Giselly is a designer, researcher, futurist, and artist born in the western mountain range of the Colombian Andes and now based in New York. She has worked with the Government of Colombia on recovering and disseminating the memory of victims of the armed conflict, as well as with NGOs and academic institutions on projects related to civil rights, migration, and environmental justice.
She currently works as an Advisor at the Public Policy Lab, leading the project The People Say.
She also works independently in other projects as a curator, researcher, and artist, whose outcomes have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá (MAMBO), Parsons School of Design, Brooklyn Museum, United Nations Headquarters in New York, Canal Projects (New York), Open Society Foundations, and other international venues.
Practice
The WHAT:
Giselly’s practice takes the form of:
- Qualitative research
- Oral Histories
- Public policy briefs
- Curation and exhibitions
- Facilitation of workshops and spaces for conversation and learning
- Visual ethnographies
- Design fiction and speculative narratives
- Service design
- Communication strategies
The HOW:
Action Research
Exploring real-world issues through creative research methods, aiming to drive positive change.
Design and Art
Blending artistic creativity with practical design principles to craft engaging and impactful experiences
Futures and Systems Thinking
Analyzing complex systems and envision future possibilities through speculation and design fiction.
Co-creation
Facilitating collaboration that empowers diverse voices, driving innovation and shared ownership.
The WHY:
She endeavors to challenge the paralysis of social and environmental despair by shifting the focus from scarcity to abundance and promoting collective action.
Areas of interest:
Human relationships with a living Earth: exploring practices for reflection, conversation, and learning around human interconnectedness with the living world. Recognizing the more-than-human world as kin, not as resources.
Imagine other futures: decolonizing imagination from the dominant Western goal of infinite growth through consumerism and individualism. Exploring local alternatives towards preferred just futures based on solidarity, conviviality, and reciprocity.
Oral history, collective memory, and the power of telling stories: facilitating the telling of embodied stories that enrich our perspective of the world and improve the intergenerational passage of knowledge.
Migration: I believe in a world of open borders.