A young talent „Volition“ award goes to Marie Dietze for her work „Assembling Fragments – Exploring Feminist Modes of Hacking through Design“, which was produced as part of her Master’s degree at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences and her work in the Critical Maker Culture research group at the Berlin University of the Arts/Weizenbaum Institute.
mariedietze.fyi/Assembling-Fragments
Jury statement: „The work addresses issues of design in the context of sexual health in a critical and playful way. It is not only about what is done for gendered bodies: it also asks who is allowed to be part of this process in order to take back control of body data and attain self-knowledge. As a participatory do-it-together (DIT) approach in workshops („Let’s Spit Hormones“ und „Make Your Own Menstrual Cup“), it encourages a feminist attitude towards open hardware.
The work was created in close collaboration with h/activist colleague and software developer Marie Kochsiek. It opens up a space to engage with taboos while stimulating debates about intimate technologies, body sovereignty and design beyond essential gender norms. Design as feminist hacking is a tactic of critical collectivity that demonstrates the limits of power through the process of “open-source commons-based making”.