Disappearing knowledge
The stories you’ll never know, the knowledge you’ll never get.
What role can design play in highlighting society's epistemicide process and creating new frameworks to develop and promote that underrated knowledge and stories?
Disappearing Knowledge aims to interrogate the power of dominant narratives over other stories by embodying the concept of ‘epistemicide’, the destruction of existing knowledge systems. The reader will never be able to access its content: just as alternative cultures, other forms of knowledge, or mythologies, the story is there, but they won't be able to read it. This book illustrates the importance of what we are losing when only one form of knowledge dominates and highlights the need to develop new frameworks where multiple knowledge systems can exist in parallel.
Left: pages from chapter 1, 'To censor'. Right: first page of chapter 5, 'To erase'
Knowledge as we know it has always been dominated by Western concepts, overseeing crucial disciplines for national development, including law, science, and sociology. This way of thinking creates an asymmetry in knowledge, where other sources of cultures and intelligence are considered less legitimate and valuable. As professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos points out, this contempt of different forms of knowledge leads to ‘epistemicide’, the killing of knowledge systems that don't converge to the main narrative in power (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, 2014). This conception of Western-centric knowledge creates unfair societies, endangering our well-being and relationships with the natural world.
Through its five chapters, Disappearing Knowledge illustrates censorship, negligence, ignorance, rewriting and destruction, some of the ways knowledge is taken away from us today. Each chapter, through its content and design, illustrates the specific way dominant narratives silence other’s stories and voices: ‘To Censor’, the first chapter, leverages traditional visual codes for censorships, such as cut-off or crossed-out words and altered pictures, over extracts from Boaventura de Sousa Santos book’s ‘Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide’, that develops how western cultural domination marginalized other forms of knowledge and wisdom. ‘To Ignore’, the third chapter, uses a blurry and overlapping iconography to illustrate knowledge on the periphery of the main knowledge system and our vision, the voices on the side, connected to nature and indigenous societies, considered not real or efficient enough for the dominant narrative. Its unreadable content, poems from Ursula K. Le Guin and extracts of Robin Vall Kimmerer’s book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass explore the relationship between science and traditional indigenous knowledge, between humans and nature. ‘To Erase’, the fifth and final chapter, represents all the stories deliberately destroyed and erased from the world and, as such, the pages are ripped apart and thrown away.
Chapter 2, 'To neglect', illustrates the knowledge we are slowly losing because we are not taking care of it. As a result, the special ink of the pages slowly disappears and fades away.
The book deliberately questions the value of what we are losing when those narratives and knowledge disappear, generating a sense of frustration for the reader, who will never know what the stories are about. Disappearing Knowledge also points out the interconnectedness of things: how the disappearance of knowledge is also the loss of languages, cultures, ways to see the world, nature understandings, species, and at the end, us, urging the reader to consider their role and responsibilities in creating new spaces holding diverse knowledge system.
Left: an image from chapter 2, 'To neglect'. Centre: a cut-off page from chapter 1, 'To censor'. Right: an image from chapter 4, 'To rewrite'.
Book overview