It’s been now four months since I first arrived in Buenos Aires to conduct fieldwork for my PhD in social design. A post about it all is long due, and I can only say that the main reason that kept me from writing was actually the overwhelming abundance of projects to write about. I reckon I am still in a process of digesting it all.
My time and energy here mostly headed towards the project that hosts me as a collaborator and now a friend (or so I hope) - the book publisher Eloísa Cartonera. While working at Eloisa and learning from and along with them, I could also take a look at many like-minded initiatives, many of them a product of the social and economical upheavals of 2001. As one can read at Eloisas’s website:
“It all began with the crisis of 2001. As some say, “we are a product of the crisis”, or that we “aestheticized misery”. Actually, it was nothing like that. We were a group of people who came together to work in a different way, to learn new things through work, to build up a cooperative, to learn how to subsist and manage ourselves, to work towards a common good. Like many of the movements and collectives born out of those insane times, we organized into a cooperative, or a small assembly group, as there were also neighbourhood and community groups, and all sorts of social movements. Citizens, workers and neighbours - there we were.”
I do intend to write about Eloisa in more depth in an upcoming post. But working next to them, while trying to take distance and ponder on their choices and their process and the way they have changed so much since 2003 has proved for me to be a rich but complex exercise, and I will need more time until I can come up with anything remotely readable about them.
What I did immediately realized was that a project like Eloisa was but one example of the multitude of collaborative and community solutions that emerged in those years following the referred crisis. As the above quote bears witness, people took the streets and found in community and collaborative practices the way to cope with such an acute scenario. Very creatively, the Argentineans developed a multitude of ways to make it through the day, applying creativity and developing design and artistic projects for a very specific and demanding context.
There were all sorts of alternative economies popping up, like the barter clubs or similar exchange platforms. Workers took over the factories they had been dismissed from, and ran self-organized independent businesses. Theater and street performance became major political participation instruments, with massive citizen involvement and even the creation of a specific form of performance - the escrache.
“The escrache is a particular political demonstration that emerged in Argentina in the turn of the century by the organization H.I.J.O.S. The members of H.I.J.O.S. started the escraches as a way of showing to the community the presence of unpunished criminals of the dictatorship (1976-1983).” (read more about the escrache phenomenon here).
An array of cooperative structures emerged, where it’s arguable that design is more or less present, and which got me wondering - where were the designers through all this, and how were they engaging?
I already came up with a couple of answers. Obviously, it was never a straightforward response.
One of the many examples one might present was a graphic design competition followed by an itinerant exhibition, under the name ¡Dios es argentino! (meaning God is Argentinean!). Although it sounds very peculiar and even arrogant to my ears, this is said to be a house-hold expression in Argentina. It’s a curious cultural expression from people that once lived in the “land of abundance” and that underwent a harsh decade of scarcity, repression, unemployment and social inequality. It has to do with the pride Argentineans carry themselves with, it has to do with the awareness of being a very privileged country in terms of natural and also cultural resources, it even has to do with Diego Maradona; But it also has to do with all the opposites - the irony of what was made of such a promising nation, or as I was heard it in a documentary film the other day: “¿ Si Dios es Argentino por qué nos abandonó?” (If God is Argentinean why did he abandoned us?).
Two of the thirty posters that made up the final selection of this exhibition (it’s stated that a hundred were submitted) refer exactly to that divinized self-perception. Pablo Agustin Mendoza (author of the poster at the left) and Sara Paoletti (right) both visually represent this divine aspect of being Argentinean. But while Pablo lists the same reasons above stated (the most beautiful women, the best performers, tango dancing, the best meat, the best landscapes, mate-tea, the wine, the people - and of course, Diego Maradona…) Sara takes it further to the irony of it all. In her poster one can read “God is poor, God is an artist, God is a cardboard-picker, God is dangerous…God is Argentinean”. I particularly appreciate her poster for bringing to light all these aspects that emerged from the afflicting situations the crisis created, and for more or less placing artist and the need to be creative in the bigger picture. It’s important to realize how for so many people this fall into creativity and artistic production was nothing less than a terrible consequence of an despairing impotence.
In Gustavo Saliola’s poster (below) the disillusioned self-perception goes even further. The Argentineans are depicted as specialists, that’s for sure, but of unwholesome skills, to say the least. In the simulated street graffiti one can read “Che Bush, if you ever need help let us know, here in Argentina we really know how to destroy a country!”. And it’s not by chance that it’s set in a street from Palermo, and a particularly dirty one (well, as most of them are…). The author goes on to state: “There is something I’m sure about. If our country gets cleaner in the upcoming years, nobody will convince me God is not Argentinean“.
Many of the posters represent this generalized disappointment. They reflect a massive effect of shock the Argentinean people lived through, witnessing a country that had everything to make it greatly, and that for many years enjoyed a considerable amount of material prosperity and wealth, suddenly caught in a economical farmyard (literally, considering they named it “corralito“), unable to take their money from the banks, seeing poverty in all forms (including political) strike like a wave.
Sol Mendonza gives us a testimony on how the design class lived it, or escaped from it, in the poster below, which demands no translation.
And for a more positive outlook over it all, the winners of the competition, Amalia González and Ezequiel Bluvstein’s poster (below). To remind us that all that happened can serve as a wake up call to the need for social engagement, or as the designers themselves put it: “The events of the 19th and 20th of December 2001, under the noise of “cacerolas” (cooking pans) were a turning point in Argentina’s history as a large part of society got out and into the streets, awakening from social lethargy, in a society where unemployment and poverty and a deteriorated educational system had deepened. People began to take charge of their own destiny, new political actors emerged with communal assemblies, with the movements of unemployed workers and with factories which were recovered by their workers.” (2)
¡ Dios es argentino ! was organized by the Design European Institute in Barcelona. It was curated by Elenio Pico and Luciana Leveratto. The awarded posters were selected by an international jury composed of Mario Eskenazi, Andrea Rauch, Manuel Estrada, Norberto Chaves and Gustavo Fosco. The exhibition was shown in several occasions both in Argentina as in Spain (in 2004) and it’s possible to see it online here.
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