Material Migration: A talk with Seetal Solanki

As the earliest days of the pandemic approached, our friends at Likeminds were planning a weekend of ideas, activities and festivities in the hills outside Los Angeles. They had gathered a group of artists and visionaries to speak on the topic of movement: Dance, migration, political and cultural movements, and the movements of our own bodies were all on the docket.

Like many of the best-laid plans of early 2020, Likeminds was cancelled due to Covid. This November, we present a series of three speakers from the Likeminds lineup who were unable to present their ideas as planned.

Our second speaker is Seetal Solanki, who translates materials with the aim to humanise them. Founder and Director of Ma-tt-er, a relational practice focused on building and bridging kinships between ourselves, materials, the immaterial and virtual.

Join Seetal on a journey of Material Migration. Materials move just as humans move around the world. The constant movement of materials across our planet has us questioning how we make, manufacture, transport and dispose of goods. From the urban to the rural and back again, from the east to the west, from the north to the south — we move.

Ma-tt-er reorients mind-sets, behaviours and mechanisms towards futures that are caring and respectful by providing ecological and nuanced strategies that are antifragile, elastic and response-able.

Author of "Why Materials Matter" (Prestel, 2018) and a Textiles Tutor at the Royal College of Art. She was made an Honorary Fellow at Hereford College of the Arts and received her Fellowship at the RSA in 2018.