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The Journal of Design #39 Short stories about survival and design Spring 2025

The Journal of Design #39 Short stories about survival and design Spring #0#5

Contents &

Introduction The Courage of the Cucumber

Contents

Contributors

Masthead The people behind Disegno

The Return to the Collection Permanent collections take centre stage at ArkDes

Through a Glass Darkly Studio Brynjar & Veronika make glass windows into translucent nebulae

10) Hard Work, Soft Spaces Comfort and survival in design for childbirth

Incomplete Dreaming up alternative uses for abandoned spaces with Ghana’s Limbo Museum

Jach’a Qhatu Trading at a Bolivian market with El Alto Aesthetics

Where’s Your Cow From? Studio Saar’s gaushala houses an indigenous breed

To Survive Death Attempts at cryonic preservation, captured by Murray Ballard

Opa A family odyssey to reclaim a forgotten designer

Surviving What? Mudac’s preppers exhibition critiques consumer culture

Nature Does Not Exist Samy Rio designs for human life and sylvan health

Competition and Compassion Playing non-hierarchical sports with Gabriel Fontana’s Multiform

All Eyes Studiomama’s face castings stare back

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Threading History Aissa Dione preserves Senegal’s weaving traditions

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In Search of the Long-Armed Chair Tracing a shapeshifting chair from its colonial origins to modern deconstructions

DISCOVER AIR SYSTEM, THE WALL PARTITION SYSTEM AND DOOR PANEL. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

London Flagship Store 83-85 Wigmore Street W1U1DL London london@rimadesio.co.uk +44 020 74862193

Jach’a Qhatu Words Tin Ayala with El Alto Aesthetics,Photographs Santos Miranda Ramos and Noemi Gonzales

Dawn arrives like an icy blade over the Altiplano. The wind cuts through, lifting the dust from the empty avenue, dragging plastic bags discarded last week, twisting old posters of candidates without legitimacy. At (,000m above sea level, in El Alto, Bolivia, the sun is a dagger, blinding before it warms. The first vendor lays out her aguayo,1 a minimal square-metre territory of market ballast stretched over the open ground. With movements steeped in memory, she unfolds the blue plastic sheet, pulls out bags filled with coca leaves, and arranges with care this plant that has withstood conquest and racism. Then another woman sits beside her. Then another. And so, with no other call than the light warming the hills, the Jach’a Qhatu2 begins to take shape, one of the largest markets in South America – a vast trading ground that no one ever sees in its entirety because it never stops shifting, piling up, winding its own labyrinths. By the time the sun rises fully, the market is a human river. Women in polleras with children tied to their backs, young

men in smuggled sneakers, uncles with eyes accustomed to the logic of this disorder. In its narrow and wide streets alike, stalls overflow with Chinese toys, Taiwanese radios, Brazilian underwear, cellphones recycled just the day before, medicinal herbs brought from Sorata, avocados from Cochabamba, evangelical Bibles printed in Colombia. The market is a fragmented map of the world, a geography of objects without passports. The ch’iwiñas3 and makeshift stalls turn walking here into a journey across a mountain range of merchandise. There are piles of second-hand clothes, bundled up and shipped from the United States and Europe – garments discarded by a gringo and reborn here with a new owner. There are car parts still dripping with oil, brought from clandestine workshops where stolen vehicles from across the border are dismantled. In the Feria 1! de Julio, its o(cial title, di)erent territories and timelines are chewed together in a single bite. Objects never meant to meet – born in opposite geographies, designed for di)erent purposes – coexist. Carefully

selected coca leaves from the Yungas are sold just meters away from plastic Chinese toys with Mandarin labels. The ancestral and the globalised, the handmade and the industrial, do not cancel each other out; they absorb, empower, and transfigure one another. The market is an abigarrado landscape, a ch’ixi& fabric where the Indigenous and the global do not ask permission to overlap. Here, the popular economy is a defiant cry against the formal structures of banks, contracts, and exclusionary systems. El Alto’s thriving economy is no accident. It is upheld by thousands of migrant bodies and the children of the rural migrants who turned this highland into a city – mostly urban Aymaras, people whom the white elites have chosen to call “cholos” with disdain. But to be cholo is not a defeat, nor an insult. It is the embodiment of a modernity the state never wanted to imagine – one that does not erase its Indigenous roots, that refuses to be domesticated by whiteness, that inhabits the urban without abandoning the rural. In Peruvian sociologist Aníbal

Survival

Nature Does Not Exist Words Helen Gonzalez Brown,Images Samy Rio

Species of humans have lived amongst the peaks and valleys of the Cévennes forest in the south east of France for at least (00,000 years. As such, the forest has long been entwined with industry. In the 19th century, mulberry trees were grown to feed silkworms and produce stockings fit for the calves of European royalty; chestnut trees, locally nicknamed “breadfruit trees”, were used to make flour; and maritime pine trees – which grow quickly and as straight as arrows – were planted to buttress coal mines. But by the mid-twentieth century, French silk had been replaced by cheaper imports; fastergrowing crops such as potatoes were favoured over chestnuts, and the coal mines closed down. For the first time in 1,000 years, vast swathes of the forest were left untouched by human intervention. This sounds like it would have been a good thing, but it wasn’t. The highly flammable pines dominated the forest, leaving it susceptible to fires. Meanwhile, ink disease, a destructive fungus that has been linked to climate change, killed o) many of the chestnut trees, and the dead were left standing. Three-quarters of the woods and forests in France are privately owned, and without any financial incentive for the Cévennes’s many landlords to tend to the forest, its paths disappeared into the thicket. The forest has become so overgrown that it is now di(cult for people to enter and make helpful interventions. The fates of the surrounding villages, towns and small cities are intimately linked to the forest; the region’s summer heatwaves and droughts derive, in part, from its poor health. Designer Samy Rio grew up near the Cévennes, and first noticed when a teenager that the river in which he used to swim all summer had started to dry up by mid-July. “As a kid, you just think, ‘Oh, I can’t swim there,’” Rio says. Only as an adult has he considered how the local farmers who use the river’s water for their crops would be forced to dig further underground or to source water from another valley. “It creates this butterfly e)ect, where one thing happens and then the humans try to find a short term solution, but the short term solution becomes another part of the damage,” he says. “And that’s something which takes time for people to realise.” Rio is known for his previous work applying industrial manufacturing methods to bamboo to create lamps, benches and consumer electronics out of less damaging

materials. His bamboo bluetooth speakers and hairdryer earned him the Grand Prix at the Design Parade festival in southern France in 2$15, which was soon followed by residencies in Japan and Taiwan researching further into the material’s craftsmanship and environmental context. Rio continued his interest in craftsmanship, industrial design and natural ecosystems through work with the circular design and biomaterials lab Atelier Luma in Arles, where he developed a shelf, a tray, a bench, and a table made out of invasive plants found in Camargue National park in southern France. “I realised after a few projects that something was missing, and that was actually knowing the territory and the place really well,” Rio says, explaining why he wanted to apply his knowledge to a project in the Cévennes, near his hometown. Rio also wanted to create a project which would develop beyond prototypes or a limited series. “Me alone as a designer, I don’t have the power to come up with a way to concretise everything,” he explains. As such, Rio set up Standards Autochtones, an association of foresters, scientists and researchers, to explore the possibilities of reenergising the Cévennes’s forestbased industries. By revitalising the economy of the forest, Rio aims to take the first step towards caring for it better: creating paths and small roads into the forest so that people can access it easier on foot or by truck. “If there is economical interest in using the trees, people will collectively pay to make the track,” he says. While businesses in the 1,th century were focused on extracting goods from the forest, Standards Autochtones’s goal is to preserve its long-term health by coming up with uses for the dominant chestnut and pine trees so that foresters can replace them with other species and create a more resilient forest. Part of the profits from any successful products will be funnelled back into Standards Autochtones, and the organisation will continue to adapt according to the needs of both the forest and the marketplace. Searching for a potential use for the chestnut trees, Rio got in touch with Arnaud Mainardi, founder of manufacturer Atelier Chatersèn, whose furnituremaking methods lie at the intersection of craft and industry. Mainardi draws upon traditions such as basketry and barrel hoop making alongside steam bending to create furniture which preserves the dark bark of the chestnut tree and its strikingly pale knots. “What I really like is this naturally black stain of the chestnut,” Rio says. “For me, it’s what gives its identity

Survival

Photographs: Danielle Caputo.

On cue, the space’s lights begin flickering as part of a programmed sequence intended to engender paranoia and discomfort in visitors. It’s definitely working (how did the ancient Assyrians know I want to write a book?) and sets the stage for a recurring theme of the exhibition. “Preppers react to a situation,” Koivu tells me, “whatever that situation may be, by not trusting in the system.” For the record, I don’t think the world is coming to an end – at least not in any way that fits comfortably on an A& poster. Although the recent global rise of temperatures, tensions and tin-pot dictators has made the future precarious, my money is still on civilisation’s slow death by entropy, rather than one-o) catastrophe. In this respect, I don’t believe in disasters, but rather the gradual enshitification of society: death by the slow erosion of public services; the hollowing out of civil liberties; the withering of our environment; the persecution of the vulnerable for the benefit of the powerful; the metastases of inequity, capital and exploitation. This idea, to be clear, is not alien to the preppers themselves – they’re not exclusively worried about extinction-level events. In Dancing at Armageddon, for instance, Mitchell notes that despite appearances, many cases of survivalism may be “neither intentional protest nor practical readiness for coming uncertainties.” Instead, he argues, the movement’s activities and beliefs can be interpreted as a kind of “encompassing game of make-believe”, whose participants are pursuing “a rhetorical means of transforming depersonalized consumer society, rife with mass commodities and mass marketing”. Prepping, the suggestion runs, may be as much about asserting autonomy, and critiquing the existing social system, as it is about, well, actual prepping. “Preppers’ fear of the apocalypse can be read as a diagnosis of the present, o)ering a profound and meaningful critique of contemporary society,” write Koivu and Kugler in We Will Survive – The prepper movement, a book that accompanies their exhibition. “Their actions make visible society’s fears and fault lines.” With this in mind, Koivu and I pass by a Huggable Atomic Mushroom, a plushie polyester atomic blast created by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, in collaboration with Michael Anastassiades, as part of their influential 2$$&/$5 project Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times. It’s a squidgy, squodgy, plastic, catastrophic, atomic collectible, which feels like Dunne and Raby managed to find the ideal metaphor for what’s wrong with our society. Who needs an actual

atomic blast, I think, when consumerism and cheap mass manufacture will probably tip us over the edge anyway? In this respect, “snafu” seems apt: we don’t necessarily require an armageddon event to ensure our own eradication – we’re heading there anyway. “That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his 1,3, ‘Central Park’ series of reflections. “It is not that which is approaching, but that which is.” To illustrate this idea, Koivu and Kugler’s remit for their exhibition has been laudably broad. There are sections, for instance, that document design projects exploring society’s fears of destruction and collapse, with contributions including Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym’s nickel “souvenir” models of real-world buildings connected to various tragedies and atrocities, positioned next to Reed Kram’s unnerving 2&-hour recordings of online security camera feeds. Elsewhere, the show expands its gaze to state-sponsored survivalist schemes,3 such as Japan’s Disaster Preparedness Tokyo protocol for steering citizens to safety should its capital be hit by earthquakes; Switzerland’s network of emergency shelters that can o)er sanctuary to , million people; and Helsinki’s vast “second city” of subterranean spaces and infrastructure carved into its bedrock during the Cold War, which have been newly documented for the exhibition by filmmaker Tapio Snellman. The core of the show, however, is its Prepper Supermarket – a central space in which decommissioned shelves from Switzerland’s Migros supermarket chain have been stocked with products designed for, or endorsed by, the prepper community. “What I like about all these objects,” Kugler explains as she joins me and Koivu in the space, “is that it’s surely the first and only [design] exhibition you can make where every object is really, really well made and really, really useful.” Given that I am in the process of clearing out a flat and am, therefore, très au fait with my own accumulation of pointless shit,& the Prepper Supermarket makes for chastening viewing – everything is confrontationally practical. Koivu and Kugler have researched their topic immaculately, trawling YouTube, books and dedicated survivalist blogs such as The Prepared, SurvivalBlog and SHTF Preparedness to bring together some 3$$ 3

Survival

An interesting wrinkle is considering whether these state-sponsored projects can be thought of as national extensions of the prepper impulse, given that preppers typically distrust the state and its assorted systems. At last count, I own 1! table lamps and one table.

the mix of materials and crafts and the deafening sound of the looms working – all touched by the beautiful light coming in through the ceiling windows. Dione’s spaces are part industry, part museum, which makes them all the more special. One of the new looms in Pikine is from a factory in Lyon, dating from the 1,5$s. The loom is currently non-functional, but Dione is now working with local engineers and mechanics to restore it to use. She tells me that levels of manufacturing skill are high in Senegal and, in order to avoid having to import spare parts for these ancient looms, local makers can make replicas instead. In so doing, more local mouths are fed, and more local workers remain in business. Dione’s craft is not only impacted by global markets, however, but also by the remnants of Senegal’s colonial ties with France. The new Senegalese government, which was elected in spring 2$2& under President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko of the Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (PASTEF) party, seems to be working to change this post-colonial relationship, however, and in December 2$2&, the Minister of Industry and Trade announced that the country plans to ban both the import of secondhand clothing – which amounts to 18,5$$ tonnes each year in Senegal – and the export of raw textile materials in order to protect and revitalise its domestic textile industry. “They are re-joining our philosophy,” Dione says. The Pikine space is a huge factory, yet seemingly not big enough for Dione’s ambitions. She already needs additional space and has now embarked on another quest that she hopes can further contribute to reigniting the country’s textiles history. She is currently looking into partnering with the partly government-owned Senegalese company Domitexka. Founded in 2$1$, Domitexka specialises in textile production for export and, in 2$18, took over a disused factory in Kahone, a town southeast of Dakar, where hundreds of looms were left behind as part of its closure. The proposed deal will be an exchange, a collaboration between industry and design: Domitexka wants Dione’s aesthetic; she wants its looms. And so the future is created and everyone can survive. Dione’s decades of experience have given her a solid understanding of what it means to preserve a craft. “The most important thing is to not lose the technique,” she explains to me, “so the only way for any craft to be preserved is to modernise the aesthetic.” When I see

how her sofas, cushions, throws, boubous and shoes marry contemporary design with traditional textiles, her vision becomes tangible. True to the essence of traditional Manjak cloth, the patterns in her collections range from simple lines to complex designs, such as a pattern which resembles a hair comb that Dione uses as her company’s logo. Yet by widening the traditional looms and experimenting with di)erent colour palettes, she has managed to open a new world of possibilities for traditional Senegalese textiles. “In order to keep people employed, new markets need to be found and that comes through design,” Dione says. “Whether for craft or for industry, in Africa, in our context, to design is the only way.” Before we end our time in Pikine, I ask Dione to summarise her experience. “The overall concept is political,” she replies. “Making on the spot, in Senegal, in Africa, developing know-how and being independent. That’s it. When you make your own goods that you consume, that you use everyday yourself and you don’t have to import, that is a political move.” I leave the factory elated. As a maker, it is inspiring and reassuring to see that it can be done: that we can work against the often overwhelming global currents. Dione’s story has all the ingredients for success: passion, vision, an in-depth understanding of her craft’s history and local traditions, and a relentless drive to continue threading new stories of survival.+END Bisila Noha is an artist and writer whose work centres on craft, women’s stories and social justice. Djibril Drame is a photographer, visual artist, curator, and independent researcher on graffiti based in Dakar.

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In Search of the Long-Armed Chair Words Sarita Sundar and Rachel Lee,Photographs Hugo Revollet

The Nieuwe Planter’s Chair, designed by Mileno Guillorel-Obregón and Yassine Ben Abdallah.

Survival

Disegno #39