Designer as ‘border-crosser’

As a border intellectual (Paulo Freire), he constantly reexamines and raises questions about what kind of borders are being crossed and revisited.

Henry Giroux.

Henry A. Giroux, in an article about Paulo Freire, uses the term border intellectual to refer to his type of practice, term, in turn, taken from Abdul R. JanMohamed‘s article Worldliness without-world, Homelessness-as-Home: Towards a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual. He uses this term to refer to a person that has no particular attachment to a geographical place, neither to an intellectual one, meaning that he can constantly re-negotiate the borders of his knowledge. This takes me back to a conversation I once had with Paolo Lugari (founder of Las Gaviotas -probably another border intellectual), in which he told me that he was in the permanent search of temporary truths, acknowledging that there is nothing permanent in knowledge, except the the revisiting of its borders.

I want to consider my practice as designer as a border-crosser. As a Colombian (yet with little attachment with what that could mean) studying in Holland, I live in a similar exiled state, on a constant state of homelessness, which allows me to cross (field)borders, like the ones existing between design and non-design. In this case, the border-crossing seeks to relate both sides of the border, bringing what could be regarded as a cultural exchange, bridging between the inside and the outside.

In 1979, for Skulptur Projekte in Münster, the north-american artist Michael Asher did an installation with a caravan parked in different places around the city. It was an ordinary caravan, which could be disregarded by any passer by, but seen as a piece of art to the spectators who would have visited the official venue before, finding a map with its description and location. This intervention poses a question about the work of art, and the contexts in which art is appreciated; in the case of design, even though it is less evident and contrasting (design pieces in galleries and museums, abstracted to any situation of use), still seems important to bridge the design world with the rest of the world (avoiding to call it real world, understanding the implications of the term). This is what a border-crosser designer can do.