CRUNCH: Resourcing Anatomies

“The earth’s temperature is getting hotter and hotter. Sea levels are rising. The ice sheets are shrinking. I’m no scientist, but I believe everyone can use their skill set to do their part. That’s why I’m introducing a brand-new bra with a built-in nipple so no matter how hot it is, you’ll always look cold. Some days are hard, but these nipples are harder. And unlike the icebergs, these aren’t going anywhere.”  

Kim Kardashian, Skims Ultimate Nipple Bra Advert 

Our current context sees bodies being standardised and homogenised for consumption and production – in both physical and digital spaces, in all possible mediums, in real-time all the time.  These bodies must also adapt to the pressing environmental challenges that are forcing humans to reconsider their longstanding hierarchical relationship with the planet and other species.  

Join Igor Bragado and Miles Gertler (Common Accounts) in discussion with Dream Chittmittrapap (Xcessive Aesthetics) and Parma Ham as they consider bodies as material, bodies as aesthetics and bodies as labour. Through various technological lenses and formats, they will examine how bodies are being redefined to navigate the new realities that are being brought about by the impacts of climate change. 

This discussion will be chaired by Daniel Ovalle Costal, The Bartlett School of Architecture. 

This event is part of the inaugural CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture, replacing the International Lecture Series. Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. 

Speaker Biographies

Common Accounts is a conceptual design office based in Toronto and Madrid. Founded by Igor Bragado and Miles Gertler in 2016, the studio aperture shifts between planetary, psychic and physiological scales, working in architecture, visual art and academic inquiry. Invested in the immediate present, Common Accounts studies situations in which design intelligence is abundant but under the radar, often looking only a few seconds into the future, or into the rearview of the recent past. 

Dream Chittmittrapap is a Bangkok-born interactive sound and installation artist, coder and architectural designer with interests in the immaterial perceptions, collective psychology and the socio-politics of human futures in the age of data anxieties. Dream has experience in design, coding and fabrication of interactive, performative and sound installations, and virtual reality projects as well as in architectural practice. 

Parma Ham (they/them) is an artist, curator, musician and DJ, based in London. Since 2015 they have been a producer with the Serpentine Galleries. Parma is represented by Anti Clone Gallery under the pseudonym Nullo, their silicone-based work takes the form of design objects that intersect organic forms with the manmade. Nullo launched in 2019 via a runway show with a collection of surreal sex toys and fetishwear based on transhuman bodily augmentation and mutation, the project has since manifested through VR, performance, and sculpture. Parma’s performances activate their design work, through narratives that modernise local folklore and esotericism via outsider queer aesthetics. Their work has been commissioned or programmed by Comme des Garçons, The British Library, Dover Street Market London and Paris, Soho House, Silencio, Burberry, and more. In 2019 Ham founded the Wraith event and its sibling magazine Inertia, that platforms ritual as performance, music and posthuman fashion. 

Daniel Ovalle Costal is an architect trained between Spain and the UK. He works as a sole practitioner in London where he has led commercial and mixed-use projects across many sectors while working for WilkinsonEyre and Acme. Since 2018 he has been a Lecturer (Teaching) at The Bartlett School of Architecture where he co-runs Unit 22 on the Architecture MArch programme and Unit 4 on the Engineering and Architectural Design MEng programme. He also co-leads the London School of Architecture’s Design Think Tanks. Daniel’s research interests lie at the intersection of architectural design, domesticity and queer studies. He has a special interest in forms of making that relate to popular culture, including dollhouses, miniatures, paper theatres and pop-up books. 

More information

Image: Clima Fitness by Bruno Lanca