Opening talk with Andrea Staid

Shaping the World: A Telluric Perspective

To open the opening of Earthrise 26 – From the Ground It will be a conversation with anthropologist Andrea Staid dedicated to the relationship between design, soil, and non-human life forms, to reflect on how design can rethink its role within the contemporary ecological crisis.
 

Contemporary design needs to rethink its practices beyond the debilitating anthropocentrism of the Anthropocene. This intervention intertwines the perspective of multinaturalism, founded on overcoming the nature-culture divide, with the concept of terricide, developed by indigenous activists to defuse the ongoing material and spiritual ecocide.
 

Placing oneself in a "telluric" dimension means abandoning the notion of matter as a mere passive resource to be shaped from the outside. Shaping the world requires transforming the project into an act of co-creation, listening, and diplomacy with the planet's non-human forces. Design thus becomes a regenerative and relational practice, capable of recognizing animal, plant, and mineral life forms as agents, countering telluric destruction with new political and visual ecologies of care.

Andrea Staid
Professor of Cultural and Visual Anthropology at NABA, of Cultural Anthropology at IED Turin, PhD at the University of Granada. He directs the Biblioteca/Antropologia series for Meltemi. Among his latest publications: Disintegrati (Nottetempo, 2020), The Living House. Repairing Spaces, Learning to Build (ADD, 2021), Being Nature (UTET – Dialoghi di Pistoia 2022), Giving Shape to the World. For a Multinaturalist Design. (UTET, 2025) Illegal Living (UTET, 2026). His books have been translated into Greek, German, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian.,
Portugal, Chile, Lebanon. He collaborates with various newspapers.