Qatar Week: PechaKucha

“Archipelagic Documentary: Three Projects from Puerto Rico” by Paul Thulin-Jiménez

Puerto Rican belonging is often judged by legibility: language, distance from the island, whether a last name reads Puerto Rican. I grew up in Richmond with a Puerto Rican mother who quieted that part of herself, and I found my way back to the island through photography. This talk traces three projects made over those returns. Isla de Las Palmas is fifty photographs with no captions, a book that opens fully to readers who carry the island with them. Isla de Las Palmas: 100 Years gathers letters from Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, each written to one of my photographs and addressed to a reader a century from now. Sol y Sombra, still in progress, sets photographs beside short passages of prose, drawn from the lives of my cousins Carlitos and Juanko in Santurce. Together they make what I call archipelagic documentary: knowledge that lives in more than one place at once and answers to no center.

“Mapping Migration Memories: From Desert Paths to Global Stages” by Astrid Kensinger

Mapping Migration Memories began with an encounter at the National Museum of Qatar and a question: how might design make visible the seasonal journeys, memories, and knowledge embedded in Qatar’s historic movement between desert and sea? Developed through (IN)>Tangible Lab, the project brings together design research, oral histories, cartography, sound, and participatory making to explore migration not simply as movement across geography, but as a living cultural memory.

Working with members of Qatari families whose histories are rooted in these seasonal journeys, the project traces routes through stories, landscapes, sounds, and embodied knowledge. What began as research evolved into an exhibition at Msheireb’s Company House, where these memories became spatial and sensory experiences.

The project has continued to travel and transform: from Doha to Shanghai, Venice, and Beijing, each context has opened new questions about how local heritage can be translated without losing its specificity.

This PechaKucha follows that journey—from museum inspiration to field research, from intimate family memories to international platforms—and considers how design can activate, carry, and re-map intangible cultural heritage.

“Between Leaving and Arrival: The Body as a Quiet Archive” by Sara D. Reed and Hawa Stwodah

This presentation introduces an evolving collaborative research project exploring diasporic identity through the body as an archive: a site where memory, adaptation, and longing are carried through objects, gestures, and everyday practices. Grounded in diasporic experiences, we ask what remains when continuity is disrupted by migration, loss, or assimilation, and how fragments might hold meaning without becoming whole again.

Rather than seeking recovery or narrative closure, the project attends to the space between leaving and arrival. Garments, photographs, inherited objects, embodied routines, and acts of repair become traces of movement and identity-making across generations. Fragmentation operates not as a problem to resolve, but as a method for understanding how memory is continually remade.

The presentation also reflects on the project’s evolving form: from our initial research presented in Venice toward a participatory archive built through correspondence, material traces, and potentially a course in which students document family movements through everyday digital tools. As the archive expands, we consider the ethical questions raised by recording mobility, particularly amid changing policies around migration, borders, and belonging.

“Staging Human Machine Encounters” by Louis-Philippe Demers

How do machines reorganize the ways we sense, act, and relate to one another? This presentation introduces MESH Lab—Machined, Embodiment, Staging, Hybridity—through artistic projects that transform technological systems into lived encounters rather than objects of observation.

Radiant Bodies invites visitors to spin motorized drums, transforming gestures and haptic feedback into generative light and sound, drawing on ritualistic practices and collective engagement.

A Monocular Dialogue confronts visitors with a singular robotic eye, using gaze and speech to question artificial intelligence, surveillance, and technological perception.

Deep Taming proposes a playful encounter in which participants lend their movements to a humanoid robot attempting to fold a towel, exposing tensions between embodied knowledge, automation, and labor.

These investigations extend into Godspeed, where wearable machines enable collective choreography, and a humanoid workshop at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, exploring the relationship between robotic embodiment and performance.

Across these initiatives, staging becomes a means of making agency, perception, and control tangible. MESH Lab explores how participation transforms spectators into implicated actors, revealing shifting human–machine relationships through direct bodily experience and challenging assumptions about technological autonomy.

“A Surplus of Vision: Collaborative Revolutions & Ethical Answerability in Relational Creative Practices” by Sara Wilson McKay

This presentation explores the intersection of relational creative practices, ethical responsibility, and collaborative artistic frameworks within contemporary practice. Grounded in theories of perception, the session examines how shared artistic inquiry and collaborative revolutions challenge traditional limitations of singular authorship.

By emphasizing Mikhail Bakhtin’s “ethical answerability,” through which every act should be made anticipating a response, and a “surplus of vision,” which acknowledges the additive perspectives of others, this talk addresses how creators navigate relational dynamics, physical and conceptual mobility, and collective social structures within contemporary art contexts.

The presentation provides a conceptual framework for understanding the ethical obligations and transformative possibilities embedded in co-creative artmaking today. It interrogates how artistic labor can move beyond isolated individualism to foster resilient, less hierarchical ecosystems. Ultimately, the session articulates how relational methodologies enable artists and communities to co-produce knowledge, reframe social ecology, and embrace mutual responsibility as the foundational engine of contemporary cultural production.

“Wander Lines” by Rola Khayyat

Wander Lines asks how loss can be given form while it is still unfolding. Beginning with the artist’s shifting relationship with her mother, who is gradually losing her memory, the project moves through landscapes of family, memory, empire, and displacement.

Taking its title from Fernand Deligny’s concept of “wander lines,” the work explores how meaning can emerge through movement rather than fixed structures. Drawing on photographs, memoirs, letters, and family archives, it traces three generations between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon—from a grandfather’s years with Saudi Aramco, to a mother’s memories of “American Arabia” and civil war Beirut, to a daughter shaped by Lebanon’s recurring ruptures.

Reworking these materials as a living counter-archive, Wander Lines considers how intimate histories intersect with larger forces of empire, displacement, and erasure. Rather than restoring what has been lost, it stays with the fragments and traces through which memory persists.