Lecture by Luna Mrozik Gawler – Symbiopunk: Designing the Symbiocene

Image credit: Sarah Walker

Luna Mrozik Gawler is a transdisciplinary artist whose work seeks to envision and engender the Symbiocene—an era defined by multispecies collaboration, mutual care, and coexistence. Their participatory and experiential work invites audiences to imagine post-anthropocentric worlds and practice inhabiting them.

In this talk, they will offer a close examination of the future scenarios and world-building practices behind their work and the ecological, Symbiopunk methods that inform them. By exploring how speculative design can serve as a potent disruptor in times of anthropogenic polycrisis, Mrozik Gawler asks: What are the stories of symbiotic futures, and how can we best tell them?

With a focus on generating exuberant and equitable planetary futures, Luna Mrozik Gawler's work attunes and attends to articulations, temporalities and worlds beyond the human. As a multigenre Symbiopunk, Luna works outside of disciplines intent on disrupting and refiguring anthropocentric paradigms by repopulating the social imaginary with multispecies companions, comrades and co-creators. They are a recent winner of the Most Significant Futures Award by the International Association of Professional Artists, and recent finalist in the TMMRRW Futures Award, the NSW Environmental Art & Design Award and Incinerator Gallery Art Award for Social Change. Luna's work has most recently been commissioned or programmed by: The Interspecies Library, The Center for Projection Art, Blindside Gallery, Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, The Australian Network of Art & Technology, The City of Hobart, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Multicultural Arts Victoria, The Sydney Institute for the Environment and The International Digital Media & Art Association.

This open lecture is part of the Vinnova funded project "Degrees of a school lunch 2060", included in the Design Ecologies master's program at Konstfack. Degrees of a school lunch explores the question of what school restaurants and food could look like in the year 2060, depending on if we keep within the boundaries of a 1,5° rise in global temperatures, or if we fail and land at 3°. The results will be displayed in an interactive traveling exhibition shown at Universeum, schools in Helsingborg, and the Stockholm Furniture Fair.