Feifei Zhou Presents Between Land & Water | IN FOCUS: RESEARCH

The World Around & Future Observatory at the Design Museum present IN FOCUS:RESEARCH.
In our latest video from In Focus: Research, Feifei Zhou guides us through the deep, fascinating detail of her illustrations in a tour of her ongoing research. Watch it now via the link in bio!
Through visual analysis, Zhou aims to synthesise understandings of coastal infrastructures through the local stories and more-than-human narratives adapting to them. In this aim, research in the field is essential to her practice. “What we learn from our collective experiences,” Zhou tells us, is that there is a real “need for the exchange of knowledge, perspectives and skill sets.”
Sited in contexts across Southeast Asia, Zhou has based her research where humans have intervened in absorbent, constantly-changing coastal landscapes to draw a solid line between land and sea, using sea walls, dredging and land reclamation projects: what Zhou calls “coastal hardenings.”
The imbalanced, wide-ranging impacts of these top-down developments-on regional water systems, amphibious ecologies, and the indigenous communities who rely on them-have drawn the attention of chemists, anthropologists, and environmentalists. But as Zhou emphasises in her practice, research is most powerful when approached as a “transdisciplinary and collaborative effort.”
And as this exchange informs her artistic practice, as Zhou draws, she finds interspecies, cross-disciplinary connections that steer the research in unmapped, novel directions. Drawing allows the research to remain open-ended: to constantly evolve, expanding to understand and represent the world in all its interrelatedness.
Zhou’s presentation shows us that the uneven developments of the Anthropocene are writing collective histories. To understand it deeply, knowledge-sharing and collaboration are essential; and there is a space where all of us can have an impact. Watch her speak at In Focus: Research, co-presented with Future Observatory at @designmuseum, on The World Around KZbin channel.
Program for the full event available to download at theworldaround...
This presentation has been edited and was part of In Focus: Research, presented by The World Around and Future Observatory at the Design Museum in London on Saturday, March 16, 2024. The event was hosted in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) - part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) - and The World Around Global Cultural Partner Fondation Cartier
To find out more about The World Around's programming or to get in touch, visit www.theworldar...
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