Postcards from a Brave New World
About the Digital Exhibition: A Brave New World
The research initiated with Atmosphere of Craft led us to reflect on how profoundly different—and almost alternative—the worldview, values, and desires of those who practice artistic craftsmanship are, compared to those that underpin the current, and increasingly unsustainable, model of mass consumption and production.
It’s a kind of utopia, that of craftsmanship, which has led us to wonder: what would the world look like if our present were built on artisanal foundations rather than being the full, and now unsustainable, expression of industrial civilization?
With Brave New World, our second project, we aimed to explore a possible answer to this question by imagining a divergent story, a world where the relationship with resources, modes of production, trade, and consumption are radically different because they are more similar to those of artisanal production. What would that world be like, and how would a production system different from capitalism as we know it impact the environment, politics, the educational system, urban planning, and lifestyle?
We have engaged in a speculative dialogue with researchers in economic history, management, and organization from the partner universities of the Hephaestus project, who have become a fundamental part of our creative process, to bring this first “release” of a new world to life. We display here a selection of images exploring an artificial creativity with its blurred perspectives that reshape reality and its aberrations.
Postcards
Brave New World Talks
The following video “Brave New Talks: About Progress” is the editing of a series of interviews we conducted with craft makers and scholars who visited our installment of the exhibition in Dals Langed in 2024.
Exhibitions across Europe
This gallery demonstrates A Brave New World exhibitions in Gothenburg and Venice.
Imagined, created and proposed by Raffaella Rivi & Sergio Marchesini D20ArtLab
D20 ART LAB is an artistic collective and research laboratory based in Padua that explores the intersections of technology, art, and design, developing new languages to narrate organizations, ecosystems, and communities. We investigate the relationships between humans and machines, turning artistic practice into a critical tool for observing, questioning, and reimagining the world. Our research fosters unexpected dialogues between body, mind, and technology, opening new sensory and conceptual horizons. Within this framework, Arts-Based Research (ABR) is our primary approach: a method that embraces the sensory, affective, and material dimensions of experience, expanding the understanding of social phenomena beyond disciplinary boundaries. ABR invites us to immerse ourselves in processes and contexts, alternating artistic and conventional methods while valuing listening, empathy, and the regeneration of bonds between culture, community, technology, and nature. We believe that only participatory approaches make it possible to imagine shared, inclusive, and sustainable futures.