Design, Poverty, Fiction
co-ordinated by Catherine Geel
Design, Poverty, Fiction 22 & 23 March 2013 – Grand Hornu Museum – Belgium
Design, Poverty, Fiction aims at questioning the ambiguous relationship between design and poverty. It will question poverty in the industrialized countries. Then, it proposes experimental ways of living, political hypotheses and artistic dispositifs which make use of poverty as a raw material. The project will take the form of a festival, with guests, films, a bar, design experiences and a party. The festival is leaded by three schools: the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), the Ensad (Paris), and the Esba (Angers), Impression of the location: http://www.grand-hornu.eu/
Manifesto:
Designing Poverty makes the hypothesis that design is a (very sophisticated) weapon to remain order, a practice that plays with its own transparency, illusionist, clever, without knowing it. Designing Poverty wish to provoke this moral and those contemporary aesthetics, by confront them to existential quests sometimes contradictory, provocative, even from the rear. Target: To bump in the materialist world’s imaginary. Designing Poverty makes the cynical assessment that in our hyper organized occidental societ- ies, the way back to poverty is a design object. Poverty is designed, poverty is drawn up. Would it be aesthetic? Voluntary? Is poverty the nec plus ultra of the bobo to be hobo ?
Argument:
Design is a slave to the material society and has frequently been denounced as a tool of the so- ciety of spectacle, of the non-stop Entertainment. The race towards abundance leads to exces- sive consumption, false needs to be fed. Nowadays a succession is proposed and oppose to it, putting at the front poverty, morality, nostalgia of the time before materialism…return tickets for numerous St Francis of Assisi. Subservience to arguments for frugally, asceticism will make design the ideal bard of the main- taining of poverty. But what could come after materialism to avoid this simplistic dualism? Could it exist different choices, different projects beyond the way back to a survival economy or below the hedonistic overexploited exponential materialism… Which space for thoughts, for imaginary?
Priciples:
Designing Poverty will be festival led by 3 schools: the Esba-Angers (Art & Design Dpt), the Ensad- Paris and the Sandebrg Institute – Amsterdam. A festival because the goal is not to disembark without any return : we will spread productions, produced on purpose. An important work has will be made by students concerning the media- tion of the event.
Festival : 18-22 March 2013 – Grand Hornu Museum – Belgium