Making the Making Public

Emile De Visscher, Petrification machine, 2018. Credits: Hands Studio.

Emile De Visscher’s work focuses on the invention of local manufacturing processes. The aim of his research is twofold: it allows to imagine and set up new territorialized, shared and open production networks, but it also attempts to question our relationship to techniques, technologies and materials, by imagining processes for their performative and symbolic potential. Addressing for example waste (Polyfloss, 2012), the relationship to speed (Pearling, 2012) or to carbon (Petrification, 2018), it seeks not only to propose solutions but also to question our Western conceptions of productivity, nature or crafts. If the current environmental crisis requires to reconsider collectively our material production’s impacts and issues, how can we create manufacturing processes able to engage and mobilise? How to make the making a public thing? How to create graspable technologies, both in a practical and cognitive sense?

Emile De Visscher is an engineer and designer by training (UTC – 2009 and RCA – 2012). He worked as an innovation project manager (NODA, 2013) to then undertake a PhD by practice in the SACRe program at PSL University, attached to EnsadLab (2018). Entitled “Technophanic Manufactures”, his thesis explored the relationships between technology and culture using an anthropological methodology. Since 2019, he is a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity – Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, in the Material Form Function research group. He develops new projects at the crossroads of materials science, biomimicry and experimental surgery. www.edevisscher.com