OLIVIA   OBEN

. . . is an interdisciplinary visual designer and researcher interested in exploring cultural ownership, binaries, and systems in and through graphics, design, publications, and physical media. 


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Olivia’s work explores themes surrounding care through delicate and tactile printed matter, using her skills in physical processes, digital design, and publication-making as mediums. She takes inspiration from Lauren Berlant and Robin Wall Kimmerer, fascinated by their abilities to bring forward the unseen, unnoticeable connections in our lived (eco)systems into conversations. Inspired by her Filipino experience, her interest in caring runs deep as she looks into ideas of hospitality, institutional and economic care, and the country’s biggest export: its workers.

She carried her interest in Berlant and systems in one of her recent projects, a short film called “I Care” (2025), taking the relationship between love and inconvenience as a starting point. She applied that to discuss our relationship with people in the service and care industry, specifically within her experience of househelp and caretakers. Combined with thoughts from Francoise Verges (2024) and Dan Hicks (2020), she questioned: How different or similar is the treatment of museum object’s narratives and those of careworkers? How does the economy of care treat all beings, living and nonliving?

Olivia continues to explore the connections between nonliving, other living, and humans by looking at how materials and mediums influence how we communicate, or attempt to, understand sociocultural ideas and each other.

Serif 420    + HK Grotesk Regular (both by Hanken Design Co.)