SOPHIE DYER and SOLVEIG SUESS
Proxy-archives: touching without touching
6th of March 2017
18.00 TORI Space (Media Wall area), Learning Centre, Otaniementie 9

Over the course of a series of chance commissions we have had the opportunity to develop a design practice focused on archives and their logics. For this lecture we will discuss our practice through notion of the ‘proxy-archive’, drawing on recent work with freethought for the Bergen Assembly. For us proxies are those which have authority to represent someone or something else – they are placeholders that may or may not bare resemblance to the originals. As designers the tasks we undertake necessarily conflate production and subject-matter. We ask how to conjure the archive in its absence? How to touch without touching?

Sophie Dyer and Solveig Suess are graphic designers and postgraduates at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London. They split their time between commercial practice and design research. Together they run A Satellite Studio and have participated in exhibitions at the 2016 Venice Biennale, Bergen Assembly, Beijing Design Week, Tramway in Glasgow and most recently, Tabakalera in Spain. Their work been published in Impact Vol. 2, Grafik, Migrant Journal and Avant.org (forthcoming). Together they edit the bilingual Chinese-English journal, Concrete Flux.