Militanter Optimismus / Plakativer Aktivismus

Designers are creators of models, prototypes, and propositions [who] occupy a dialectical space between the world that is and the world that can be. Informed by the past and the present, their activities oriented towards the future. They operate in situations that call for interventions, and they have the unique ability to turn these interventions into material and immaterial forms.
(Victor Margolin in “Design, the Future and the Human Spirit“, 2007)

The exhibition MILITANT OPTIMISM / BOLD ACTIVISM. Global Design Politics explores design within its political and social dimensions. If activist interventions deploy strategies of irony, poetry, subversion and provocation, then words, symbols, signs and objects turn into powerful agents of socio-political action. By compiling historical as well as recent design positions of the past fifty years the implications of design as radical practice to discuss global discourses will be investigated. Thus current conditions will be negotiated critically, alternatives will be given rise to, fractures created and new visions developed.
With: Atelier Populaire (FR), Global Tools (IT), Institute for Applied Autonomy (USA), Superflux (UK/IND), Tactical Technology Collective (D), Ruben Pater (NL), Ayzit Bostan (D), Maxivive (NG), Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura/ Güerxs + NAAFI / ORU + ASCO (MEX), Silvia Knüppel (D)
Curated by: Alexandra Weigand assisted by Mareike Schwarz