Baltan Laboratories

We focus on societal issues through a relational approach, creating spaces to rehearse living otherwise. We believe that the increasing complexity of our world and of the challenges we have to face no longer allows for a strictly disciplinary, reductionist and western-based approach. In a world full of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, the interactions and exchanges between different discipli

nes are fundamental to achieving a relational approach that responds to the environmental, political, social, economic and technological issues we must address today. We can no longer divide a problem into its parts, deal with those in separate disciplines and then recompose them in a solution. Disciplines separate those considered qualified to think from those who are not; for this reason, we rather focus on indisciplinarity: an approach which transgresses disciplinary boundaries to achieve intellectual emancipation and evades disciplinary specialism and hierarchisation. Indisciplinarity is not undisciplined. It opposes what, in the discipline, limits the process of discovery and the free movement of serendipity. That means that we shouldn’t get rid of disciplines but instead design ways for their borders to be more permeable and for a new collaboration attitude to emerge. We try to achieve this attitude by designing learning trajectories, projects and collaborations that bridge different ways of knowing (not just the artistic and the scientific ones) through creative strategies, including embodied, sensory, intuitive and performative techniques. The core of an indisciplinary approach is de-organizing knowledge, temporarily dismantling how it operates to reveal that we are not really touching the complexity of reality but just scraping the layers of abstractions that we put on it to feel in control. In this way, we can become aware of some of the assumptions and ideologies that shape our understanding and action in the world, especially the hegemonic ones that become natural, automatic, unconscious and apparently unquestionable. We acknowledge the importance of creating a non-hierarchical and safe space where people from all kinds of social, ethnic, discipline, and cultural backgrounds can talk to each other on an equal and non-judgemental level. We strive to include diverse knowledges and value systems in our projects and collaborations, not relying solely on a western perspective.