Erehwon: A Digital Platform for Empowering Sociopolitical Interventions in Public Space. In Global Cultures of Contestation, Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity | 2018 | Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
In this chapter we introduce Erewhon, a work-in-progress practice-led research project that aims to create a digital commons space and platform for connecting and supporting communities of people who initiate sociopolitical interventions in public space. The platform consists of an interactive cartography of these types of projects, co-designed through a series of workshops with different communities of interest in a way that offers to their projects different forms of visibility. It also allows the viewer to trace, in the visualization, a project’s progress, its contaminations, size, collaborations, and duration, and its interconnections with the other projects. This chapter describes our theoretical framework, discusses our research and design methodology, and presents and reflects on the outcomes of the practical research.
What are the best Digital Tools to support collaborative Activism in the Public Space? An exploration through Design by Erehwon Project | 2016 | European Alternatives.
In the recent years we experience a spread of sociopolitical interventions by activists, artists and citizens as an attempt to mobilize a movement for community-led political and social change across Europe and beyond, with movements such as Occupy, Teatro Valle occupato, Empros Occupied Theatre, Los indignados, Gezi Park among many other local activities.
Erehwon project was conceptualised to: (1) explore ways to contribute to the empowerment of such movements by providing them with tools for communication and collaboration, avoiding state and corporate control; (2) creating strategies for resilient archiving for better understanding and research enabling effective and long lasting change.
Erehwon: For a Cartography of Change. In Proceedings of Performart | 2014 | Dakam, Istanbul
We initiated a work in progress, collaborative research project, which aimed at creating an interactive real time cartography of sociopolitical performative projects within Europe and beyond. The cartography will be designed as a digital platform for rehearsing new ways of direct democratic practices and experimenting with potential forms of public space transformation that these practices can lead to.
Having worked on the idea and done background research we wrote a paper to outline our goals, our approach and methodology, and a detailed plan about how we would be going about to do this project. The paper was accepted at the 2014 Performart Conference in Istanbul where we presented and discussed our plan in an audience of performance artists, and philosophy scholars. It is available online under a Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License here.
