I
work as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Graphic Design at Kingston School of Art (KSA) and at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design (CSM). At KSA, I am part of the Level 6 (final year) team, where I teach graphic design. At CSM, I work as a Context Tutor for the unit Communities of Practice, helping students develop their writing and critical reports.
My research and independent practice focus on the poetic, political, and practical dimensions of production, reproduction, and cooperation. For this, I draw from marxian feminist perspective on post-work and social reproduction as well as transfeminist theories and practices.
Since 2022, I have pursued my interest in language, performance, and text activation through the workshop series DRAMA, co-developed with John Philip Sage. You can find out more about this project here.
As a development of this practice, John and I developed the module Somatic Publishing: a five-week project for Level 6 students of the BA in Graphic Design at KSA. Over the course of five weeks, we explore the relationship between language, publishing, and design through the lenses of interpretation and performance, considering their effects as well as how they can act as methods.
My approach to and position towards teaching and education have been shaped by my experience as a member of the collective Evening Class, an experiment in self-organized education active since January 2016. Evening Class emerged in response to various desires and necessities arising from the complexities of navigating precarious work within the creative industries. This included the need to establish networks of support and care outside institutional channels that we couldn’t, or refused to, access, and an interest in developing and engaging with critical discussions on design practice that were often paywalled by institutions or tuition fees.
Evening Class provided a space to cultivate common interests, develop research, and collectively decide the class’s program. Our program included public workshops, talks and debates, reading groups, radio broadcasting, performances, walks, and publishing.
While I now teach within institutional contexts, self-organization and autonomous learning remain central to my research and practice. I strive to incorporate these principles into my teaching and design practice, as well as employing them in my work with DRAMA and the Autocoscienza Writing Group.
Since 2022 I am also working and engaging with feminist practices of embodied and affective writing as a member of the collective Autocoscienza Writing Group. Our London-based collective works with and promotes the work of Italian feminist and writer Lea Melandri.
Our group is intergenerational and explores experiential writing as a practice of autocoscienza (consciousness raising) using group readings and writing as a tool for collective sharing, analysis and care. Developed by Melandri in 1990s scrittura di esperienza (experiential writing) focuses on the off-topic, the fragment, the embodied, the non-binary and the affective as feminist methods to deconstruct dominant forms of language and knowledge production.
Aligned with trans-feminist and queer politics and practices, the group operates between Italian and English language, alongside different art forms. The group was established in May 2022 by Lucia Farinati and Sara Paiola together with myself, Eleonora Bottini, Valentina Caivano, Filomena Campus, Elisa Fontana, Manuela Galetto e Sara Ortolani.