Why design?
Because…coffee crops, cocoa and cognitive faculties, because…The memory of the hands Conference about seven years of activities in La Factoria.
Attending to… apprentices and its instructing companions, and to those who foster similar projects, for a place of cultural and interdisciplinary observation, with long term links with rural communes, inscribed in academic programs from conjoined faculties …
“Being cultured” and “being intelligent” are considered different intellectual states. One refers to “a culture” that a person possesses and the other has connotations a bit more scientific, like an almost physiological characteristic that can be measured and quantified
Thus, someone is cultured from the books read and remembered, for good vocabulary, for the movies seen and even the journeys made. Cultured is that who has cultivated oneself, like a field, to obtain the best of civilization´s fruits. From a perspective in which the most ambitious projects of the West are combined --, from Classical Age´s values to Renaissance´s humanism, Christianity and the Enlightenment --, an educated person is also compassionate, empathetic, reliable, friendly and maybe even wise. In a few words, there is a whole line of thought that has defended human beings become such only thanks to culture.
“Being intelligent”, on the other hand, has been thought of and studied above all, as mankind´s inherent quality as a species. Our intelligence results from evolution and that´s why all individuals have it. From a scientific point of view, intelligence explains why we are capable of reading or watching a film, but also adding or subtracting quantities, and being able to drive an automobile or catch a ball….
Nicholas Lezard. The Guardian.
La Factoria is situated 180 kilometers away from Guayaquil city in Ecuador, in the Chongón and Colonche mountain range. The majority of communities that inhabit the zone come from Manabi, and their activities revolve around in fabricating crafts and developing eco tourism, supported by internationals organizations for shared development.
The land where La Factoria has been built is surrounded by hills that protect from the wind and the city lights, allowing for the night sky observations. It has a clement climate and its vegetation remains green throughout the year. It offers biodiversity and a well-preserved fauna, given that it is located in a zone of ecological reserves.
Why design and contemporary artisan.
Design and craftsmanship have common origins and goals: the making of a utilitarian object with good energy and matter management. New technologies, the ones we call contemporary, contribute necessary information for action on matter, especially for those that have forgotten how to read work plans, which is the case with the majority of artisans from the surroundings. These are useful, and from now hereon, indispensable for connecting ancestral and contemporary.
Why design
Since over 50 years now, during the Budapest´s School of Fine Arts, the teacher warned us. I do not know how to make artists of you, but I can teach you about putting on a work of art from a perspective. That can serve you to sculpt and paint salamis for window showcases when stores are empty. After a moment of silence, he added, or for the lack of something better, doing politics.
We already had an idea for career of a sculptor or a painter, we did not care about politics, but we wanted a perspective. We had four years to understand to which extent this determined our action field, half of the class leaned towards architecture. To do politics.
Observing the frame, making a diagnosis, defining proportions, putting on a scale, establishing the values, and giving direction to a perspective, can´t be anything but the result of multiple and diverse specializations to the service of a polis.
Craftsmen, architects, designers are responsible for maintaining the balances of their formulating specializations, and their projects must respond to a real need of its addressee.
The diagnosis already imposes a professional ethics; it must install trust in accompanying and introducing dialogue for appropriating the project. The verb surges from a common reflection; it is the beginning of action and cements the necessary information exchange for the realization.
Putting it into scale is about resource-based economy, values, their socio – cultural impact and return on investment. The message´s direction must be defined according to the objectives and the resources available for the project´s communication,
Our diagnoses are enriched by points of view and different experiences to set up the best project and practice art from the restrictions it implies, draw a perspective, coordinating the escape lines towards the same objective. Knowing that the decision is political. Respecting the montage of our perspectives, we make policies that are at hand, and this is forcibly social.
Architectonic option
The radiant city of Marseille rose up like the Titanic in a dry dock and over pillars, with its rooftop for tanning, these plans make up the glory of cement and steel, finally being our world patrimony. The time has come to take possession of this heritage, despite the value of things.
Remember that the new man, appreciated by both Hitler and Stalin, was born with the golden ratio and the home of a family made for him. Once he emerged from the Stone Age, the Stakhanovist man of steel reduces its vital space and pours cement on it, when not in the cannons, his dreams that persist. Nowadays this type of construction that utilizes 25% of our vital raw materials still lingers and inspires, rectilinear poets. We are left with 60 – 65 % of contamination due to indestructible residues in the world.
Order gives birth to wellbeing, Le Corbu used to say, who did not have more than an eye for his political conscience, a who André Malraux protected to prevent him from going to prison after the Liberation. Let us not forget that this last one also saved us from the project titled “ Neighbor plan” for automobiles in Paris. Let´s remember that architecture this our body´s skin, we must break away from this contamination. We must break with cement´s totalitarism.
Training for La Factoria´s edifications / 30 months. Dos Mangas commune.
The constitution of a team with craftsmen from nearby settlements gathered a teacher and a dozen of machete men that, with our assistance, produced a work.
The architecture developed responds to the geography, climate, economic and socio – cultural situation of the sector. The material´s nobility (tagua, toquilla straw, fine wood, gadúa cane, banana fiber), the place and knowledge of the autochthonous villagers, impose on us a rigor when treating finishes and when transmitting our design experiences. We gather a team of 15 craftsmen that we have trained for all work on site.
Obligations and opportunities of the place have defined a project. The master of the work was the observation, and we, along with the machete men, were disciples of this experience.
We used the least cement possible, only in the light and floating slabs, anti resistant over pillars. We opted for wood and cane, abundant in the environment and exploited responsibly and sustainably, completing with aluminum, plywood and polycarbonate; the latter with the objective of filtering natural intense light, and guaranteeing the habitat´s intimacy. We were inspired by traditional constructions of the place. Respecting the scales and proportions, we introduced some inclined walls, to secure better ventilation and to augment useful surface.
The working method was developed under the restrictions from our collaborators, who had lost the knowledge of how to read a plan. There were no plans. Everything was drawn in real size, on the workshop´s floor, and the details were scratched in sand. Instilling rigor, responsibility and collaboration in constant improvisation, to adapt the design to its knowledge, was the principal challenge.
After 30 days passed, the polyvalent formation of the locals was forged to make them responsible for a Basic Needs Construction, a medical cabin and a Baywatch tower in the Montañita commune. / 30 days.
Pedagogical follow up for the conception of these utilitarian objects ITAE / Geppeto, Pinocho and the good company objects, was the second experience after Michal Batory.
The good ideas are always in the air, they respond to a requirement, to a necessity. The goal is to form receptive people that take distance for observing, capturing and validating through their works.
Sometimes one hears that anguish is the motor of creation, but it actually holds it up. Every action over matter requires of information and energy. Lack of information is the source of anguish, which de facto, cuts access to our acquired experiences, memorized on the long term. Lack of information deprives us from taking action. The experience consists on isolating, in order to better accompany individuals coming from different economic and socio cultural backgrounds, with different academic and professional experiences, inside a protective site, cut off from the usual information sources. By asking them to compensate their lack of daily information, through the exchange between them, by participating and collaborating.
To distinguish the useful from the futile in the concept and to give it the purest form is the goal of any creative person. The experience allowed us to observe the emotional part of creativity, with motivated students, who we prepared before the process and concluded the workshop with an analysis. The experience was repeated with the craftsmen and artists from the surroundings.
Application means. Azuay University Disconnect Yourselves!
The one who only has a hammer thinks that all problems have to do with nails. The computer is nothing more than a tool. To learn how to write, design, it is important to manage making great gestures. Putting something into perspective goes through visualizing the space. The screen makes learning uncomfortable, decreases the physical and emotional experiences necessary for learning.
When we pose a question amongst professors about integrating information on the Internet, some of us fear the exclusion of those who do not have access to it. But, more poorly fed students exist than those who do not have access to Internet. Fifteen years ago, we thought about fracture in social terms, between the well and the badly equipped. Now, the opposition is more between those how know and those who do not know how to use the equipment.
The new poor in telecommunications are those who cannot escape the obligation of responding immediately, and that most, then, live in urgency and continuous interpellation. There is a very strong desire to take breaks. People have the impression of living in constant flow, of not having moments to join pieces together. Some have the power of taking some distance; others have the duty of remaining connected, to be always in the meeting that will come. Read on Le Monde newspaper.
This experience allowed us to discover the importance of interface in order to integrate the workshop in the academic programs from institutions. It also evidenced gaps in general culture and art history, the virtual modeling at all costs, to the detriment of conception; just like the difficulties of concentrating in a connected Universe.
Migrants / Dwelling Project. Florida International University
There is no return without a home, nor a re encounter without fire, nor sharing without water. The longest journey is coming back to oneself. Necessity makes law and imposes creativity to the expatriate artists. This encounter made us question about these young migrants and their opportunity of returning to the country. At the same time we began to reflect about the needs of the creative people in the surroundings.
The Artisans and the Artists / trainings and works
Technical assistance for the realization of Juana Cordoba´s construction with local artisans.
Training workshops for the artisans from Olon and Dos Mangas with the Taiwan foundation.
Constructing a lifeguard and medical cabin for the Montañita commune with private financing.
A concept and a technology already developed by La Factoria, were interpreted and adapted to the needs of the Puerto El Morro commune for the Project Pigway, under our direction and technical advice about the necessary raw materials to use.
Unicef – Finland called on Ecuador to participate in an international exhibition; through a national announcement, participants were chosen for a workshop that was carried out in La Factoria, to make posters that were exhibited in the streets of Lahti city, Finland in the context of the 2014 Design Triennial. Students from Quito participated: Catholic University, Technological University, Metropolitan University, Israel University; from Guayaquil: Casa Grande University and the University of Cuenca. All projects were funded by the ITAE.
Observations
In order to have success, we have given importance to the emotional versus the intellectual in favor of education. We demand them to reach out with a project, we ask for a discourse, a story that reveals the emotional part, that guides us for what is next. Once the compromise´s rigor is accepted, regularity will be our master word to accompany these projects. The merit of a title, a diploma, can only be the consequence of a project. Neither absences nor delays, is the demand of this project that he or she undergoes and is responsible for.
To avoid failure in formation, we aim to transmit the gesture for them to understand why we should learn. How we should learn, they already know. Good management is that which is not seen because it is just. We must be tough with facts and gentile with people.
Flexibility and polyvalence imposes on us the creation of a fraternity in the first place, where knowing how to BE primes over knowing how to DO, in order to search how to perpetually redefine objectives and make the company gain profit.
In order to do so, we are surrounded by animals. Establishing contact with a horse is a first step towards the Other. Entering a sensorial world, inside the not written, the not said, through yoga or Tai Chi, is turning to the practice of encountering.
The same environment guarantees the most precious of all; silence. The worst contamination our modern times is sound pollution. Excellence demands silence. The voice must be heard and understood without needing to amplify it. It must assure the circulation of words in action, to remain in excellence. Silence is also a place of inaction, where poetry is born for our subsequent actions. Like Thierry Marx and his mates, we have learned through practicing with those who have collaborated with us.
Getting to the level of each one would be demagogy, but elevating the aptitudes to knowledge excellence, respecting the necessary time for each project, is the pedagogy from experience between responsible individuals that commit to collaborating.
Ventilation of Ideas in the Air
In 2015 we represented the Ecuadorian coast in the BID (Iberoamerican Biennial of Design) with the project Light Study and Idea Ventilation in the Air. We offered a conference in the MAAC (Contemporary Art and Anthropology Museum) and at UArtes (University of the Arts) in Guayaquil, besides various projects developed during 3 or 4 months with students from Strate, Product Design School from Paris.
Flying carpet under the roof. The cardboard suitcase / making of house and furniture prototypes. In order to integrate a project within its environment, all creative person must consider what geography, the weather, and the socio cultural and economic mediums impose, and respond to real necessities of its tribe.
If the industrial revolution of the 19th century got millions of miserable Europeans moving towards new horizons, the new technological revolution demands flexibility, polyvalence, and mobility, for a competitive production and designates similar perspectives for the future generation, at risk of spending their lives between the bed and the kitchen counter, feeding themselves with a smart phone at hand, along their successive migrations.
De-Facto, our duty consists of reflecting their temporal habitat, with furniture that facilitates their transiting. Imagining with interdisciplinary working groups about their itinerant opportunity to socialize with each other in future cities. We contribute to this project with our experience as trans humans and professionals in the fields of architecture, design and communication, since ten years ago in the country and seven in the Coast.
As the years pass by, La Factoria became a place for observation and intercultural exchanges of craft and contemporary design´s pedagogical and technological methods, to maintain an archaic know how and a millenarian identity from the Ecuadorian Coast.
The option of dynamic learning
If the body constantly desires to put these acquired experiences into practice, it is trapped by the anguish of inaction. The deployed methods of repetitive acts till automatism, make up its learning. But poetry is born from inaction and silence from the teacup, that just like the hammock´s horizontality, awakes the fondness for sloth and forges its mind to invent other methods of economizing energy and time. Tea and hammocks are the source of its creativity, for inscribing the memory of its hands in space.
For autonomy of someone in charge of projects, La Factoria is in motion. It is inscribed in other experiences as well, like the Amo Stern workshop in France, the Calle Loczy Pikler method in Hungary, practiced by the AMI foundation in Ecuador, or from the Dynamic School in Paris. All accompany young apprentices to guarantee excellence in their freely chosen paths.
La Factoria, leaving aside competition in favor of collaboration, gives place to fellowship between individuals from 15 to 25 years of age, for their professional orientation, getting them closer for their projects’ integration in rural zones. It organizes encounters to synchronize diverse aptitudes in a creative collective that respond to the real necessities of the communes.
Human creativity always responds to an individual or common necessity, but it is not its principal vocation to create dreams or desires, to sell products.
We practice intercultural encounters without forgetting about culture being a word from the city; outside of the urban world we speak of tradition, the know how and transmission. It is in this space and its language that we want to integrate academic programs through links in the rural zones, which perpetuates the memory of the hands and the exchange of knowledge.
Current situation
The issue at hand is not what has to be done, since everything has to be done, or redone. The ecuadorian coast endures economic desolation; the continuous threat of the sea and, most recently, a 7.8 earthquake that devastated the area on April 16th 2016.
The aftershocks have not ceased, there is still a dreaded seism to occur soon in the neighbouring province of Esmeraldas. We have no news about urban reorganisation projects in the area or any official plans. If tourism were to return, it will surely visit the coastal beaches that remain untouched by the quake.
Topography is not friendly, only a great wave, unrequited on its way by the inroads shrimp farms have opened, could cut all roads and whatever towns it finds in its way would drift into isolation. There is still no information or security measures on this topic.
Such events push time out of its hinges, disorder sways in our heads with no reference to our surroundings. Despite all efforts to erase everything, forget and start again, we should recur to our long-term experience and bring up the memory of our hands also. to act in this present inaccurate perspectives.
In spite of broken digital communications; people´s verbal fluidity is unstopped: economic, cultural or social projects flourish in their neighbourly initiatives to restore life’s equilibrium. La Factoría is ready to join this courageous enterprise by means of a three week reconstruction workshop.
The memory in our hands / A workshop on seismic zone construction
La Factoría and and its partners are committed to provide the design, monitoring, and implementation of a structure and follow up of the construction of a Center for any commune of the coast on a place legally defined by their beneficiaries and project managers.
Protocol and chronology
Before construction starts it is necessary to assure water supply, electric power and sanitary disposal of black water. To ensure the rigor and discipline, availability, punctuality and commitment of the participants, we are eager to reward the daily presence of 10 local workers, covering their expenses nutrition with the sums of money collected from various organizations. The adequacy of the structure that ensures a roof, will be evolutionary as the initiatives of the managers responsible for the activities and their future. Roof insulation of a lightweight, translucent component is under study. Once the final planning and fundraising is concluded we estimate a period of 10 to 15 days to implement this project. The blueprints of the construction will be approved by the committee.
Funding
Considering the urgent need for a space to house the economic, cultural and social initiatives of the inhabitants of the communes, it is important and urgent to reach out to local private and public entities, as well as international donors. We should unite forces with local volunteers and La Factoría and his collaborators so as to reach this particular goal.
The architecture
The structure will respond to the geographical and economic conditions, it will be a light structure, in accordance with the environment. The construction materials will include bamboo, wood, aluminium and steel so as to ensure a flexible assembly of the structure that will result in a building that offers both resistance and safety. The flooring will be a cement foundation of 12 cm inserted on a metal mesh that will be complemented with wooden floating boards. This floor will be tied to four foundational pillars that will be tied together by chains. The central columns holding the roof will be two huge shelves and the staircase to the second floor for the office and training area. The roof will cover almost the totality of the land and will be finished in the future with paja toquilla. A a provisional and waterproof roof is under way. This roof will be sitting on the bamboo columns that will hold the modular work tables for library and workshop areas.
We are ready with budget plans and logistics for acting anywhere.
Methodology and pedagogy
Our architecture methodology is to have an open ear and a ready pencil to jot down the necessities of the recipients of this project.
Therefore, narrative is the corner stone of this project. Through this method the beneficiaries will feel proprietors of the project. We will take the opportunity to confront the experience of North Sea fishermen, who live for centuries, 5 meters under water. Its evolving relationship with the sea and buildings.
New technologies will help visualize in a three dimension manner the project in its different stages. Understanding is the main premise in order to own and contribute to the completion of this project. Being able to visualize will enable all the neighbors to voice their concerns and awaken the ancestral technologies that sleep in their hands. This familial knowledge that lies in the body is crucial for our actions.
The experiment will be documented for extensive research of the place and its methodology can be replicated.
Over the last five years la Factoría built economic and seismic resistance constructions that proved to be effective during the recent test in the coast and in the highlands where we built different prototypes with traditional constructing material and local craftsmanship.
This is an opportunity to summon The Catholic University of Guayaquil, by means of activating the agreement we hold in order to request for their participation and support. It should be clear that our support and execution is pro bono and that La Factoría reserves its rights to the design and concept that should not be reproduced without our explicit authorization.
Patrimony, and Community Joint venture is our conversation topic, but first I would like to say a few words about language´s nature and the space in our research field.
At three in the afternoon on October 23rd, 1956, when the streetcar slowed down, in order to then become immobilized at the Bridge of Freedom, due to a slow walk, almost funerary, of hundreds of students from the Polytechnic School, I had the look of an eight year old glued to the window, next to my mother, to then ask them what they were doing in the middle of the roads, generally silent and deserted.
The revolution, she answered me, with a melancholic voice and a smile.
I knew that word, often heard in school and in the Teacher´s voice, a gramophone’s brand with which we designated the radio of the time, and that sometimes we listened to entire nights, with the cover up to our head to look for the lack of information in the ether. Living in apprehension.
Aren´t you scared? I asked.
Of nothing or no one, as long as we call everything by its name, she said, while the glass descended and ordered my ill lungs to breathe. Born with the proletariat´s dictatorship that sweats, during the construction of the best of worlds to share, I was obedient. I did what she told me and for the first time, fear took distance from me.
The same afternoon in mid Cold War, the second world power had just fractured in a few hours, and at dawn the voice of our favorite announcer shook while uttering these words; We lie in the morning, we lie at night, we lie day and night…Here Budapest´s Free Radio.
I´m still looking for the words to describe how that puff of oxygen, filled with humidity at the end of October, with a cloudy sky, made me comprehend a word incomprehensible until that moment, in a space of low police control, imposing fear and a constant self – vigilance.
I describe the force of that moment which fills the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the lungs, and that stiffens the bodies, to reach understanding about language´s nature; our matrimony, anywhere, must be free to name things and dissipate fear, first obstacle of our need to act in all circumstances.
Understanding that it took eight years for a complete country to mean something with this word being uttered by everybody. Since that date the word had a space in my possession that, along with the emotional part of learning, always activates my mutations.
Since then, we call Revolution or counter revolution using freedom of expression or not, according to the successive regimes. All this to show the importance of the emotional and its space in learning about History, from a boy, sixty years ago.
You must be telling yourselves that this sensorial grandpa story, not very sexy, seems distant from the connected world in which you were born, and it is an irrelevant topic.
In this day of 2016, to talk about space and language, in course of the support – message revolution, imposes proof that a generation has already moved on from the Napoleonic metric world.
Now they have a new space, the Univercity, with email to transmit in real time the practices of our concepts. Digital technologies are language´s support that our young creative people practice; and thus they inhabit this space already.
If our parents were the inventors of this support, my generation developed the message and you will tell me…. that we have found the way to throw our children out of the comfortable crib of the Father´s house. Abandoning a direction, changing a name or situating yourself outside the Law, is irresponsible, law students will tell me.
But I ask them if in Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood / lawyer, judge, magister/ didn’t offer, as a matter of fact, a valuable service for justice?
So, allow me, in a few words to describe the dimension of this space. If we talk of technological revolution, we should call bread, bread, like my mother and Michel Serres said. This last one, is still alive and I recommend affectionately. Of course, it is him and no my mother who I refer to in this topic.
We say that this technology is a couple; Message – support, composed of a hard ware and software, and we ask ourselves if it is really about a new evolution. We do not know of inert or alive beings that do not have faculties for collecting, emitting, storing and treating information. Since the beginning of humanity, the body existed as a support, and the message was carried by the voice. The first great revolution came about with the appearance of writing over diverse bronze or papyrus supports.
This transformed law, justice, religion, politics, democracy, capital with the appearance of money as support and value as message. It transformed our relationship with work, time, life and death equally. Every man with a Bible at hand was a Pope.
Today, every childe with a smart phone has the world in its hands. We have abandoned the metric world where we used to live in one address, at a certain distance from one another. Now we have annulled distance. You enter with bulimia, talent, much imagination, into no man´s land, in the Sherwood Forest. Even the safe from the Pentagon. Little rascals, have you lost your mind?
You will tell me human history is learning through loss; for a better visual perspective, we have lost two legs, we have lost a hand, prolonging it with a hammer and now the head, with a disc on the table. From now on, they are condemned to be intelligent, imaginative, and creative with the acquired experience at the great universal library. It should be inscribed, from now on, in human rights and duties.
Ceci n’est pas un pipe… ceci est une revolution... like Steve Jobs says.
The problem that worries us in the first place is that this space degrades its vision due to the aggressiveness of various ideas and due to the light that it diffuses. The observations from the disciples disturb. If they don’t take distance towards their actions, adjusting the focus of their eyes to reconnect with reality, the body remains prisoner. Capturing images and ideas cannot surpass the confrontation and observation of reality. 80% of information we get through the eyes; nonetheless, among our five senses, it is with these that we are mostly mistaken. Without image there is no access to reality….say the iconographers, and we ask ourselves what would happen with the other four senses necessary for learning, and access to knowledge and creativity, once the images are virtual?
In a place without sound contamination or city lights, conductive to this reflection for seven years now, we observe the disciples’ behavior in the Valdivia, Manglar Alto and Dos Mangas Triangle in Santa Elena, through our research domain. A place with a readily communications infrastructure, in the most bucolic place of the Pacific South, with a strong identity, an ancestral knowing and doing, a patrimony, but not sheltering any conflict of interests from communes.
If we want learning to be fluid and for it to continue transmitting experiences acquired in the land, we must transform the obligation of community outreach into a sensorial opportunity with nature, and the people that cultivate it, through creative collaborations.
We think that proposing any project that inscribes itself in a coherent urbanism, with the necessary installations for its development, could be the start to reconnect dialogues. The goal is for students to be closer of their future markets through a long-term collaboration with the community.
We have been requested for an agreement with the Catholic University of Guayaquil, to make proposals about the place, about projects to develop with a method that can help replicate these experiences in other parts of the country.
We have the need for inter disciplinary investigations, where young people can be the creative mediators of unproductive confrontations, securing communication and projects with public and private funds.
We are not experts to have judgment about managing patrimonies. We are just rooky disciples with years of experience about the first needs of neighboring communities. But, through our past professional experiences, we have been able to observe in many occasions the debate around a patrimony´s symbolism and the appropriation by its public. Always very long debates – in relation to the urgency of communicating the project and its intentions – for political or economic reasons. They produce, in general, more adrenaline that time for reflection.
In this domain, we need support from the academic world to have a profound reflection about this topic, the recent quakes, and its victims that call on us to act immediately.
This is a transition…our Chinese friends would say; they have a very different notion of space and time. Regarding us, with our restricted spaces, accustomed to these crises, to these events, to these revolutions, we cannot forget that the biggest tsunami of the 20th century, was the disappearance of the agrarian world and the longevity of humanity. Out of 70% of human activities linked to agriculture in the West, 1,6 % has decreased…. they came out of the Neolithic! ...our friends would say.
The matter presented is, can we and do we know how to anticipate this transition of the rural world, with the human means and the information we dispose?
We have observed that the frontiers no longer conform the countries, but the idioms that we cultivate. We have intercultural space and languages, we have priorities and necessities of confronting the theories with our practices and our actions….we have been ready since years ago.
The reason why we would like a critical look into our experience is to hear your proposals, for them to open dissertations about ideas that suggest our area of research.
The vertical posture is certainly elegant in difficult transitions, but a man´s real pride is his capacity to orient himself, other than through his instinct, thanks to his memory acquired by his sensorial experiences kept for the long term. Imprints that do not appear in our hardware.
Latin America was inspired, in this last century, by Christianity, civilization where the particularity was the invention of the individual that, thanks to the Renaissance and the reforms, the world was endowed with humanism. More than a concept, this allowed for the birth of literature and the arts, justice, democracy and human rights. The end of Western civilization was announced for decades given its decadence. Its facts and consequences weighted on its conscience, for generations. If Africa still starves from hunger, here we can perish in ignorance if we don´t find Other to understand its difference. The rupture between Coast and Highland, urban and rural, cannot last.
South America in this last decade has also been inspired by this humanism through its diverse revolutions; is it right or does it simply have the obligation, like the Shuaras against the Inca Empire? From hereon, we must interrogate ourselves differently. Like any missing civilization, the Western one will leave its vestiges as heritage for your continent, too. The question is whether humanism, this existential duty of coming close to its model, to the other, to oneself, would become part of the inheritance?
We thank you for accompanying us on this journey through the memory of the elderly, and remind you that in order to return to the topic of this meeting…that…. Each person´s patrimony is always identity´s expression in the future Republic, where Conscience, Knowledge and Creativity are engraved in the Constitution. Giving Conscience, an ethics, to technological practice that secures this republic, is the main role of contemporary education.
Henri Laborit told us 50 years ago…and he makes us reconsider these distant years at the beginning of my epoch´s memory…seven years after the described event, my mother placed a gold ring and a small Swiss razor on the table. “This is what remains of your father along with his education”, she told me….”here is your inheritance, now you are free”. Without the obligation of having to kill my father´s authority, at 15 years old, I was Free and Rich, like you with your own inheritance, the smart phone in your pockets and the screen on the table.
Make sure that this does not turn into just another tool more useful for a spectacle society; one more television, a narcissistic showcase of virtual fraternities, but a space for creative dialogue, of culture and employment…if possible.
We are happy to know that you are vigilant creative people to be of good use of the inheritance with a universal tool, sharing some of the travelling endeavors, which deserve retaining your attention.
Guayaquil, December 4th, 2016
Who we are
http://msghdesign.blogspot.com/2011/09/quienes-somos.html
