ds4si's (Design Studio for Social Intervention's) 20 QUESTIONS FOR 20 YEARS, 2025
ds4si's history of practice is substantial and the 20Q for 20Y event took the shape of a living archive, open to the public for a month. This physical archive told the stories of ds4si's history while actively creating new stories inside the archive. This layered experience allowed participants to learn by doing in a yet another opportunity to collaborate with ds4si's community, ultimately becoming a part of it by doing so.
Witness in Residence + Witness on Stage
The invitation to join ds4si for this unique residency began with a question, or rather a series of questions, that I was asking myself as an artist. Those questions ultimately became the project 100 Questions Workshop. It is an ongoing and participatory artwork wherein participants co-author a list of approximately 100 questions around a given prompt. It is collective artistic research that prioritizes the process of inquiry over outcome and answers.
Ten years or so after facilitating the first 100 Questions Workshop I found myself talking with Judith Leeman, Namita Wiggers, and Kenneth Bailey. We were working our way around and through ideas about long-form social projects. How do you honor their public legacies, their impact, and their people? How could ds4si do so? Reflecting on that conversation Judith remarked, "We turned to Lisa as we first began to draft our [ds4si’s] own 20 Questions, having seen how her way of working with questions invites others to deepen their own question-craft…”
Months later ds4si invited me to spend a few day during the "20 Questions for 20 Years" celebration to reflect back to them what showed up for me in their remarkable archive. I engaged/participated with the ds4si archive for two days, gathering my questions into another iteration of 100 Questions Workshop. At the end of my visit I read the piece as a “Witness on Stage” to co-founders Lori Lobenstine and Kenny, along with Judith as a contribution to (and reflection of) this dynamic archive. It was an honor
to impact and to become a participating member of this legacy of work that has long inspired my own. Thank you ds4si.
