In five short presentations, this session explores technologies as reciprocal, lived practices that center care, community, and embodiment.
Broadening what is dominantly considered technology, the presented projects reimagine metaphor in medicine, trace informal trans care networks, dive into Inca food-related wisdom, experiment with embodied listening, and explore West African divination. They move beyond machinery systems and automation and instead explore practices and ways of knowing that build autonomy, collective ownership, and meaningful connection.
The projects by the Unwired Currents fellows Lindsey Allen, Sandra Cane, Juan Fortun, Cyan Huescar, and Mahoutondji Kinmagbo bring together anthropological methodologies, ancestral cosmologies, and speculative world-building, foregrounding co-creation and situated knowledge through workshops, conversational inquiry, and lived experience. They explore speculative storytelling, listening prompts, and experimental publishing to share how community-based methods open space for plural practices.
Event language: English with close-captions.
REGISTER HEREMore Devices, More Words, More Transformations: Imagining New Possibilities for Pain Through Metaphor
Although metaphors are often dismissed as literary flourish, they are pervasive in medicine, particularly when describing, measuring, and classifying pain. These metaphors are often mechanistic and, overwhelmingly, negative. Through journeys into memoirs of pain, the doctor’s office, and otherworldly alien landscapes, informed by collaborative workshops, this research asks whether metaphor can be reclaimed by those in pain as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in.
Lindsey Allen (she/they) is a researcher, writer, and designer based in Bristol, UK. She writes in the intersections of care, time, disability, and the environment, with a focus on creative non-fiction and the essay form. She has been published in Sick Magazine and through Sticky Fingers Publishing, as well as through various online publications. In her broader creative practice, she creates socially engaged, often participatory work, utilizing facilitation and creative workshops that focus on employing caring methodologies. All her work is grounded in anthropological methods, aiming to explore how people understand the world they live in, and their hopes and imaginaries around how this world could be.
A Softly Humming Defiance: Strategies of Trans Care in DIY Hormone Therapy
The project traces how DIY HRT (Do-it-yourself Hormone Replacement Therapy) emerges as a lifeline for transfeminine people navigating Italy’s hostile medical and political landscape. Blending personal narrative with social analysis, it shows how self-administered hormones become an everyday technology of autonomy, mutual aid, and harm reduction. Through informal networks, shared knowledge, and collective care, trans communities build alternative infrastructures where institutions fail. DIY HRT appears not as reckless defiance but as necessary survival work shaped by inequality, trust, and embodied expertise. The piece argues that these practices form a quietly revolutionary ethics—one that keeps people alive and imagines liberated futures.
Sandra Cane (she/they) is a writer and independent researcher based in Italy. Her work reflects on the material connections between body and writing and on queer, anti-normative, and decolonial cultural practices. She writes for magazines and digital platforms such as Arabpop, Flash Art, Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, Il Tascabile, Lucy. Sulla cultura, Not – NERO on Theory, Palestine Square, and has written for Collana Altera and Tamu-Tangerine Edizioni. She published Grammatica della frammentazione (Einaudi, 2023) and Trans. Una poetica del paradosso per la collanna (Nero Editions, 2026). She collaborates on performance projects, publications, and talks with collectives, independent spaces, and institutions. She is a member of Bagnomaria, a trans-collective space in Milan.
Talking with Mayor Ciro
Talking with Mayor Ciro is an interactive experience that invites us into the symbolic universe of the Yanakuna community in southern Colombia—an intimate encounter with a cosmology that breathes and transforms. Through fragments of conversation with Mayor Ciro, knowledge keeper and guardian of his people’s memory, the work weaves together symbols, spiritual spaces, food-related wisdom, and traditional medicine practices reclaimed through their revitalization of Incaic traditions. At its heart emerges the Chakana, rediscovered through the community’s pedagogical and spiritual research—a living form of knowledge. Venturing into speculation, the work proposes the Chakana as a departure point for conceiving technology through other cosmologies, opening paths toward techno-diversity.
Juan Fortun (he/him) is a Colombian transdisciplinary designer and researcher based in Switzerland. His practice centers on digital commoning, integrating critical media theory and pluriversal design philosophies to explore technological interdependencies and socio-technical justice. His work materializes through design artifacts that serve as collective thinking tools, interactive installations, critical technology workshops, and experimental publishing practices. He employs Do-It-Together (DIT) and Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) methodologies to develop action-based collective research. He holds a Ph.D. from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and HEAD Geneva, Switzerland, with a thesis titled “Designing for Decentralization: Ways of Connecting.”
Ecotones of Listening: Tryouts of Middle Voice Listening
Ecotones of Listening explores listening as a relational practice shaped by bodies, environments, and devices. Drawing on the notions of situated listening and contemporary dancer Emma Bigé’s concept of the middle voice, it proposes listening as something we do with, rather than to, the world; as an embodied and reciprocal process in which listener and listened-to co-constitute one another. Through practice-based accounts involving contact microphones and surface listening, the project examines how devices become active participants within this threshold, challenging the idea that they are merely neutral mediators. As part of the research, Cyan developed a series of listening scores that offer direct experience.
Cyan Huescar (she/them) is an artist based in Geneva, Switzerland. Their practice unfolds at the intersection of performing arts, immersive installation, sound design, dance, and live action role playing (LARP) design. They work across disciplines to create spaces where different realities can coexist, overlap, and contradict each other. In her artistic research, Cyan is drawn to thresholds: between presence and absence, human and non-human, grieving and transitioning. She often works with found materials, archives, and already existing environments to explore what resists narration or refuses representation. Through this process, she seeks to use softness as a form of resistance to address topics such as grief, dissociation, environment, and care.
Fá Divination as a Practice of Listening and Meaning-Making
The Fá divination of the West African Fon people is a participatory way of knowing, a shared process of listening, interpreting, and working together with the cosmos. Through personal experience, Mahoutondji explores how meaning emerges through dialogue, intuition, and active involvement, rather than passive reception. Part of the research was translated into a web-based speculative divination experience featuring a 3D Fá tray and mixed-media visuals to imagine how ancestral listening practices could inform more responsive and reciprocal technologies in the future.
Mahoutondji Kinmagbo (he/him) is a self-taught new media artist and creative technologist from the Benin Republic. With a background in finance, his artistic journey explores the intersection of African heritage and digital technology. Through immersive environments, speculative design, and digital storytelling, he investigates how identity, memory, and culture evolve in the digital age. His work reimagines ancestral narratives, offering new perspectives on the past while imagining possible futures. Rooted in personal and collective inquiry, his practice blends curiosity with experimentation, using technology not just as a tool but as a mirror to reflect on transformation and the continuity of cultural memory.
All projects were conceived or further developed within the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise fellowship, under the mentorship of Franca López Barbera, Iyo Bisseck, Mio Kojima, and Nushin Yazdani.
This event is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise larger collaborative project between the think & do tank Dezentrum and Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and Matería Oscura.
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