In this episode of Restless Grounds, host Mariana Fernández Mora is joined by Sabine Niederer, Flavia Dzodan, and Janine Armin to explore how storytelling, imagination, and artistic practice might offer resistance to extractive and colonial technological systems. The conversation moves through feminist, ecological, and anti-colonial frameworks, asking what it means to design, read, and live with technologies otherwise.

Together, they consider how technological imaginaries might shift from instruments of control to carriers of shared relations, becoming small, situated, and/or attentive. The discussion touches on data feminism, carrier bag theory, and interspecies communication, tracing how alternative modes of knowledge and relation can unsettle dominant logics of automation, productivity, and mastery.

What does it mean to treat machines as agents rather than tools? How can we practice care without reproducing extractive or gendered forms of labour? And what happens when we think of technology not as a project of mastery, but as a shared carrier bag, gathering histories, myths, and relations into new forms of collective life?The soundscapes in this episode were created by artist and researcher Angelo Custódio during the Material Playground “Everything Evaporates” (2025).