** Co-presented with Design in Public **

Design in Public presents the 10th annual Seattle Design Festival, the largest design-related event in the Pacific Northwest. This year’s festival theme, About Time, sought to ponder, past, present, and future at a unique moment of transition for the city, the region and the world. Instead, it presently confronts the reality of a global public health crisis and its profound impact on our daily lives.

On the occasion of Seattle Design Festival, Northwest Film Forum presents A Poetics of Living: Biomimetic Blueprints, an interdisciplinary film program and interactive community vision board collectively contemplating the poetry of pace, process, and performance in how we relate to our built and natural environments. From a foundation of improvisation and biomimetic ideation, these films invite us to slow down and prioritize care in the doing, serving as vignettes of a more collaborative, connected, community-centered way of life to benefit generations to come.

The application of models and systems found in nature to human design is called biomimicry. Biomimetic ideation and adaptation have enriched the diversity of our designs for daily life, giving us novel approaches to architecture, art, programming, and urban planning.

(Jeff Frost, US, 2019, 2 min)

Jeff Frost’s video study of a living mural painting breathes a vibrant essence of potential into an otherwise familiarly stark space, crafting a durational optical illusion.

(Heidi Duckler, US, 2019, 10 min) 

Dancer, choreographer, and artistic director Heidi Duckler’s work captures dancers moving through the seasons in mirrored relationship with a public garden landscape, searching for the first bloom.

(Caroline Alder and Damien Faure, France, 2018, 59 min)

The Open City (Ciudad Abierta) is a utopian community just north of Valparaiso, founded by Chilean architect Alberto Cruz and Argentinian poet Godofredo Iommi. Formed in 1971 using an epic poem as their collaborative manifesto, Ciudad Abierta continues to attract those seeking an alternative pace aligned with nature. Architect Caroline Alder narrates this contemplative film, guiding us through the coastal environment that inspired its eccentric architectural landscape and habitable spaces for commune and rest. Here, she says, “where time becomes poetic,” is the land of Amereida.

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In an interview with Curbed, Alder states: “The anthropocene is today subjecting us to a heavy test in which we are suffering the climatic and social consequences that we ourselves have caused due to this rhythm in which human beings have done and continue to do without thinking, without measuring the consequences of what they do. In this context, this film is an invitation to take the time to reflect on how we conceive architecture, how we understand a territory, how we inhabit a continent, [and] how we inhabit the world.”