FLEX

Can a problem always be solved?

Interactive performance and research on how to exist with complexity, and to thrive within conflict, without feeling the need for reducing, solving or generalizing it.

Design research
Publication
Collaboration

During my minor, I was challenged to work together with a group of students from diverse educational backgroundsand disciplines, ranging from medicine, to criminology, sociology, graphic and product design, theatre, and music. Together we created a performance and publication that show how we worked with conflict, complexity, communication and struggle as these themes eventually became both our central topics and our ways of working. 

For a more elaborate text, you can read the flex publication here.

The flex performance started with a play, where the in the end the audience is invited to help untie the performer, and to start tying and playing with the rope themselves. The rope visually represents complexity. Through learning how to move and play with the rope, without needing to untie or unravel it, the exercise was meant to teach the participants about our inquiry on conflict. Learning that it is okay to feel uncomfortable and uneasy is not something the educational system is focused on. Expecting to always find solutions and fixes in this complex world full of wicked problems is unrealistic and sets us up for failure.

The publication binded with the orange rope serves as a continuation and extension of the performance and exercise we conducted in the minor. The texts explain more in-depth how to design for, despite, and with complexity and why it is urgent to learn how to move with the conflict, and to create untidy endings.