The Rodina

How to make freedom and playfulness – traditionally granted to artists – accessible to a wider audience? And, how to design situations or objects that stimulate activity and participation, that could lead to a transformation in a viewer or a social context? During this talk, Amsterdam-based designer Tereza Ruller (studio The Rodina) tries to answer these questions. She identifies performative components in graphic design processes and results. With examples of her recent projects, Ruller proposes the term ​“performative design” for a practice that incorporates graphic design, playfulness, bodies, action, and eventness (understanding this as a unique time and space). Performance becomes an alternative mode of value production and a space for critique and imagination.

The Rodina (Tereza and Vit Ruller) is a post-critical design studio with an experimental practice drenched in strategies of performance art, play and subversion. The Rodina invents ways in which experience, knowledge and relations are produced and preserved. In their work, Tereza and Vit often explore the spatial and interactive possibilities of virtual environments as a space for new thoughts and aesthetics that come forward from between culture and technology. The studio works mostly for cultural clients such as Harvard GSD (USA), Sonic Acts Foundation (NL), and Hyundai Card Library Seoul (KR).

How to Watch

This Penny Stamps Speaker Series event will première on November 4, 2021 at 8pm and can be viewed on this page, at dptv​.org, or on the Penny Stamps Series Facebook page.

Presented in partnership with Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Our Fall 2021 Series is brought to you with the support of our partners, Detroit Public Television and PBS Books.