sphere, but question its place in the corner known as design. How does survival manifest through objects and actions that not explicitly reference the grip to life yet inherently display preparedness for when things go south? Knowingly addressing the cruel optimism that design presumes, attempting to bypass the misanthropy embedded into these survivalist artifacts and ultimately, to champion kin and devise new patterns to means with no ends—but life.
Around the fire
Raise Your Voice
The walk I walk
Mnemotope 003
Face masks and politics of vulnerability
Published on the extinct Strelka Magazine
Engel
Published in the Dans en Kunst Magazine
Moving in Stasis
Conversation published by Het Nieuwe Instituut
A quien corresponda
Artwork shown at Kirkland Gallery Harvard GSD
Image-making
Survie Resources Assemblage
SR I — California’s red sky
SR II — Various
SR III — Various
SR IV — Will robot soldiers dream of camo?
SR V — Universal Camo Pattern
SR VI — Various
SR VII — Various
SR VIII — Snow Camo