DEEM SYMPOSIUM
Designing for Dignity 04
Explore the programming recaps
Kahlil Joseph and
jada-amina
Joseph and jada-amina discuss his approach to the archive, the mechanics of fragmentation, and the urgent necessity of building institutional models that center Black stories on Black terms.
Brendan
Fernandes
A participatory keynote in which he spoke, moved, and gathered the audience to reframe institutions as living, breathing spaces built on dignity, care, and belonging.
Curry J. Hackett, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Patricia Nguyen moderated by Ari Melenciano
Treating imagination as a methodology rather than an abstraction, the conversation considered how speculative work across art, design, fiction, architecture, and world-building can test ideas, challenge inherited systems, and invite people to navigate alternative realities.
The Black School (Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters Cuillier)
Multidisciplinary artists led a collective demonstration enacted by the room as a shared declaration: a living manifesto for liberatory design.
Debra Yepa-Pappan, Carrie Sandahl, Scott Vincent Campbell moderated by Elijah McKinnon
Drawing on Chicago’s history of institutions built through improvisation, mutual aid, cultural stewardship, neighborhood memory, and collective imagination, the conversation examined how institutions are made, maintained, challenged, and transformed, and what the city’s artists, organizers, designers, and cultural workers can teach us about building institutions that prioritize dignity, equity, and imagination over the status quo.
Torkwase Dyson
The painter explored the transhistorical conditions of water infrastructure and how the expansion of extractive industries shapes geographies, water wars, and the ethical engineering needed to build new worlds.
Reference
Room
We once again presented the Reference Room, a two-day public gathering space located at the MCA and adjacent to the theater, where anyone could encounter and spend time with the reading materials that have inspired our five print issues. Open October 23–24, the collection of books, articles, and essays reflected throughlines in our research, specific references from our pages, and recommendations from our contributors. It was our hope to offer context and access to the ideas that shape Deem’s processes and beliefs, as well as a haven for reflection and repose.