BRAVE NEW ALPS

BENDING SPACES: LEARNING AND PRODUCING WHILE BEING ON EXHIBIT

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The invitation to participate in the conference, and to address the topic

of exhibiting and curating graphic design, offers us the opportunity to

reflect on some aspects of our approach to design as a (potentially) criti­

cally-engaged practice. More specifically it spurs us to reconsider to what

degree the notion of 'embodied criticality' - as proposed by ~heorist Irit

Rogoffl - which is central to our practice, shapes the moments in which

our work directly meets and interfaces with the public.

BRAVE NEW ALPS

Let us begin by briefly illustrating how we have developed our design prac­

tice so far, and how we understand it as part of a wider constellation of

practices that operate in different fields but are all related by the desire to

contribute to shaping a more just, heterogeneous and non-alienated society.

Since the very beginning of our collaborative practice, in

zoos, soon before graduating with a BA in Design from the Faculty of

Design and Art of the Free University of Balzano, we have been driven

by the will to establish a politically-engaged, activist design practice.

Studying at this Faculty, we were encouraged to take a research-based

approach to design that consistently integrated practice with theory and

fieldwork. Moreover, our personal interests and values led us early on

to think of the designer as a politically active subject, who uses the tools

slhe has acquired - in terms of formal and social communication skills,

awareness, critical analysis and conceptual thinking - to generate pro­

jects that are founded on the desire to contribute to a society based on

different values than those that currently dominate in the North-Western

part of the world. When we founded 'Brave New Alps', therefore, we

plunged into a kind of design practice in which practitioners generate

projects driven by their convictions, choosing to become personally in-

1 - For an elaboration of embodied criticality, see for example lrit Rogoff, 'What Is a

Theorist?', http://www.kein.org/node/62 (accessed April27, 2012).

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Brave New Alps. “Bending Spaces: Learning and Producing While Being on Show.” In Graphic Design, Exhibiting, Curating, edited by Giorgio Camuffo and Maddalena dalla Mura, 72–85. Bozen-Bolzano: University Press, 2013.

valved in specific issues, to which they apply their 'designerly' approach.

In our case this 'designerly' approach means that we proceed in our

work as follows. First we immerse ourselves in conflictual situations of

various nature that are evolving in specific places - they may range from

rather obvious geopolitical crises such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,

to more subtle tensions such as the ones that emerge within the field

of contemporary design education as it pursues a neoliberal course. We

inhabit the contexts in which these conflicts evolve over prolonged peri­

ods of time, in order to explore perspectives that may not yet have been

considered, to discover or to make unexpected connections, but above

all to achieve a certain degree of agency, to earn our own voice in each

context. Only then do we feel that we can respond to the experiences

and knowledges that we have gained, and we do so by designing specific

interventions or informative artefacts that seek to question the situation

that we have explored.

By working this way, the moments in which we interface

with the public are almost never the endpoints of the processes that

define our projects. We prefer to consider them as episodes along the

way, in which new knowledge is produced, which in turn feeds back

into the further development of the projects.

PERCEPTIVE SAFARI

A telling example of how we develop our projects through this immersive

approach, and one in which other people were also actively involved,

is Perceptive Safari. When we first moved to London in 2008, we were

intrigued by the friction created by the layering of the rural, industrial,

post-industrial and urban landscapes which can be found on the outskirts

of the city along the Thames in West Thurrock, Essex. Landscapes which

people from the city usually move through at high speed, on the Eurostar

train or by car, on the M25 orbital motorway. Here we were interested in

exploring some of the ways in which capital shapes the layout of large

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urban spaces and as a consequence our perception of them. \Ve wanted

to reveal the subconscious parts of the metropolis, which contribute to

its uninterrupted functioning but which the vast majority of London's

inhabitants neither notice nor perceive.

Inspired by Situationist psychogeography - which experi­

ments with the effects provoked by geographical environments on peo­

ple's emotions and behaviour - and by the work of artists, authors and

groups such as lain Sinclair, Patrick Keiller, Platform and Stalker, and

after several weeks of exploring the outskirts of London, we began to

focus more specifically on the landscape that unfurls between the towns

of Rainham and Grays.

Perceptive Safari, 2009: clockwise from the top, view of the area;

laundry detergent factory; landfill along the way

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For four months we spent almost every weekend walking

through these places and talking to people. Then during the week, we

would elaborate the material we had gathered and do more research in

archives and libraries about the past and present of this area.

Indeed, we were fascinated by the 'aura' of the landscape and

the places we were exploring and by the thoughts they triggered in us

about the economic processes that shaped them and the socio-economic

frictions embedded in them. However, we soon realized how difficult

it would be to represent and communicate these frictions in their com­

plexity. In fact, the wealth of sensorial information that we continuously

picked up in these places, and which are the only means for interpreting

and understanding how a landscape is shaped by economic processes,

can only be fully perceived when moving through that landscape on foot.

Given our desire to short-cut communication by bringing

Londoners directly into this environment, we decided to organize a Per­

ceptive S(lfari. We wanted other people to experience and engage with

the layers of meaning we had uncovered by physically bringing them

to the places, and by sharing with them the underlying stories we had

discovered along the way.

Over two days, in the spring of 2009, with a mixed group

of twenty-two people, including designers, artists and people from all

walks of life, we trekked from Rainham to Grays, spending one night in

Purfleet, which is a small town exactly halfway along the planned route.

All together, we walked down the middle of Medieval marshlands, waste

dumping sites, socially and economically deprived villages, chemical

production facilities, logistic plants and so on.

In Purfleet, we also visited the local Heritage Centre, an

incredible volunteer-run local history museum, curated by a group of

war veterans and their wives, who have been of great support for our

research. Furthermore, each participant was given a high-visibility or­

ange bag containing the book we had produced as a companion for this

walk, and which featured a selection of texts, stories, photographs and

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Perceptive Safari, 2009 : from the top, walking on the floodwall and towards Dartford Bridge;

vis iting the Purfleet Heritage Centre; the companion book for the walk

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Perceptive Safari, 2009 : exhibition at the Hackney Gallery, RCA, London ,

and at the Purfleet Hentage Centre

historical documents that we had collected in our research and which

we felt would expand the narrative about the places we were visiting.

There were no apparent links between the chapters of the book. It was

the walk itself that constituted the connecting narrative element.

During the excursion, the participants reflected on the land­

scape, and exchanged ideas with one another. In the following weeks

they elaborated further on their experiences by producing works - draw­

ings, pieces of music and video, objects, illustrations and more - in

response to the walk. All these visual, written and audio materials were

then assembled for an exhibition held at the Royal College of Art, in

London, where we were studying. In the exhibition, like in the book,

the walk represented the link connecting the works on display. Later the

same year, the exhibition was also shown at the Purfleet Heritage Centre.

The walk and the exhibition were not in fact the endpoints

of our research project, but led to more walks in the area with other

people and inspired several of the participants to pursue some of the

issues raised during the Safari in their creative practices.

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DESIGNING ECONOMIC CULTURES

As mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, our decision to

plunge into the thick of the issues we explore is inspired by what cultur­

al theorist Irit Rogoff describes as 'embodied criticality', which, in her

words, is a 'double occupation in which we are both fully armed with the

knowledge of critique, able to analyze and unveil, while at the same time

sharing and living out the very conditions we are able to see through'. 2

Practitioners who decide to adopt such an approach in their

projects cannot stay at a safe distance for a disembodied analysis: they

must call themselves into question, identify their position, problematize

the issues they deal with and the context they work in. Moreover, this

approach usually implies the involvement of other people in the process

of embodying criticality. It is our belief that such an embodied approach

can generate what feminist theorist Donna Haraway refers to as 'situ­

ated knowledges', which is a kind of knowledge that does not distance

the knowing - in our case designing - subject from everybody, but is a

knowledge - in our case a design built on that knowledge as well - that

is situated and embodied and thus always complex and contradictory

rather than objective, disembodied and simplistic.3

\Ve build on these premises of involvement to develop 'crit­

ically-engaged' design practices, sustaining that 'embodied criticality',

with the degree of involvement, problematization and situatedness that

it requires, may well provide a basis from which relevant contemporary

design practices may emerge.

Of course this approach also calls for a different relationship

between the designers, the exhibition context and the curators. The need

to bend the relationship between the exhibition context and the people

2-lbid.

3- Donna Jeanne Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in Feminism

and the Privilege of Partial Perspective; in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinven­

tion of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991.

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who gravitate around it has become increasingly urgent in our practice

over the years. We are continuously experimenting, stretching what can

be done with and in such spaces, most recently in relation to the prac­

tice-based research project Designing Economic Cultures, which we have

been developing since 2011. 4

As a project, Designing Economic Cultures belongs to one

direction in our practice, in which we attempt to reflect and critically

intervene in conflictual situations in which we are already deeply embed­

ded, but whose problematic aspects are often invisible to us and to the

people we work with. In this practice-based research, we seek to explore

and act upon the way the designer functions, within a context that con­

siders cultural industries as part of an economic as well as a social and

political system that since 2008 has been undergoing a deep crisis that

affects all our lives.

The focal question we are dealing with in this project is what

support structures can help sustain critically-engaged practitioners, so

that they can avoid giving in to the market and falling back upon more

commercial approaches to making their living. The starting point for

this investigation is a reflection upon the ways that designers tend to

feed and lubricate the mechanisms of our economic system, while at the

same time being constrained by the unstable, insecure and precarious

working conditions this very system produces. How can we, as designers,

contribute to the co-production of our livelihoods in ways that are not

- or are at least only in part - dictated by capital and that are based on

value-practices that stand in contrast to individualism and competitive­

ness inherent to the current system?

We are hence exploring what the attempt to bring alternative

value practices into design would imply: how would such an attempt

influence the content and the scope of the work designers produce, how

4- The project is based at the Design Department of Goldsmiths College, London,

and is made poss ible by a PhD fellowship in Design awarded to Bianca Elzenbaumer

for a period of three years (2011-2013).

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THEORETICAL RESEARCH

SEMINARS WORKSHOPS

X CONVERSATIONS INTERVIEWS

INHABITING EXPERIMENTAL SUPPORT STRUCTURES

would it re-shape the self-perception of designers, their ways of proceed­

ing and their social relations within and beyond the field of design?

Designing Economic Cultures is a project that in its prac­

tical component unfolds by attempting to stretch the spaces and other

resources offered by cultural institutions, in order to explore learning

and production according to certain value practices. In this process it

is crucial that the research be open and always involve other people,

since we believe that the construction of alternative economic cultures is

necessarily a collective endeavour. For this reason, the project is accom­

panied by a website that makes the various stages of its development pub­

lic .5 The website presents the interviews conducted with people whose

practice we find relevant, it shares the discussions developed during the

research seminars we conduct, but most of all it documents the various

'inhabitations' that are the core of the project.

Inhabitations are particularly significant moments during

which we use the institutional resources offered to us as creative prac­

titioners, to make our project public and to set up experimental support

structures in which we can experience and share some of the economic as

well as social mechanisms that we thus begin to understand. Our first in­

habitation took place between March and July 2on in Warsaw, where we

spent five months in a residency program at the Centre for Contemporary

5 .:.._ http;//www.des igningeconomiccultures.net.

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Residency at the CSW, Warsaw, 2011: left to right, Constructive Dismantling, seminar,

and My Castle Is Your Castle, room in a room interiors

Art Ujazdowski Castle (csw). During this period we worked mainly on

two fronts. First, we set up a seminar series called Constructive Disman­

tling for a group of design and art students from the Warsaw Academy

of Fine Art and Goldsmiths College, in which we explored alternative

economic practices in Poland both in the past, under the socialist re­

gime, and in the present, under capitalism. These seminars built up to a

three-day-long festival in the park surrounding the art centre, in which

a much larger public could be involved in the findings of this research

and participate in a series of lectures and workshops about autonomy,

the do-it-yourself culture, and the sharing of resources and knowledge.

On the other hand, we 'collectivized' our residency for ape­

riod of three months by sharing both our living and working space and

the budget that was allocated for our travels with six other practitioners

from different disciplines, who felt an affinity with our research project.

These practitioners lived and worked together with us in Warsaw, in a

'room within a room' structure constructed ad hoc in our studio.

82

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The second inhabitation within the framework of the

Designing Economic Cultures project took place between Septe_mber

and October zon, when we were offered a residency at Careof DOCVA,

a contemporary art space in Milan. Drawing on the findings of the col­

lectivized residency in Warsaw, we again decided to share the resources

allocated for our stay; we invited ten young Italian designers to share the

exhibition space and the budget we had raised for the project.

We built our daily working environment inside the Careof

gallery and throughout the two months we collectively organized a

series of seminars, shows and discussions revolving around the topics of

precarious working conditions, the social imaginary in capitalism, the

relationship between design and production in Italy and so on. People

in the group all contributed to the programme of the ·inhabitation by

organizing activities and events based on their own personal interests.

Construction site for non-affirmative practice, 2011:

the first days of the collectivized residency at Careof DOCVA, Milan

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Construction site for non-affirmative practice, 2011: from the top, seminar with economist

Herve Baron; conversation with San Precario; presentation by members of the Carrotworkers'

Collective; conversation with design historians Fiorella Bulegato and Alberto Bassi

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CONCLUSION

As these brief examples from our practice illustrate, our approach to

design has led us to consider the exhibition context in a particular way.

When offered the opportunity to exhibit our work, we increasingly tend

to bend - to shape, tweak, adapt and take over - spaces and other re­

sources, so that these occasions become moments of collective learning

and production. The degree to which a space can be stretched is partly

determined by the resources at hand, but more often than not by how

permissive the institutional context is towards us - and in this sense the

negotiation with our hosts of what can be done with the resources at

hand becomes an integral part of our design process.

Finally, considering our own practice as it is in conversation

with many similarly inspired practices, we think that at a time when more

and more attention is being given to the exhibition of design works, there

is a real opportunity to rethink how the exhibition itself can support

projects built on the assumption that as designers, we need to imagine

other ways of relating with each other, other value-practices and other

ways of working and interacting with the world.

Therefore, rather than with a statement, we would like to

end with a question: how can potential exhibition contexts and the

collaboration with institutions and curators enable as well as foster and

advance critically-engaged practices?

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