This summer, Assistant Professor Elpitha Tsoutsounakis presented her design research practice in a film created for the 2021 Pivot Conference of the Design Research Society.

Unknown Prospect is an assemblage and collaboration with Ochre that responds to extractive industry. I am exploring methods of design in relation with the more-than-human as an alternative to design research and practices that serve infinite production and capitalist culture. Ochres are not only mineral pigment, but terrestrial beings that have an ancient relationship with human culture. I enlist these geological interlocutors in creative work and printmaking to make drawings, maps, and books that extend beyond the colonial record. Ochre not only makes color material, it activates its own agency in world-making. It realizes the desert as more than the colonial narrative of barren, criminal wasteland or public commodity.""

Elpitha is currently working on a digital Ochre archive hosted by the Marriott Library on the omekaS platform. It will launch in the Spring semester in conjunction with an exhibit at the Finch Lane Gallery in January 2022."

For more Information contact: elpitha@design.utah.edu