Exhibition
Remedy brings together a collection of unfolding exploratory treatments responding to the over-emphasis on techno-solutionism in the design of care. Through a series of works and workshops, the exhibition opens up questions about the underlying assumptions of care technologies and the neglected relations in present-day care practices.

What are the implications of current care technologies? How can we reimagine the structures of care in society? This participatory exhibition is an open invitation for collective inquiry and imagination into the messy realities and plural practices of taking care of ourselves, each other and our environment.

Happenings

Opening
Monday, April 4th 17.00-20.00 with food, drinks, and exhibitor introductions (no pre-registration required)

Workshops
Registration is required for all workshops by March 31st. All morning workshops are followed by a shared lunch.

• Caring in Tensions Dialogue - Monday, April 4th, 9.00-12.00 
• Recipes for Menstrual Pads - Tuesday, April 5th, 9.00-12.00
• Quilting Care Patterns - Wednesday, April 6th, 9.00-12.00

Guided Tours
Anyone is welcome to join a guided exhibition tour hosted by the designers. There are limited spaces available so to guarantee a spot please register in advance.

• Guided exhibition tour - Tuesday, April 5th, 15.00-16.00
• Guided exhibition tour - Wednesday, April 6th, 16.00-17.00
• Guided exhibition tour - Thursday, April 7th, 15.00-16.00

To join any of these happenings register at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScGGaN2ALarmbn5ir0YLXsTxbn0rT0G...

If you are not able to access the Google Form, please email us at remedy@aho.no with the happening you would like to participate in.

If you need accommodation to participate or have any questions about the exhibit, you can get in touch with the organizers by emailing remedy@aho.no.


Exhibited Projects

Biomenstrual 
Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard & Nadia Campo Woytuk

The current landscape of disposable menstrual products are both harmful to menstruating humans and the environment due to their high content of plastics, often designed to conceal menstruation. What if menstrual care products were designed in ways where caring for one’s menstrual health would also become an environmentally nourishing practice? Biomenstrual is a collection of biomaterial experiments, rituals, and recipes for imagining, designing and practicing sustainable menstrual care beyond the human body. Menstrual blood is not a waste or something to hide away. Rather it is a fertile liquid filled with nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, which are important nutrients for plants and in soil and found in common fertilizers. With the idea of making biodegradable menstrual pads, Biomenstrual imagines a cyclical process where materials for menstrual care products are gathered in local ecologies, assembled into pads, used, and composted together with the body’s materials (menstrual blood, mucus and tissue). https://biomenstrual.com/ 

Recipes for Menstrual Pads Workshop - Tuesday 5 April 9-12
Marie Louise will facilitate a design workshop where we will experiment with making biodegradable menstrual pads, tampons, and cups. The goal is not to make functional menstrual hygiene products, but to explore how biodesign with gluten, moss and seaweed would change our relation to the body and environment. 

Caring in Tensions
Shivani Prakash

Care is something “people shape, invent and adapt, time and again, in everyday practices” – Anne Marie Mol
 
This exhibition takes time to explore the entangled contradictions and multiplicities of meanings in the digitalisation of care services. When care is designed to be extended from one context to another, it leads to the emergent shaping of different existing practices which in turn design us back. In particular, Caring in Tensions explores remote-care services in collaboration with Larvik Municipality. The exhibition takes time to zoom in on tensions amid experiences of using remote care services, where healthcare providers offer in-home support, guidance and monitoring to patients in their homes.
 
Caring in Tensions dialogue - Monday 4 April 9-12
In this dialogue you are invited to engage in three core tensions which emerged from a study of remote-care services. Through a facilitated dialogue, participants will be supported to materially experience the tensions through artefacts, assemblies and assemblages which constitute remote-care services today. Participants are encouraged to bring forth their lived experiences to enrich the dialogue and are invited to begin caring by keeping the tensions alive in their own work within healthcare.


Care Patterns
Josina Vink

Care Patterns is a participatory quilting project that explores the collective re/making of the social fabric of care in communities. It is a joint speculation that embraces radical openness with respect to the structures of kinship and their dynamically reconfiguring im/possibilities. Demonstrating the plurality of alternatives to dominant, normative structures of care, this exhibit builds a care pattern library that uses quilted compositions as metaphors for social structures. 

In contrast to dominant care patterns frequently reproduced in care design, such as the “nuclear family” or “social safety net”, this project materializes a plurality of possible alternative patterns, such as “chosen family” from queer theory, “uncommons” from Indigenous cosmopolitics and other patterns lingering in the collective imaginations of communities. In doing so, it presents a plethora of patterns that open up for a fundamental reshaping of our current care practices.

Quilting together the co-existence of divergent realities of dis/connection, this project grapples with questions of response-ability, exclusion and entanglement amid the cutting a/part and weaving together of emergent patternings. Through a process of improv quilting, you are invited to join into the snipping, stitching and splicing of this collective refuturing of caring intra-actions.

Quilting Care Patterns - Wednesday 6 April 9-12
This hands-on improv quilting workshop will engage participants in composing and sewing together patterns that materialize alternative social structures for caring communities. Through a facilitated materializing process of reflecting on dominant care patterns and exploring alternatives, participants will gain knowledge about the role of social structures in care design and actively contribute to the development of the care pattern library. To engage in this exploratory making process, no previous experience of quilting or sewing is required.

About the Exhibitors
The exhibition is organized by a collective of designers and researchers who explore neglected care relations. The organizers are based out of the Institute of Design at AHO and developed the exhibited projects in collaboration with Larvik Municipality and Nadia Campo Woytuk, with support from the Center for Connected Care (C3).