Nadine Botha is a research designer preoccupied with how unseen social, political, legal, economic and cultural systems design our objects, bodies, homes, cities, technologies, experiences and knowledges. Her practice brings together artistic research, storytelling, curating, writing, performance, activism, media analysis, and participatory practices in exhibitions, digital media, events, publications, workshops, journalism, and academia.
She is a winner of a 2020 Bio Art and Design Award from MU Hybrid Art House, and was awarded a 2019-2020 Talent Development Grant from the Creative Industries Fund. In 2018 she was associate curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennale—A School of Schools. She graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017, receiving the Gijs Bakker Award for best Master’s project.
She has contributed to numerous books, and her writing has been published widely.
#AMAZE: PEDAGOGIES OF THE LABYRINTH - The labyrinth might seem to be an antiquated garden feature, but it is not at all a relic. Contemporary institutions from democracy to archives, architecture from museums to malls, methods from hypertext to psychology, past times from video gaming to social media… are all labyrinthine; and Umberto Eco has argued that the labyrinth is the structure of Western epistemology. Pedagogies of #AMAZE is a participatory research design project exploring how the labyrinth as spectral architecture impacts how the world is known and experienced by the ‘modern’ individual, as charted by the history of the labyrinth: Originally single-path labyrinths elevated human consciousness from nature; with the emergence of modernism mazes with alternative paths created the illusion of choice and freedom; and now the rhizome or quantum labyrinth offers all possibilities but strongly reverts to fixed positions.
By re-embodying the materiality and practices of the labyrinth can we reach different insights and paths? Pedagogies of #AMAZE explores the material and embodied qualities and affect of the labyrinths pervasive in contemporary society. Unlike the spectral architecture of the panopticon that does not physically exist, numerous actual labyrinths exist and can easily be drawn, making it uniquely possible to explore not only through mental reflection but also embodied engagement. The labyrinth’s mesmerising, disorienting and illusory qualities that are frequently abused for manipulation, can just as well be used as tools to encourage reflection and perspectival shift. For instance, inside the labyrinth one can feel trapped by limited possibilities, however when viewed from above the institutional structuring of choices are revealed. As such, the project is concerned with exploring the architecture of the mind, the self and how its sense of time, space, others and the unknown impact perspective and decisions. Another striking labyrinthine perspective shift is that there is always a way to walk around seemingly insurmountable walls.
Currently two episodes are under development: an ethnographic exploration of the self through neuroaesthetic technique that makes a 2D drawing meditation into a digital 3D labyrinth with support from the Creative Industries Fund; and an exploration of the labyrinth in developing an anthropocentric attitude towards nature, through the Multispecies Knowledges School by Zone2Source and Open Set at Amstelpark in Amsterdam.
THE ORDERS OF THE UNDEAD - What do we learn about infectious disease, mortality and modernity/coloniality from zombie mythology? Through ongoing review and analysis of key zombie movies, games, literature and other pop culture media, The Orders of the Undead highlights how ideas and behaviour that originate in colonialism continue to be propagated in our entertainment media and replicated in everyday prejudices. The result of a collaboration between research designer Nadine Botha and skin infections specialist Henry de Vries, the initial research was presented in an installation of four short films at MU Hybrid Art House until 9 May 2021.
How these prejudices order society becomes magnified under the stress of epidemics and pandemics, and despite being repeatedly debunked scientifically and socially, continue to replicate faster than one can shoot them down — just like the undead. Some undead orders are outlandishly obvious — such as vaccination causing autism and race being a biological feature — while other undead orders are so embedded, that we may not notice them
at first, and have no idea how to uproot them — such as the economic quantification of human life, and the war-like language and metaphors of contagion that are used to ‘other’ and oppress dierent people and organisms. Yet other undead orders are deep- seated existential anxieties such as the individual’s role in the collective, personal survival, the end of the world and a desire for a greater transcendental explanation for calamities.
Is the fearmongering zombie itself an undead idea that no longer serves its purpose, or is it a mythology through which we process
our fear of death, disease, apocalypse and the irrational? This is the research question as the project turned to social media, inviting people to use three custom-made Instagram filters to observe and express how the undead orders propagated in zombie films appear in our daily lived experience.Awards
Bio Art and Design Award 2020
Exhibits
Evolutionaries, MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven (Dec 2020-May 2021)
Presentations
University of the Underground (forthcoming 2022)
Art-Science Panel Discussion at European Society for Dermatological Research
Symposium, Amsterdam (Sep 2021)
The Hmm @ IMPAKT, Netherlands (Feb 2021)
Art & Life Sciences Master invited lecture at Leiden University (Feb 2021)
Supported by
Creative Industries Fund
SUGAR: A COSMOLOGY OF WHITENESS - The industrialised farming of sugar since the 15th-century has
not only changed what we eat and how we enjoy it, but completely restructured our society, economy, ecology, culture, and even bodies and minds. Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness is a participatory design project seeking to grow an alternative history of the rise
of modernity/coloniality, from the perspective of sugar — what if sugar is the engineer behind this all?
Through participatory storytelling, the project seeks to initiate
a conversation about our dominant realities, using sugar as a medium. During workshops, participants speculate on new stories linking themselves with fragments of the history of modernity/ coloniality. The stories from the workshops are added to a growing story rhizome online, which represents an inconsistent, contradictory, wildly imaginative alternative history. Acting as a mirror, this speculative history demonstrates the inconsistent contradictory nature of our dominant narrative of history on which reality is based.
The stories are shared through installations, lecture performances, social media (@sugarcosmology on Instagram) and a growing online rhizome (www.sugarcosmology.com).
Exhibits
[UN]REAL, Rotterdam Science Gallery (Apr-Dec 2020)
Lecture performances
UN/Green Festival, Latvia (Jun 2019)
Design Academy, Eindhoven (Sep 2019)
Workshops
Neuhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (Aug 2019)
Design Academy, Eindhoven (Oct 2019, 2020)
Design Biennial Ljubljana, Slovenia (Nov 2019)
[UN]REAL, Rotterdam Science Gallery (Nov 2020)
Featured in
Extra Extra, DAMN, We Make Money Not Art
Supported by
Creative Industries Fund
THE POLITICS OF SHIT - How bad would design need to be to make you throw shit? The sociospatial apartheid that continues in Cape Town over 20 years since democracy has resulted in ongoing toilet wars. Service delivery protests by Ses’khona People’s Movement (better known as the poo protestors), student protests by the #Rhodesmustfall movement, guerrilla art stunts by Tokolos Stencil Collective, and tireless advocacy by the Social Justice Coalition have all rallied around an unusual object: the portable flush toilet. The Politics
of Shit explores how the portable flush toilet has made invisible social, legal, political and psychological design systems visible. The Portabotty chatbot and memewall, an academic thesis, and peer- reviewed paper were developed to amplify the activists’ work.
The Portabotty is an experiment in conversational storytelling using a Facebook chatbot. By responding to interaction prompts, each user is led through the story differently according to their interests and background knowledge. The wheatpaste Portabotty memewall is a preview of the memes, images and graphics used in the chatbot. In the era of clicktivism, memes have become a means to make political sentiments go viral using humour.
Awards
Gijs Bakker Award for best Master’s project at Design Academy Eindhoven
Presented at
Decolonising Design Conference in Malmo (2016)
Base for Experiment, Art and Research, ArtEZ, Netherlands (2017)
University of Bergen, Norway (2018)
Beyond Change, Swiss Design Network Conference (2018)
Transnational Academy: Designing Convivial Futures, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (2019)
Published in
Monu, Dirty Furniture, Design and Culture Journal
