Hannes Bernard is a South African designer based in Amsterdam, and one half of SulSolSal – a design & research practice run with his Brazilian partner. The studio has a specific focus on design problematics in the Southern Hemisphere. Based between Amsterdam, Cape Town & São Paulo, SulSolSal uses research, publishing, food and performance as a means of investigating the complex relationships between design, economy & society and the austerity politics of Europe. Food is often incorporated into the practice as both a research tool and a medium of communication. – sulsolsal.com

This lecture will take as a starting point the aphorism “A rising tide lifts all boats” – popularized by JFK during the early 60s in a clarion call for an expanded welfare society – as a fundamental principle of global social democracy. We will consider an arc from the rapid expansion of modernism in the colonies, to the neoliberal globalization of today and discuss the possibilities for post-capital/post-liberation design. We’ll speculate on the near-future, as the risen boats of the global periphery return to old shores in Europe, with new cultural cargo.

Bio - Hannes Bernard is the co-founder and director of Jungle Jim, the first pan-African pulp fiction magazine, publishing genre fiction from across the continent & African diaspora – junglejim.org and he is a member of the DDG (designdisplacementgroup.com), which recently presented Digital Campfire #2 – a summer academy at the Jan van Eyck in Maastricht. After completing his undergraduate in South Africa, he moved to the Netherlands in 2011 where he received a masters in design from the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. Currently he teaches design and research at the KABK, Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam) & ArtEZ (Arnhem).

Students react to Hannes Bernard's lecture with an artwork presented at the entrance hall of the academy