The Fyrthyr conducts and documents experiments that probe the following questions:

  1. How are today’s prevailing definitions of technology conditioned by processes of racialization, colonization, and extraction? 

  2. How do we contribute to processes of racialization, colonization, and extraction by accepting today’s prevailing definitions of technology?

  3. What alternative definitions of technology are possible, and which of these alternatives might enable us to subvert processes of racialization, colonization, and extraction?

In and through probing these questions, the Fyrthyr aims to unsettle forms of know-how that alienate culture from nature, labor from land, and people from place; and we aim to (re-)create and disseminate know-how to further (fyrthyr) the planetary abolition of empire, war, and accumulation by dispossession, denigration, and devastation.

We use the term “technologies” not only to refer to technical implements but to administrative statements, built environments, and dramatic elements; and we pay special attention to those implements, statements, environments, and elements that shape our senses and understandings of  “time”, “space”, “matter”, “energy”, “information”, and “intelligence”.

The experiments conducted and documented by the Fyrthyr center the Transformative Ecological Knowledges (TEK) of Indigenous and Maroon communities, the Do It Yourself (DIY) cultures of the urban undercommons, and invention by other-than-human lifeforms and, in so doing, these experiments decenter and deconstruct definitions of technological innovation and technical know-how that maintain and advance racist, colonial, and extractive ways of being and knowing.

The Fyrthyr intends to (i) publish an annual magazine (exhibition as publication), (ii)  organize an annual site-specific series of workshops on unsettling technologies, (iii) convene a community of fellows around its signature initiatives, and (iv) host a number of research centers and streams.

Fugitive Planning

+ Design for Planetary Abolition

Founding Architects

  • Muindi Fanuel Muindi (he) is a performance artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. He is the author of six books of experimental poetry and prose.

    Muindi’s philosophical perspective, his “deconstructive empiricism”, is deeply affected by Bantu philosophies and by Western deconstruction and schizoanalysis, and it is subtly informed by figures, functions, and structures from comparative biology and measure theory.

    Muindi’s performances, his “philosophical gestures”, deploy dramatic devices to create sensuous experiences that serve as lessons in the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences. Having adopted the motto “more grit, less kit”, Muindi’s performance practice privileges high latency, low fidelity, and seamful designs and the use of TEK (Transformative Ecological Knowledges).

    In addition to being co-founder of the Fyrthyr, Muindi is coordinator of the “Prototyping Social Forms” and “Alter-Eco” research streams at the Synthesis Center, an organizer at the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, co-producer and audio engineer for the Forested Niches podcast, and a member of the “After School”, “Technologies of Critical Conscientization”, and “Unwriting Nature” research communities at the Center for Arts, Design + Social Research.

  • Hyperion Çacatzin Yvaire lo Saga (ha/li/he) is a detribalized Indigenous (Atakapa Ishak) and Louisianan Kréyòl father, researching post-studio artist and kinmaker investigating alternative sovereignties and new territories emerging from climate chaos. Li practice is aimed at the eradication of Indigenous-settler divisions, White Supremacy, and Christian personhood’s grip over humans and nonhumans alike. Li artwork explores the afterlives and aftershocks of collision through investigating administrative, legislative, technological, and wave phenomena.

    As a kinmaker, Çacatzin is interested in the harmonising and integrating the matter resulting from the collision of materials, practices, and claims into new sensory patterns to improve practices for solidarity.

    Çacatzin has participated in residencies at Studio at the Edge of The World, Queer.Archive.Work, National Parks (Boston Harbor Islands) and Center for Arts, Design + Social Research and has published work in Writing the Land: Foodways and Social Justice, New York University Environmental Law Journal, and 900 Chicon literary magazine. Çacatzin holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and is co-founder of the Fyrthyr, where he advances multi-species jurisprudence as the principal researcher in the Lak Yapùhne Center for Jurisgenerative Arts.