THE OBJECTS

Before I speak, I have something important to say

Groucho Marx

It’s not the monuments that teach us history, it’s the ruins

Carl Hammarén

What was first the dog or the tree? Dogma!!

IRN-BRU TV ad

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s William Blake

It could be good for your heart

Shredded Wheat TV ad

All you need is love

The Beatles

Don’t be afraid to see what you see

Ronald Reagan

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live

Kim Il-Sung

I am the walrus

The Big Lebowski

In God we trust US $20 bill

God is in the details

Mies Van der Rohe

Jesus loves you

Christian slogan

There is no indispensable man

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Now that we can do anything, what will we do?

Bruce Mau

Dig for victory

WWII British slogan

Beneath the pavement lies the beach

Henri Lefebvre

I am two with nature

Woody Allen

Abstraction is real

Joseph Albers

On the time when the surrealists were right

André Breton

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste

Marcel Duchamp

I can’t believe it’s not butter Margarine brand name

Change we can believe in Barack Obama

Power to the people

Socialist slogan

Black power

SNCC political slogan

White power

White supremacist slogan

Girl power

The Spice Girls

Flower power

Hippy movement

I have a dream

Martin Luther King

Power to the imagination

Situationist slogan

Against the state, total trip out!

Anarchist graffiti

A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage

Herbert Hoover

Sale 50% off Retailing strategy

It is good to have just one child Chinese one child policy slogan

New Labour Labour party slogan

One, two, three, four, fuck the rich and feed the poor! Anti-capitalist chant

Red or Dead Fashion label

Capitalism is boring Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

I’m lovin’ it

McDonald’s trade mark

I love Fidel Castro and his beard

Bob Dylan

Form follows function

Modernist motto

Stick it to the man School of Rock

God save the Queen Sex Pistols

Beat on the brat with a baseball bat, oh yeah!

The Ramones

New fighters will arise

Communist slogan

Make love not war

Anti-Vietnam War slogan

Happiness is obsolete

Theodor Adorno

Less is more

Minimalist design motto

Childhood was invented in the XVII century

Neil Postman

You are born modern

Jean Baudrillard

I hope I die before I get old

The Who

A woman’s right to choose

Pro-choice campaign

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what can you do for your country

John F. Kennedy

It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong Voltaire

Be realistic, demand the impossible

May ’68 slogan

Sex and drugs and rock & roll

Ian Dury

A return to normalcy

Warren E. Harding

What’s the point of free speech if you have nothing to say?

J.G. Ballard

Until victory always

Che Guevara

Love – Hate

The Night of the Hunter

Found objects: dialogues

El Ultimo Grito 2009

Featuring Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo

Abandon Architectures

Our departing point for Abandon Architectures was a photograph that we took in Milan during one of our annual visits to the Salone del Mobile. It was a Sunday morning, our plane was leaving for London after lunchtime and we needed to catch the bus to the airport from the Central station. It was a very nice morning, so we decided to walk from our hotel, which was not far away, just off Corso Buenos Aires. The walk was probably no more than ten or fifteen minutes. We crossed the square that precedes the station and as we headed towards the side of the building, where the bus stops are, we noticed that there was quite a lot of activity going on in one of the gardens next to the Central Station. Little groups of immigrants were gathered along the walkway. As we got closer we noticed that at least a couple of dozen ladies had set up shop in the park, in what you could call an outdoor hairdressing salon. They provided service to a clientele that stood around in sort of unorganised queues awaiting their turn, chatting their time away, while the cut hair piled up on the floor and was slowly scattered around by the mild morning breeze.

We are sure that no Milanese would ever imagine doing something similar. The city has a protocol that dictates how we behave within it. There are a few negotiable spaces, but that is it. But people coming from other places read this city in a completely different way because their own situation is new, and this city is not a known place. It is unexplored territory still to be colonised. To be a foreigner gives you that space. Everything is new and interesting, but also (knowingly or unconsciously) you do not have to comply because you are free from both the dominance of the local culture and the pressure of the culture from your place of origin.1

Reflecting on the thoughts raised by this photograph gave us the idea for the title Abandon Architectures. We chose to use the word ‘architectures’ (meaning the structure of anything) because it implies that they are constructed by people, and are not ‘natural phenomena’ although sometimes it might seem that way, which we guess is what Baudrillard calls ‘The Perfect Crime’. Consequently we find ourselves living victims of the residues and the structures that other people have thought for us. Although sometimes we are able to reinterpret their meanings, these are always subjugated by the origins, which become even more unquestionable as we lose consciousness of their sources and just accept them with a ‘this is the way things are’.

“This here’s a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don’t it? Means they are looking for something they already found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it! (…) What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what? 2”

Ultimately, Abandon Architectures is a reflection around our interest in how structural residues are incorporated, re-used and re-interpreted within our culture. Raising the idea that, perhaps, the exact moment we launch a product, an object or a thought into the world, is the very moment we abandon it.

WHAT WAS FIRST?

In 1990 we squatted a flat in Peckham, South-East London. At the time there were organisations that would aid potential squatters who were looking for ‘empties’ and explain the steps to follow (our advisors were SHIP on the Old Kent Road). Living as a squatter in Britain was not illegal, but breaking in to a property was. This is the paradox; as soon as you have a key to a property the local Council (owners of social housing in Britain) must go through a court case to evict you. How you acquire this key is, however, a ‘mystery’. In its fight against squatting the Council developed some subtle discouraging techniques, breaking the toilet or the bath were the most frequent tactics, thus making the properties unsuitable for living. As we were ‘acquiring’ our key via a window of our chosen flat, torch in hand, we went around the rooms exploring the terrain. We didn’t know that something really puzzling was in store for us. Ah! There is a working toilet… good! Another room… there is a sink!… great! We have a kitchen too! No, wait, there is a bath by the sink… we have a bathroom! Check the rest of the rooms! There is no kitchen… We fitted our own lock on the door and left.

We returned the morning after, this time as lawful tenants, to get familiar with the property in daylight. We checked the first door to the left and, yes, the toilet was still there and fully functional too. Then to the right we expected to see the bathroom. Well, the bath was there, but now that we were able to see the room in daylight we realised that we were in a kitchen. There was a nice old-fashioned sink fitted with a wooden board to drain the dishes, shelves and a ventilated cupboard to store your perishables. There was also a socket that clearly said “cooker”. Well, the bath was in the kitchen, but the flat was lovely so we stayed there. Two years later we were given the option to become legal tenants, which we took.

This situation is not unusual in London where lots of prewar flats were fitted with a bath (once it was decided that a bath in each home was necessary) in the place where it made most sense: the kitchen. Of course, in the kitchen there were water pipes and enough space… The baths had wooden tops so they doubled up as tables when no-one needed to bathe. Perfect sense.

For 16 years we enjoyed the bath in the kitchen, together with the very particular social interaction that it generated. At the time we were starting our design studies while working in bars and restaurants to pay our way in London. This meant that the only moment we really had an opportunity to spend time together was during our early morning breakfast or late at night after work. In a standard build, that time together would have been cut by half: one would have a shower whilst the other prepared coffee and began breakfast, waiting his or her turn to go to the bathroom. In our case as everything happened in the same space, breakfast time became a real social time. One of us would prepare breakfast while the other was bathing; we had long talks in the morning and left home on a high. Years later, already in the 21st Century, we were forced to move to another home as the bath in the kitchen situation became illegal. To our surprise, there was a small uprising from many of the neighbours, who opposed the move to change our bathroom/kitchens. Everyone had somehow made it a central part of their life. We resisted for a couple of years, although we knew it was a lost battle, because it gave the residents a bit more bargaining power against the Council.

It has now been a few years since we left our flat in Northfield House and although we still live in Peckham, which we love, we do not enjoy a bath in the kitchen anymore… But in the mornings, we still have coffee and talk while one or the other is bathing... So far, this is still perfectly legal.

FOUND OBJECTS: LINE

Alive Dead

1. Text originally published for the catalogue of the Under The Same Roof at Aram Gallery. London (UK) 2008

2. From Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss

Trousers In Socks 1

We know, the title sounds like a Dr. Seuss story… In fact we could call it a homage.

“Two socks. New socks. Whose socks? Sue’s socks.2”

In this case they would have to be Oscar’s socks.

We believe we noticed Oscar wearing his trousers tucked inside his socks pretty much from the first time we met back in 2004, when he joined Platform 10 at the Royal College of Art. In the beginning I thought it was probably one of those bicycle things, but as time went on we realised that it had no connection with the two-wheeled sport. We then assumed that it must be some kind of fashion statement. It was both weird and cool (like cool things normally are) and, in fact, we believe it did catch on with some of his colleagues. For us it just remained one of Oscar’s idiosyncrasies.

We found out by chance one day, chatting over lunch, how this ‘trousers in socks’ thing had started. He explained that he began to wear them this way to prevent his trousers from touching the floor, especially when going to bars and clubs, where the toilet floors were consistently wet, soiled and stinky. We guess he then ‘developed a taste for it’ and wore them like that at all times, so it became part of his persona.

For us, knowing this bit of information completely changed the way we understood it, and in a second it was transformed from the purely anecdotal into a classic piece of DIY.

Bricolage (DIY), according to anthropologists and the Nouveau Petit Robert – which is not nouveau let alone petit, but is famous for being a good dictionary – was a “Travail dont la technique est improvisée, adptée aux matériaux, aux circonstances.” Meaning, work realised with improvised techniques, adapting to certain given materials and circumstances. That bricolage, in French, also means botch should not come as a surprise, especially if we take into account that it was specifically in France where all the mothers of all of the world’s ‘Academias’ were born. And what is an Academia if not a way of inventing, sanctioning, institutionalising and fossilising the canon, the one that, from now on, will be the only and unquestionable measure of ‘good taste’?

Similarly, we could agree that tucking your trousers inside your socks, although useful, is hardly elegant or for that matter tasteful, but rather weird and geeky. So much so that, even in a city like London, home to all fashions, it still catches your eye. It feels strange because you can see, frozen, the freshness of the moment, the gesture of the improvised technique and its remnant functionality. It enjoys a distinct aesthetic value – honest, personal and without nostalgia – coming from the confidence of a designer who claims ownership of his idea and a complete disregard for the accepted norm.

“All right, here’s a useful lesson for you… Give up. Just quit. Because in this life, you can’t win. Yeah, you can try, but in the end, you’re just gonna lose, big time, because the world is run by The Man…

Oh, you don’t know The Man? Well, he’s everywhere. In the White House, down the hall. Miss Mullins (referring to the school’s head mistress), she’s The Man. And The Man ruined the ozone, and he’s burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank!

There used to be a way to stick it to The Man. It was called ROCK AND ROLL. But guess what. Oh, no! The Man ruined that too with a little thing called MTV!

Tape Lighting Track. Installation @ Marta Herford Museum (DE) 2009.

This installation highlights an inaccessible space within this museum gallery. We managed to reach an impossible place and mark it with an X by climbing through the building’s internal structure and sticking out our hand through a ventilation opening. Then we created a taped circuit that brought electricity to a spotlight that had been placed on the furthest accessible point with the means available at the museum.

So don’t waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome. The Man’s just gonna call you a fat, washed-up loser and crush your soul.3”

… But we must, what’s time for anyway?

Over the last months we have come to think of ‘Trousers in Socks’ as a very concise design manifesto. Open to interpretation, like all concise things of course, but perfectly exemplifying the argument for the demystification of design. As Walter Benjamin contends in Author as Producer, it is not the content of a culture (the work of art or design) that makes it radical, because it is clear that such things are easily assimilated when presented within the context of high art or entertainment. For him, truly radical culture has to challenge and eliminate the line between the producer and consumer by encouraging everyone to create. We could say: design.

‘Trousers in Socks’ is not just a sweet anecdote. It symbolises an approach to design that is very relevant today, in these times of design nonsense.

“Because, what’s the point of freedom of speech if you have nothing to say?4”

Maybe this is a good occasion to launch a new movement… Or is it an old one? Does it really matter?

Pull up your socks! (It’s now a statement! But also useful, remember?) Don’t comply. Invent. Use art. Make change. Keep rocking!

I Must Create A System

As we enter the building we can see a wide-open space to the right and a smaller space to the left. The open space on the right is double height and the ceiling above is the two-way roof of the building itself. The space to the left is more contained; it sits right under the mezzanine where the offices are located. To its far end it also opens up to the full height of the building, so lots of natural and artificial light flow in making this corner a very desirable spot.

Accessing this space we encounter two of the structural columns that hold the mezzanine floor at exactly three meters high. As we analyse the space, applying a certain sense of survival, we find that the space to the right is far too open and exposed. Although a much airier and beautiful place, it has less character and, consequently, fewer possibilities.

We decide to set up camp on the left side. With basic packing materials to construct and manipulate our surroundings, we begin to explore the possibilities of the space and its architecture. The exploration is primitive and sensual, working the space with our bodies… A column is the first element that catches our attention.

With sharp edges and immobile character, the columns are always very difficult elements within a space; they are unavoidable objects. In a way, they work like tree trunks but without the same life and warmth.

So, these could be our ‘trees’; they could be soft and inviting trees where we could sit, thinking about falling apples, or climbing up for a sporadic retreat and a different point of view. We rapidly cover the columns with bubble wrap and other packaging materials, and subsequently wrap them tightly with cling film.

This is a technique that we’ve developed to encapsulate and compress the air inside bubble wrap. It creates amazingly uncontrollable shapes, very much like living organisms with tensed muscles.

We use our bodies as tools to shape and create spaceobjects. Working just with our hands does not produce the same results. Our hands are too trained; they respond to our brains in a comfortable way…

Using our bodies in this way is essential. They can be employed to shape spaces that are a truer representation of our search for an un-typological object; one without embedded history, programmed use or prescribed social interaction.

This is also why the use of packing materials is ideal for these projects, as they are highly malleable and do not constrain or dictate at the time of making. They can be cut, glued, joined, folded, twisted etc, without any of the preciousness or skill required when dealing with other materials. Plus, they produce shapes that are slightly uncontrollable, allowing room for mistakes and surprises.

The light is another attractive feature, especially as it is concentrated at the very back of the space. We’ll try to capture and somehow control this light, like cavemen trying to keep an ember alive, building a ‘living in light container’.

We formed a space for harvesting the light, distributing it throughout its inside. The light container evolved on the outside, eventually doubling up as a resting place and working surface.

After a few days of working and living in both this space and the adjacent one (where other work for the exhibition was evolving) we decided to settle and ‘freeze’ the space in that very moment.

If we render it completely with stickers – adhesive structural units – working like a very slow computer, we can unify it as a single entity.

We created this method both as a structural solution, producing a plastic skin that keeps all its parts together, and as a graphic layer, designed differently every time, thus giving each intervention its own identity.

POST-DISCIPLINARY

We declare ourselves a post-disciplinary design studio. Post-disciplinary, because we do not acknowledge the disciplinary classifications imposed by the Academy and the Market. We understand culture and its objects from a multiplicity of perspectives, generating interpretations of the world around us through an informative collage where all elements are treated without establishing any hierarchy. And design, because design is not a discipline but the processes through which people materialise thought, as signs, symbols, objects, food, images, buildings, languages etc, thus viewing creativity as the driving force behind every human endeavour.

Just so that we understand one another, from now on we will refer to all these materialisations of thought as ‘objects’. We, humans, need to translate our ideas and observations about the world into objects to be able to decode, understand and relate to them and the rest of humanity. This group of objects we call ‘culture’ or ‘knowledge’ is, therefore, also an object (or in the context of this book an ‘architecture’).

Knowledge is acquired, analysed and manipulated through design processes. For example, within a laboratory context different theories are tested (these theories are objects elaborated through graphic languages, written as much as physical or applied). To make this analysis possible it is necessary to design the ‘object’ experiment, which will allow us to materialise the theory into a manageable ‘entity’ (we know that this is simplistic but the point is to show that the process we call design is common to all of these mediums).

Ultimately, the purpose of design is to decode the world around us with the intention (often unfortunate) of transforming it into a more sympathetic and/or

NOWASTEEUR laborious poem

Video-Activism-Poem-Seating @ IFEMA, Madrid (SP) 2008 controllable environment for humans (because, what is a better world?). To this end we have developed tools that allow us to interpret this world, creating social, material and spiritual architectures, which help to translate complex ideas into ‘objects’.

Let us use the word ‘mountain’ as an example (without trying to get to deep into Semiotics, although it might be the right place, it is definitely not the right moment). The word ‘mountain’ represents the thing ‘mountain’. If we asked different people to draw one (given that they have seen one before) they would draw it more or less the same way: a line that goes up in a certain angle to a certain point from which it would start going down in a certain angle to another point, most probably at the same height as the point at which they started. Therefore the word ‘mountain’ has a graphic and conceptual counterpart with an object that, in our minds, represents ‘mountain’.

“That mountain, for example,” (…) “That big and glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it.”

(…) For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She’d seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains. What she’d seen in that flash wasn’t even a “mountain”. It wasn’t a natural resource. It had no name.

“That’s the big goal,” she said. “To find a cure for knowledge.”

“For education. For living in our heads.1”

Compartmentalised knowledge does not allow us to contemplate the ‘mountain’ simultaneously from all