Assume Nothing is an invitation to critically engage with a present that can no longer be taken as stable and demands new ways of thinking and inhabiting the world. In a moment in which narratives of progress and development are being profoundly re-examined, we are confronted with discontinuous and often contradictory temporalities. In this condition, the very imagination of the future seems suspended, reinforcing a widespread sense of uncertainty and disorientation.

Within this scenario, 'assuming nothing' becomes an act of responsibility. The book proposes to understand not-knowing as an operative condition: it brings together the works of thirty-two young artists and designers who graduated in the past year from the Faculty of Design and Art at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Through a variety of approaches and sensibilities, their projects explore the contradictions and potentials of generating knowledge through image, gesture, form, sound, and action. Their intersection with newly commissioned writings on pedagogy in art and design opens up an interrogation of ways of working that renounce predetermined outcomes and enter open-ended processes that resist and transform established trajectories.

Edited by Giulia Cordin with text by Gianluca Camillini, Zasha Colah, Silvia Dal Dosso, Davide T. Ferrando, Alessia Formica, Roberto Gigliotti, Shona Kitchen, Eva Leitolf, R.H. Lossin, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Chiara Siravo, Elisabeth Tauber, Aart van Bezooijen and Seçil Uğur Yavuz.