Several years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened the audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will – and sometimes those of bad, as well – have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment’s rest.
I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its creative expression, that has deserved the attention of the Design Academy Eindhoven. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.
Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of oldtimers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.
Now, do not get to excited, for what you have just read is not of my authorship, but it is parts of the discourse given by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, when receiving the Nobel Prize in 1982; yet, I consider it timely, and it expresses my motivations for working on a project that explores the margins of design, at the place where we stop calling it design. These peripheries may only be explored through a thorough understanding of the contexts under which creation occurs, based on necessity rather than market demands and are self initiated, rather than commissioned; they are the vivid antithesis of traditional design practice.
On dOCUMENTA(13), the French artist Kader Attia attempted to challenge the aesthetic criteria and judgement of African arts and crafts, by presenting a series of objects repaired on a vernacular way, resulting in pieces that you would rarely see in an ethnographic museum, for not meeting the aesthetic idea made in Europe of African art. In another context, the Cuban artist and designer Ernesto Oroza, presents a series of objects made throughout Cuba by combining components of different products, and categorizes them as objects of necessity. These examples, in my opinion, are genuine cases of anti-design, even more than what was made by radical designers in the 60’s and 70s, who mainly operated within the margins of traditional design and architecture, and in central countries like England and Italy.
Nowadays, we can see approaches with this critical attitude towards the establishment all around peripheral countries. In my opinion, one of the most interesting cases for me is Greece, for it presents an interesting paradox: it was the place where the canons of beauty as well as the basis of western knowledge were set, yet now is at the margins of Europe and at the verge of being set aside of the EU. A couple of years ago, due to the crisis, the government passed a law to charge a new tax with the electricity in Athens; the people that didn’t pay it –which were most of them- got their electricity cut. In response to this, a self-organized initiative grew in the anarchist neighbourhood of Exarchia, to train people in how to reconnect their electricity back, including posters, meetings and amateur video tutorials of how to do it.
Reflecting upon the examples quoted before, one question comes to my mind: why design? Why design if it has always been favouring the rich and powerful and minimizing the poor and vulnerable? Why design if it desperately seeks the novelty, even when it is not necessary? Why design if it serves as a neo-colonial tool, by setting standards to live to oppressed communities? Why design, if it is an object of desire, rather than an object of necessity? It could be said that a shift from an aesthetics of production to an aesthetics of consumption already happened; now, we have to shift to an aesthetic of use to understand these phenomenons.
How can we learn from the creativity and inventiveness existing in the periphery?
It is my interest to explore the inventiveness and creativity on the periphery, for I understand it as a response to paternalist impositions, a declaration of independence, and a statement of autonomy.
it is what it is 