Scaling bodily fluids for utopian fabulations through

In this workshop participants are invited to create utopian fabulations — unworldly scenarios and stories taking place in distant futures or alternative presents — through collaborative collages and annotations, thinking at speculative physical and temporal scales of the use of human bodily fluids, such as menstrual blood, urine or breast milk.

It is motivated by calls, such as by Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluralverse, to reimagine design’s world-making capacities towards just and sustainable futures that account for a plurality of relational flourishings.

Bodily fluids, such as menstrual blood, urine or breast milk, are essential to anthropocentric flourishing through their functions of distributing nutrients, filtering toxins or sustaining reproduction. Yet the usefulness of bodily fluids often remains at the scale of the human body, although they generously extend and entangle a diversity of many other bodies, human and non-human alike. Through utopian fabulations people can imagine shifting in scale from an individual human body to other ways of collaborative surviving, and how these materialize in concrete aspects of the worlds: urban infrastructures, social practices and gatherings, means of production, embodied labor or rituals of care.

We invite participants to imagine queer uses of bodily fluids at micro and macro scales by creating visual scenarios through collage and text. In order to kickstart the collage-making, we will ask participants to bring visual elements (photographs, sketches, drawings, etc) that respond to at least one of five prompts, and we will collect them in a digital Miro board. During the workshop, participants will be divided into breakout rooms and will collaborate on making a digital collage depicting a utopian scenario with a queer use of one or several bodily fluids. In addition, we plan to gather the outcomes of the workshop on a public ‘living’ website. Prior to participation we will ask participants for consent to publish their collages on this website and will inform them about the use of their work within possible future collaborations and/or research outcomes, such as publications.

How to prepare for this workshop? In order to kickstart the collage-making, participants are asked to bring visual elements (photographs, sketches, drawings, etc) that respond to at least one of five prompts (inspired by The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies)

• Places (a building, a forest, a home, a planet, a city, a spaceship)
• Situations (watering a plant, browsing the internet, travelling by train, cooking a meal)
• Values (decoloniality, empathy, pleasure, agency, environmental justice)
• Objects and actors (a bicycle, a menstrual cup, a mirror, a dildo, a toilet, a trash bin, bacteria)
• Bodily fluids (menstrual blood, urine, breast milk, sweat, cervical mucus, semen)

If you would like to attend any festival event but can't pay the fee, the organizers will gladly waive it for you, just please contact them at festival@uroboros.design.