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
76
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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
77
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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