ODDKIN

Oddkin

Oddkin, is a formation of Márton Kabai and Natela Lemondzhava founded in 2018, in The Hague, NL. Our hybrid, mutant practice shifts between investigative and metaphoric approaches through forensics and intuition that unfolds in critical storytelling.

We live in a state of urgency and hopelessness. We wish to reveal the fertility within hopelessness and its vast possibility, unlocking persistent optimism in contrast to psychic entropy. We wish to uncover systemic biases that had been mistaken as truths or legal and demystify hidden affairs that seems to be innocent, efficient or normal. We embrace an ecocentric, post-anthropocentric outlook, crafting radical visions and critical maps to de-center the status-quo.

We are specifically interested in the mutation and transformation of human and non-human relationships in the age of the Anthropocene.We carry a responsible attitude towards learning, finding and speculating on forgotten and new ways of multi-species coexistence and world-making. Our works committed to engage in a radically different material world and our place as humans in it.

Oddkin’s practice distinguish two research directions. Clarion Call entitled to environmental and social justice by mapping systemic problems and question how can we coexist on Earth with other species in times of crises. While Ground Zero defines the personal, metaphoric granulating process of overcoming hopelessness and impossibility by nurturing persistent optimism.

We formulate our researches in forms of books, games, videos, workshops, installations, and live performances. We are active in exhibiting, teaching, lecturing, facilitating different forms of workshops as well as collaborating with other fields of knowledge.

Photo credit: Obaid AlBudoor

The starting point of our visual inquiry is the messy, dark illegibility of the multidimensional crises in which we agonise as a conscious species. The world is transforming into a technologically driven uncertainty. The gap between the quest to define what is the concept of human versus the materiality of the human as flesh and bones are in a pathological disconnection. This gap we usually ignore and afraid to acknowledge. This gap is violent, painful, uncomfortable and awkward. This accumulated pus of uncertainty, however, is certain, it is the impossibility of hopelessness. We shouldn't accept and take for granted what we know and learned so far. We have to question everything we assume, trust and got used to. We have to imagine other spaces, other worlds, never forgetting the pulsating tragedy of this gap, this wound between the knowledge and the experience. This speculative space that we call Ground zero.

Ground zero is impossible, hard, honest, cruel and vertical, but it allows to redefine relations and opens up possibilities of letting go. Ground zero is a metaphor that makes us awake, but leave us alone and powerless. Ground zero is however fertile with possibility between time and timelessness, between space and void, between the idea and the flesh. It is risky, temporary and unreasonable. Ground zero departs from the gap, the wound, the void, the discarded, the waste and reinvent the significance of proximity. In this vertical motionless fall, we have to find healing.

Works within Ground Zero are interdisciplinary that rely on poetic storytelling and intertwining with sound compositions and 3D renders.

In Clarion Call we are engaged to critically re-evaluate the ethical, cultural, economic, political validity of our human centered status quo. Decisions and designed solutions are often the outcome of systemic processes that enhance exploitation of the environment and on non-human animals. We attempt to re-contextualise and re-map morally and environmentally unsustainable biopolitical events as complex designs that are maintained by power relations, political and economic status quo. Clarion Call is an urgent call to design such complex but accessible maps, in order to demystify seemingly difficult and impossible systems.

It is an investigative, design program, involving methodologies from forensics, journalism and design research in a multidisciplinary settings, working with humans or non-humans alike. Clarion Call projects devoted to foster debate between design and anthropocentrism. It aims to learn and integrate non-human, multi-species worldings and communities and speculative scenarios in our times where everything is designed, altered, modified by the man.

We design games and facilitate desgin workshops.

Projects: