Everyday Acts of Design: Learning in a Time of Emergency 9781350162402, 9781350162396, 9781350162433, 9781350162426

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Everyday Acts of Design: Learning in a Time of Emergency

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DESIGNING IN DARK TIMES Responding to the current and wide-ranging systemic, social, economic, political, and environmental challenges we face, the aim of this series is to bring together short, polemical texts that address these crises and their inherent possibilities. Understanding that the old division between the theoretical focus of the social sciences and the practical stance integral to designing, making, and shaping the world is dissolving, Designing in Dark Times explores new ways of acting and knowing concerning the artificial. Identified by the refusal of resignation to what-is and by the equal necessity and urgency of developing new models of the possible, the series presents both modes of thought (models, concepts, arguments) and courses of action (scenarios, strategies, proposals, works) at all levels from the local and the micro (the situation) to the global and the macro. The aim is to push the boundaries of both design and thought, to make each more capable of opening genuine possibilities for thinking and acting otherwise, and thus of better facing, and facing down, the myriad failures of the present. As the world descends into crisis, these books seek to offer, in small ways, a counter view. Against the instrumental they use the fact that design is also a means of articulating hitherto unforeseen possibilities—for subjects as much as for the world—to show how at base it offers irreplaceable capabilities for thinking and acting well in the artificial. In so doing, they point us towards ways of reversing some of the negative and destructive tendencies threatening to engulf the world.

DESIGNING IN DARK TIMES Politics of the Everyday Ezio Manzini Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon Edited by Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism Otto von Busch Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating Martín Ávila Design and the Social Imagination Matthew DelSesto Everyday Acts of Design: Learning in a Time of Emergency Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins Clive Dilnot Eduardo Staszowski

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“Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins take us on a personal journey through the challenges of leadership, management, and teaching in a design school during times of uncertainty, precariousness, and government neglect in Brazil. Weaving together stories of everyday experiences demonstrating alternative ways of thinking, design acts, the resilience of educators and students, and the bonds that are developed when a situation and a state is on the brink of collapse, this book is an urgent read for all design students and educators.” DANA ABDULLAH, University of the Arts, London “In this account of a present intensively lived, Anastassakis and Martins reveal the individual struggles and collective actions of ESDI’s prodigious community of precarious lives. Reimagining the first and foremost design education institution in Brazil, Latin America, and the Portuguese language demanded shuffling functions, challenging privileges, and questioning conventions. But also claiming resistance, vulnerability, care, interdependence, coexistence, and solidarity as essential terms of a design lexicon they generously share with us in this momentous book.” FREDERICO DUARTE, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon “Hope is perhaps the element to be harnessed in a time that insists on oppressing and in which different ways of doing things are designed to circumvent the investments of domination. In these margins, scribbling is the act of imprinting life, whether it be to inscribe battles and continuity, or to strike through the logics that paint a world obsessed with a single, exclusive method. Education, when it becomes an inventive and radical stroke of life, affirms itself as an ordinary task, as everyday acts that give other contours to the margins.” LUIZ RUFINO, Faculdade de Educação da Baixada Fluminense, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

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Everyday Acts of Design: Learning in a Time of Emergency Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins Translated from Portuguese by André Jobim Martins

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS, and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins, 2022 Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Andrew LeClair and Chris Wu of Wkshps All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of images and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in copyright acknowledgment and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-3501-6240-2 978-1-3501-6239-6 978-1-3501-6242-6 978-1-3501-6241-9

Series: Designing in Dark Times Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS List of Figures ix Foreword xii Acknowledgments xv Notes on Translation of some Key Terms xvi Historical Background xix Map and ESDI Ground Plan xxiii INTRODUCTION 1 The setting 1 Storytelling, educating, designing 3 Writing 12 1

LANDING 19 Following a design school’s threads: What makes a place? 21 Staring the past in the face: Metamorphoses and colonization 30 Carrying the future upon one’s shoulders: What does this design school carry? 36

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CURRICULUM 45 In the classroom 45 New curriculum, again 54

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A LANDSLIDE PANIC 65 2015: Panic 65 2018: Landslides 70

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DRAWING TOGETHER 83 Representa(c)tion 87 Shall we dance? 92 Gates, then and now 96

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CONTENTS

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CRISIS 105 Interruptions 105 Detours? 112 Occupation 124 Little box 132

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DESIGN RESEARCH 137 Espaços verdes 138 Colaboratório 143 When life spills over research 147

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IMPASSES AND CORRESPONDENCES 155 Correspondences with Indigenous artists and researchers 155 At the Museu do Índio 166 Afro-Indigenous confluences 172 Impasses 174

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HOW DO YOU GET TO THE UNIVERSITY? 183 By bus, by train, on foot 183 Getting a degree 192

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WALKING BAREFOOT 203 Beginning again, otherwise 203 Clearing the ground 207 Neither north nor south 212 Designing . . . but not projecting 217

Bibliography 225 Author Biographies 235 Index 237

FIGURES 0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1

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5.3 5.4 5.5

Part of downtown Rio de Janeiro xxiii ESDI’s grounds xxiv 23 School gates Main corridor, nicknamed “the Boulevard” 23 One of the trees planted by Carmen Portinho in the 1970s 29 Termite trails running through a classroom wall 29 School yard and promenade leading to the new entrance opened in 2017 39 View of the school area 41 Karl Heinz Bergmiller at the inaugural lecture 46 Students sitting in the courtyard between the school workshops and the library 70 Sand over the cobblestones of the school’s main corridor 73 Main corridor pavement renovation 73 Zoy and students outdoors 84 Marcos and students at the director’s office 84 ESDI’s website 88 95 ESDI’s new logo School grounds before the new gates to Rua do Passeio were built 98 ESDI’s pavilion 102 ESDI’s new gate to Rua do Passeio 102 Meeting with students and alumni to discuss actions at the school in reaction to the crisis triggered by the state government of Rio de Janeiro 118 Meeting with students and alumni to discuss actions at school in reaction to the crisis triggered by the State Government of Rio de Janeiro 118 Zoy, professors, and students at a garbage collecting mutirão 119 The ESDI Aberta party 121 Zoy and Marcos speaking on stage at the ESDI Aberta party 122

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FIGURES

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Karl Heinz Bergmiller lectures at the ESDI Aberta party 5.7 Temporary tattoos on students’ arms at the ESDI Aberta party 5.8 Mattresses on the classroom floor during student occupation 6.1 Patio between the school’s workshops and library covered with fallen leaves 6.2 Students prepare part of the school grounds for the installation of the community garden 6.3 Students and alumni work in the community garden 6.4 Student shows vegetables harvested in Espaços Verdes 6.5 Collaborations between students and outside partners in the occupation of the graphic workshop 6.6 Collaborations between students and outside partners in the occupation of the graphic workshop 6.7 Collaborations between students and outside partners in the occupation of the graphic workshop 6.8 Mutirão for production of editorial projects 6.9 Installation featuring the ESDI Aberta movement in the exhibition organized by Frederico Duarte 6.10 Installation featuring the ESDI Aberta movement in the exhibition organized by Frederico Duarte 7.1 Guarani Ñandeva anthropologist and curator Sandra Benites presents her proposals for an Indigenous vegetable garden 7.2 Laboratório de Design e Antropologia (Design and Anthropology Laboratory) researchers meeting with Indigenous anthropologists Francy Baniwa and Sandra Benites 7.3 Wally Kamayurá paints a student’s arm. On the right, Ynê Kuikuro and the couple’s children 7.4 Professor Ibã Sales Huni Kuin during one of the art and perception workshops he taught at ESDI 7.5 Professor Ibã Sales Huni Kuin during one of the art and perception workshops he taught at ESDI

123 124 126 138 139 140 141 146 146 146 147 150 150

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156 159 162 162

FIGURES

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7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11

7.12 7.13 8.1 8.2

Two leaders of the Nasa people of Colombia during the seminar “Indigenous Struggles, Good Living, and the Crisis of the Notion of Development” Filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro visits one of the classes given by Zoy and Ricardo Artur Carvalho at the Museu do Índio Student project presentations at the Museu do Índio Student project presentations at the Museu do Índio Student project presentations at the Museu do Índio Sided by Amilton Mattos, Ibã Sales Huni Kuin speaks to ESDI students on the course in partnership with the Museu do Índio Guided tour with the curator of the exhibition “Dja Guata Porã” Sandra Benites Student working at the ESDI director’s desk Centro Acadêmico Carmen Portinho Rua do Passeio ESDI entrance

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167 169 169 169

170 171 177 193 201

FOREWORD Have you ever had the impression, on reading a work of scholar ship, that the authors’ hearts are just not in it? It is an unwritten rule in academic writing that it should reveal no trace of the feeling that went into the composition of a text. One should remain objective and dispassionate, distanced from matters of one’s concern, lest their truth be contam in ated by too close an involvement. Every shade of feeling, from joyful exuberance to deep despair, is banished from an account whose truthfulness is measured by factual objectivity, to be judged in the cold light of reason. Yet a truth bereft of feeling is but a shadow of the world. Is there no more to guilt, for example, than the facts of the case, which prove beyond doubt that a crime has been committed? What of the pangs of conscience, the pain of relationships traduced, the agony of knowing that what’s done is done—that the slate can never be wiped clean? These afflictions are of course the stuff of literature and drama. Yet so convinced are we that truth finally comes to rest at the facts, that we can countenance such themes only by consigning them to fiction. This division between fact and fiction is the curse of our age. For even as it reduces reality to a shadow of itself, it admits to imagination only as fantasy. Life itself drains away between the two, like water under a bridge. Must we be resigned, then, to an endless shuttle back and forth across the bridge, between ideas in the head and facts on the ground, or can we open up to the pure possibility of a life that ever overflows its measured representations, into realms of conscience and feeling? Can we muster the courage to jump from the bridge and regain the current? This is a challenge for design, as it is for any endeavor dedicated to securing a pathway into the future. If you believe that design holds the key to renewal—that far from setting targets it can clear the ground for life to carry on—then read this book! For Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins, design is not a game of futures, played out through strategic plans and smart solutions. Design actions, they insist, are rather experiments in living and

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working together, sharing in the joys and sorrows they bring, and restoring life to a world racked by oppression. In the following pages, the authors offer powerful testimony to what this means in practice. They show that the road to keeping life going lies not in innovation, prediction, and control, not in planning for the future, but in the plethora of little acts of everyday care by which we look after the people and things around us, or simply get by, and which are far too often belittled or ignored. In this, the work of cleaners, caretakers, and secretar ies holds just as much value as that of managers and professors. Everyone has a part to play in the collective task of fashioning a habitable world for generations to come. This, first and foremost, is the task of education. That’s why design is, above all, an educational endeavor; not so much a subject to be taught as a way of teach ing. Nor can what students learn be dissociated from the ways—including the activities, the conditions, the spaces, the collectivities—in which they learn it. The politics of managing a school, the challenges of creating a curriculum, and the struggles to maintain an estate—these, and more, are design issues in themselves. All bear directly on pedagogic practice, and on the lived experience of teachers and students alike. This book tells movingly of actual events, some shocking, some exhilarating, as they unfolded from amidst the thick of it. It pulls no punches. Its pages are populated by real people, having to cope with the practical immediacies of life in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Unlike so many scholars who have made their names with their prognostications on the contemporary crisis—written from the relative security and affluence of North American or European academia, and who can afford to indulge in tournaments of philosophical erudition and verbal gymnastics— the authors speak from their own, visceral experience of violence and precarity through a time of intense political turmoil. They are not ashamed to speak from the heart as much as from the head. For them, design is not about projecting futures, imagining solutions; it is about sheer, day-to-day survival. But in survival lies not just desperation but also hope—the hope that we can

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live another day, and that generations to come can begin afresh. This is to commit not to progress but to sustainability, to the ongoingness of life. But if the designers of tomorrow are to have loose ends to pick up and follow, then today’s stories need to be told. For that, read on! TIM INGOLD, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people were essential to the making of this book. Firstly, we must thank Clive Dilnot and Eduardo Staszowski for believing in this project from the beginning, and for their generous feedback through debates and provocations, which were decisive for the final result. In addition, we would like to thank those who talked to us during the writing process, as well as those who read parts of the manuscript and provided us with precious criticism: Ana Rita Santos, André Teodósio, Arthur Bittar, Arthures Garcia, Bitiz Afflalo, Bruna Fernandes, Caio Calafate, Camila Carol Oliveira, Cherry-Ann Davis, Clara Meliande, Daniel Rocha, Daniela Capistrano, Denilson Baniwa, Domenico Lancellotti, Freddy van Camp, Frederico Duarte, Gabriel Borges, Gabriel Diogo, Giulia Cezini, Idjahure Kadiwel, Ilana Paterman Brasil, Isabella Pedreira, Ivan Bezerra, Jilly Traganou, John L. Walters, Jonathan Nunes de Souza, Julia Sá Earp, Juliana Paolucci, Katja Klaus, Lara Penin, Léa Anastassakis, Lee Davis, Lucas Nonno, Maia Gama, Marcelo Carnevale, Mariana Monteiro, Mark Gevisser, Nickolas Borba, Nina Paim, Paula de Oliveira Camargo, Pedro Alexandre dos Santos, Pedro Biz, Pedro Herzog, Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza, Philip Miller, Philipp Sack, Rita Natálio, Roberta Guizan, Sergio Boiteux, Silvia Steinberg, Suellen Oliveira, Tatiana Gabriela Rappoport, Theo Cunha, Thomas Binder, Tim Ingold, Wendy Gunn, and Ynaê Lopes dos Santos. We are also grateful to those who contributed to the production of the book: especially André Jobim Martins for the judicious and collaborative translation into English; those who gave us images, Ana Clara Tito, Caio Calafate, Carlos Azambuja, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Gabriel Borges, and Philippe Leon Anastassakis; Mariana Monteiro, for her contribution assisting us in research. We would like to especially thank our fellow professors André Carvalho, Ligia Medeiros, and Ricardo Artur Pereira Carvalho for replacing us as acting directors in different occasions. Finally, we thank all those who, at UERJ, fight for free public education and for opening access to higher education for those historically excluded from it, who, today, are decisive in the resistance to the various forms of totalitarianism that threaten democracy in Brazil. xv

NOTES ON TRANSLATION OF SOME KEY TERMS The use in this book of some terms referring to the field of design, or to socio-political aspects, requires preliminary clarification. Some words were kept in Portuguese, especially when it came to names of institutions or places. In the first occurrence of these names, however, we provide their literal translation in parentheses. Concerning the name of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI), we must clarify that its literal translation into English is “Superior School of Industrial Design”. It is important to note that “superior” indicates that it is a higher education institution (Instituição de Ensino Superior, IES). As for “industrial design,” this was the first term adopted in Brazil for the set of professional activities that would later come to be widely known through the English term “design.”1 Throughout the book, we will use the acronym ESDI to refer to the school, since this is the term by which it is known in Brazil. We employ the term “project,” when connected to the field of design, in a different and broader way in relation to its common use in the anglophone world. In Brazil, the English word “design” is used to designate the professional area in which “designers” work. However, the making of design is identified by the word “projeto” (project). As we adopt the English word “project” and its cognates, we also want the reader to mind the meaning of the word in Brazil. As for the terms relating to affirmative action policies in Brazilian universities and, more broadly, with regard to ethnicracial issues, some considerations are necessary. We have adopted the term “cotista,” commonly used in universities, because we believe it carries a meaning that a literal English translation, quota students, does not comprise. A set of federal and state laws regulate the system for reserving places in Brazilian public universities. At UERJ, the system is called the Affirmative Action Program, or Quota System. In 2000, the Legislative Assembly of 1

For a review of this semantic trajectory, see Milene Soares Cara, Do desenho indus trial ao design: uma bibli o grafia cr í tica para a discip lina . S ã o Paulo, Editora Edgard Blücher, 2010.

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Rio de Janeiro approved the first law for reserving places for candidates from public schools, and in 2001 quotas were expanded to include self-declared Black (negro) and Brown (pardo) candidates. In 2003, these laws were modified, encompassing all categories of quota reservation into the broader category of “needy” (carentes) students. According to the text of this law, “a needy student is defined as such by the state public university, which must take into consideration the applicant’s socio-economic level and determine how this condition will be proven, using for this purpose the socio-economic indicators used by official public agencies.” Since 2018, among the needy, the law guarantees the reservation of 20 percent of seats for Blacks, Indigenous people, and candidates from quilombola communities, 20 percent for candidates from public high schools, and 5 percent for candidates with disab il it ies and chil dren of civil servants in risk professions, such as firefighters, military personnel, and prison guards killed or injured in combat.2 Note that Rio de Janeiro State legislation uses different terms from the Brazilian Census Bureau (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE) and, consequently, from the Federal Quota Law (Lei 12.990) and other nation-wide affirmative action legislation. In IBGE documents and federal race-related legislation, the population is divided into the following ethnic groups: pardos (Browns, or lighter-skinned Blacks), brancos (whites), pretos (Blacks), amarelos (yellow, i.e. East Asian), indígenas (indigenous), and negros standing for the aggregate of pretos and pardos. Conveying the distinction between negro and preto in English is difficult for several reasons, not least because the meaning the terms carry in administrative parlance is different from their current use in everyday language, which also varies according to context. When referring to colors in nature, the Portuguese words preto and negro have the same meaning (the color black), the latter being slightly archaic, but, when referring to people of African descent, 2

See “Quota System,” UERJ – State University of Rio de Janeiro, accessed May 27, 2019, “Sistema de cotas,” UERJ – Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, accessed June 22, 2021, https://www.uerj.br/inclusao-e-permanencia/ sistema-de-cotas/.

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negro is more widely used, at least in the mainstream news media (usually meaning Afro-Brazilians in general). A person of mixed European, Levantine, Indigenous, and/or African descent may identify as pardo, but not consider themselves to be either negro or preto (however, note that, for census purposes, they will be counted as part of the negro population). These distinctions are also a matter of debate within Black and anti-racist political activism in Brazil.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ca. 1500 At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the territory of the city of Rio de Janeiro was mostly occupied by the Tupinambás, also known, in this region, as Tamoios. 1500 Beginning of Portuguese colonization in Brazil. 1822 Brazil declares independence from Portugal. 1850 Eusébio de Queirós Law prohibits the entrance of enslaved Africans in Brazil. 1888 Lei Áurea (“Golden Law”): slavery is outlawed in Brazil. 1889 Proclamation of the Republic. 1919–1933 Period of operation of the Bauhaus, Germany. 1948 Establishment of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM, Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art). 1950 Opening of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, State University of Rio de Janeiro). 1953–1968 Period of operation of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, Germany.

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1953 Max Bill visits the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. ca. 1953–1959 Plans are made for a Escola Técnica de Criação (ETC, School of Technical Creation) at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. ca. 1960 Establishment of the first design companies in Brazil. 1962 Establishment of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI, Superior School of Industrial Design), offering courses in the areas of product design and programação visual (graphic design). 1964–1985 Military dictatorship in Brazil. 1968 Ato institucional no. 5 is promulgated, suspending constitutional guarantees in Brazil, and opening the way for widespread incarceration and torture of political dissidents. 1975 Incorporation of ESDI into UERJ. 1985 End of the military dictatorship in Brazil. 1988 Promulgation of the current Brazilian Constitution. 2002 Implementation of the quota policy at UERJ.

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2003 Election of Luiz In á cio Lula da Silva, from the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party), for the Presidency of Brazil. 2004 Creation of the Bolsa Família federal program guaranteeing, by direct transfer, a minimum income to families in poverty or extreme poverty in Brazil. 2014 Brazil hosts the FIFA Soccer World Cup. 2015 New ESDI curriculum is implemented, with a new and expanded set of areas of expertise: communication, product, interaction, and services. 2016 Rio de Janeiro hosts the Summer Olympic Games. Dilma Rousseff is ousted as President of Brazil through a parliamentary coup. An Architecture and Urbanism undergraduate course is opened at ESDI/UERJ. March 2016–December 2018 Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins are directors at ESDI. 2016–2017 Budgetary crisis at UERJ. Payments are systematically delayed, academic activities are suspended, basic maintenance funding is curtailed. February 12, 2017 ESDI Aberta (Open ESDI) event is held in the context of the #UERJResiste (#UERJResists) movement.

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March–April 2017 Students occupy ESDI, dwelling on the campus and promoting activities of the ESDI Aberta movement. August 2017 Regular academic activities resume at ESDI and UERJ. March 14, 2018 Assassination of Rio de Janeiro Councilwoman Marielle Franco. April 29, 2018 Assassination of UERJ student Matheusa Passareli. October 28, 2018 Jair Bolsonaro is elected President of Brazil. March 2020 to the present COVID-19 pandemic.

MAP AND ESDI GROUND PLAN

FIGURE 0.1 Part of downtown Rio de Janeiro.

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MAP AND ESDI GROUND PLAN

FIGURE 0.2 ESDI’s grounds.

Introduction Marcos Martins and Zoy Anastassakis

THE SETTING The place where the stories in this book unfold is the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI),1 the first design school in Brazil to offer bachelor’s degree courses in the areas of product design and programação visual (graphic design). The initial plans for its implementation date back to the country’s industrialization between the 1950s and 1960s, a time of progressive ideas shared both by enthusiastic intellectuals and the government. At that moment, the idea of progress was adopted as a motto by the federal government, which invested intensively in industrialization as a vector for national development. In this context, it would be necessary to form a body of professionals capable of designing for the national industry. These were the first steps towards creating industrial design courses in the country. 1

The literal translation of the school’s name into English is Superior School of Industrial Design (see Notes on translation of some key terms).

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ESDI came into being with the support of a group of designers linked to the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm, such as the Swiss Max Bill, and the Argentinean Tomás Maldonado. As far back as the late 1950s, the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), Rio de Janeiro, hosted several educational activities related to a proposal launched by Max Bill, later revised by Tomás Maldonado, to create the Escola Técnica de Criação (ETC), within the museum premises. The project (which ultimately fell through in its initial MAM-based version) was embraced by designers, artists, architects, and scholars from Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and Switzerland, culminating in the establishment of ESDI in 1962. During its early years, the school became a model for the teaching of design in Brazil, and, in 1968, the Brazilian Ministry of Education adopted its curriculum as a model for the creation of other design courses in Brazil. Initially, ESDI was to be housed at MAM, which, in 1958, was transferred to a building designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy facing the Baía da Guanabara, in downtown Rio de Janeiro. The plans for linking ESDI to MAM did not go any further, so the school came into being through an initiative of the state government, and was provisionally placed in a group of buildings in the historic central district of Rio, where it still is today. When it was established, the school was not part of a university, being directly linked to the structure of the Secretaria de Educação e Cultura (Department of Education and Culture), until, in 1975, it was incorporated into the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (State University of Rio de Janeiro) (UERJ), of which it is, to this day, an academic unit. For more than fifty years since its founding, the school’s curriculum had been structured around two main areas: visual programming2 and product design. This structure also determined the creation of departments, two corresponding to these two fields, and a third, dedicated to historical and theoretical disciplines, the Department of Cultural Integration. In 2016, a substantial curriculum reform was approved, increasing the 2

Programação visual (visual programming) was one of the first terms widely used in Brazil to designate what can also be called graphic design, or visual communication.

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number of core axes to four: communication, product, interaction, and services. The same year, ESDI started offering a course in architecture and urbanism, in the city of Petrópolis, in the mountainous range of the state of Rio de Janeiro. ESDI launched its postgraduate program in 2005 with a master’s course in design, also offering, from 2012, a doctoral course in design. The school’s graduate program is currently divided into two lines of research: Technology, Product, and Innovation; and Theory, Information, Society, and History, and admits around twenty students annually. In its undergraduate design course, until a few years ago, ESDI would open thirty seats for new students every year. More recently, this number rose to forty. Since ESDI’s establishment, around 2,000 designers have graduated from the school. Because of this history, ESDI has established itself as one of the main references for design education in Brazil. However, more than that, it has remained an institution capable of rejuvenating itself and resisting the recurring attacks on public education in the country because of its tendency to constant transformations.

STORYTELLING, EDUCATING, DESIGNING This book tells stories that were lived by both of us between 2016 and 2018, when we were directors of ESDI. It was a time marked by a severe financial and institutional crisis that affected the entire university. Different paths led both of us to the moment we took office as directors in March 2016. Zoy graduated from ESDI in 1999. In 2012, after completing her PhD in anthropology, she returned to school, approved for the vacancy of associate professor in the area of Design, Society and History. Marcos graduated in design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1984. Between 1999 and 2004, he taught some courses in graphic production at ESDI, as a temporary lecturer, until, in 2010, he was admitted by public tender as a professor of design for the area of Design, Interaction, and Communications. Both, today, are tenured professors at the school.

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To our stories we have added others, which we were told by some of those who were next to us during that turbulent period. Most of the situations narrated here took place in a time marked by a violent political, institutional and financial crisis that threw us into a situation of uncertainty and precariousness, in which this design school, and the university to which the school is linked, found themselves threatened with closure by budget cuts from their sole funding source, the state government. In the city and State of Rio de Janeiro, a growing economic and fiscal crisis, combined with falling oil prices, widespread corruption, and mismanagement of works for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, led the State into a complete mess. The government started to parcel and suspend the payment of bills for several essential sectors of the public service, such as security, health, and education. At UERJ, classes were suspended, salaries and scholarships were paid intermittently and with delays, and the supply of materials for the basic maintenance of the physical integrity of the campuses was interrupted. At ESDI, as a reaction to this attack, which threatened its very existence, atypical activities of knowledge exchange and unusual experiences in administrative decision making and in design education started to thrive. This movement was called ESDI Aberta (Open ESDI).3 Disrupting the regular institutional routine in many ways, the situations that emerged in the midst of the crisis brought management, students, former students, teachers, administrative technicians, and friends of the school together in a collective effort to move beyond what threatened us, aiming to keep the school open. Running the school in that period was more about engaging in a set of experimental actions in collective work. More than just managing the school, we became part of a struggling collectivity. And so we committed ourselves to a movement in which important debates emerged about the relationships between 3

It is important to note that the ESDI Aberta movement was also associated with a broader one, UERJ Resiste (UERJ resists), in which numerous initiat ives of struggle and resist ance prolif er ated through out the whole university.

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design education and the socio-political environments in which it takes place. The way we wrote this book is connected to the collective commitment we made during our time running the school. Thus our writing seeks to maintain the same type of commitment to lived experiences. Given this engagement to the situational grounding, and our desire to communicate with a broader audience, some questions arise. What will the report of such situated experiences serve readers from all over the world? Why tell these everyday stories of a collapsing design school, apparently similar to the difficulties faced by so many other educational institutions elsewhere? Are we proposing to rethink and reconfigure design practice and education? What contribution can these narratives bring to a collection committed to debating designing in the dark times we face today? First, let us address the issue of storytelling. To tell a story is not about explaining things or providing comprehensive information. Storytelling is setting an open ground for readers to chart their own path through the text.4 It is, thus, a means to achieve a contingent perspective, making a kind of situated knowledge,5 which builds from the ephemeral and inconclusive character of specific lived experiences, therefore challenging the idea of an official and univocal historical account. The stories told here do not aim to offer readers a recognition of the past “as it really was,”6 but rather to report on what we learned through practice and experience. The narratives clearly spring from the positionalities of each of us, the two co-authors. As such, they simultaneously reveal our perspectives and the worlds that unfold from them, which are entangled but not indistinguishable nor reducible from one another. This double perspective also intertwines with our apprehension of what we were told by alumni, professors,

4 5

6

Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture, 109–10. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings Volume 4. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2006).

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deans, secretaries, cleaners, and caretakers whom we were next to and to whom we reached out to again during the writing of this book. Throughout all the chapters of this book, we take a position that advocates for expressing and keeping multiple perspectives without ever losing sight of the differences implied in narrating them with our own voices. Our stories are, thus, aimed at establishing partial connections7 with these numerous and also partial worlds with which they happen to intertwine. It is in this sense that, if any objective lessons are to be found in this book, we hope that they will be produced from the weaving of the threads of each of the different stories (which are not to be overly explained or contextualized) and from the plurality of situations in which they will be read, which can envelop them and multiply them with other worlds, still unknown to us. In other words, by narrating the situations of extreme crisis that we have faced, as well as the ways in which, at ESDI, we have struggled to resist, we intend to give readers factual examples of refusal of what-is, in order to stimulate, in their imagination, the formation of new models for the possible.8 In this way, the very act of narrating these stories full of imagination and collective effort makes them able to serve as antidotes to exclusively pessimistic narratives about the multiple failures of these dark times. There is, then, the issue of design education and education in general. However, we do not speak here as theorists of education, which we are not. We are both academically trained in design and act as professors and researchers on the permanent staff of a design school. As we do not think about design education from the field of education, but rather from design, we do not analyze education by the content of disciplines or planned pedagogical practices either. Neither do the experiences we talk about here include innovative methods of teaching in the classroom. 7

8

Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2005). Clive Dilnot, “Foreword,” in Ezio Manzini, Politics of the Everyday (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), viii.

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We also do not intend to address the state of the art in design research and theory, and neither do those experiences risk giving solutions for the problem of the future of design in a collapsing world. Even though we are not going along these somewhat safer and conventional paths, we hope, with these reports on what we have experienced and learned when managing a school in a period in which regular classes and activities were suspended, to contribute to the debate on what education in design can look like today. Throughout the book, readers will find multiple collective care initiatives, extracurricular activities, student proposals and demands, alternative dynamics in knowledge sharing, and exchanges with other scholarly productions different from the teaching programs of a Eurocentric tradition. Another important concept that we have gradually put together in the chapters that follow is that there is no pedagogy or pedagogical content dissociated from the physical, affective, social, political, and psychological reality of the people involved in what we usually call education. This book is the result of the authors’ joint effort to bring attention to stories of everyday experiences, which are usually relegated to the margins, when compared to what is widely assumed to be the main focus of a design school. Here, we identify with the work of Sara Ahmed, as she comments on her own research on diversity9 and complaint at the university: more than the research field or the research site, Ahmed’s work takes place on the university.10

9

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012). 10 In the words of Sara Ahmed on her own book about complaints in the univer sity envir on ment: “this book in being on complaint is also on the university. By saying this book is on the university, I mean something more than that the university is my research field or site. I also mean the book is about working on the university. I write this book out of a commitment to the project of rebuilding universities because I believe that universities, as places we can go to learn, not the only places but places that matter, universit ies as holders of many histor ies of learn ing, should be as open and accessible to as many as possible” (Ahmed, Sara, Complaint! Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021).

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Ahmed’s text is written from what she calls a commitment to the project of rebuilding universities. Thinking with Ahmed, we understand that this book is about dwelling on a design school. It thus constitutes a gesture stressing our commitment not only to design or design education, but also to the collective engagement to which we are linked on a specific design school. Therefore, the themes we address here are the same ones we struggled with, in a broader collectivity, in the period in which we joined forces with other teachers, employees, students, and alumni in order to keep the school open. By doing so, in this book, we end up addressing an array of broader issues, such as the elitism of the design field; the enormous difficulties of Blacks and all the needy11 students in getting a university degree; the micropolitical dimension of the impacts of political violence in Brazil; the economic hardships experienced by professors; the role played by environmental elements, such as buildings, trees, garbage, and humidity; living with other animal species and bodily expressions, such as crying, exhaustion, depression, fear, and hangover; situations of racism and homophobia; moments of celebration, joy, sociability, and collective efforts to maintain activities. We want to include all of this under the term “education,” broadening it. These aspects of practices and experiences lived in a school are not dissociated from the learning contents, but are intertwined with them and determine practical educational experiences with them. This is why the writing in this book also distances itself from the cold and hands-off language of conventional academic discourse. Some chapter and section titles, such as “Curriculum,” “Design research,” and “Getting a degree,” may appear misleading as they use academic terms to narrate situations and experiences, which, in principle, would not fit these rubrics. Perhaps this will frustrate some readers, but these false promises are intended precisely to highlight, by contrast, that a kind of knowledge that comes 11

The terms “Black” and “needy” correspond, respectively, to the words “negro” and “carente” present in the quota law in effect in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Therefore, we will adopt these terms through out the book (see Notes on translation of some key terms).

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from practices that are not epistemologically validated can suggest new ways of thinking about these words. Education in general, and design education in particular, are thus reconfigured as ways of exchanging local knowledge, which are no longer based on consolidated science, but on knowledge produced on a daily basis, within a community, focused on the very conduct of life. This way the borders of design and education get blurred. Our collective activities of knowledge sharing also involved a great deal of designing, in which design activities took place, surprisingly, simultaneously with learning, responding to our urges and our struggle for survival. Therefore, in our view, the activities and actions described in the chapters that follow constitute not only educational acts, but also design acts. We now address the question the reader may be, at this point, asking themself: How can this book contribute to a critical reconfiguration of the design field? As with the issue of education, we insist that this contribution does not come to us through a theoretical way, but originates from the lived experience itself. We think that opening school spaces, decentralizing decision-making processes, collectivizing and politicizing suffering, as well as making it the starting point of a partial recovery of our existence as an academic community, are design actions. Above all, because they broaden horizons no longer through an approach of prospective plans, but, rather, by the emphasis on lived and shared experiences, and on creating places where affection circulates. We understand that conceiving design as a set of collective everyday acts led us to practice and think about design far from its established canon, serving, especially, as an antidote to the obsession with planning for the future. The historical link between design, planning the future, and investing in progress has been fundamental in demarcating the design field since the earlytwentieth century. Design activity has played a prominent role in the processes of industrialization and modernization through an Enlightenment reliance on rationalism as a means of ensuring progress. Nowadays, the historical understanding of design as an instrument to foster progress faces the fact that this progress and these solutions only make sense in the predatory neoliberal logic guided

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only by a drive for profit, often expressed in celebratory terms such as “innovation” and “entrepreneurship.” This connection is problematic today, also in view of counter colonial12 movements, of the repositioning of the discipline in what appears to be a crisis of capitalism and neoliberalism. Today we are urged to rethink, in view of climate issues, the accelerated production of artifacts, processes, and interactions, and to interrogate the possible relationships between the problem of growing social inequality in the world and a discussion about free public education. The threat of closing a design school, such as ESDI, in the period described here, also appears to us as an index of this crisis, precisely because the school has been associated with that developmental project of progress since its inception. Latin American countries undergoing industrialization from the mid-twentieth century, such as Brazil, were affected by this developmental conception, and design schools, such as ESDI were strongly influenced by a conceptualization that was organized around rationalism and enthusiasm for the future. In the case of ESDI, specifically the one developed at HfG Ulm.13 Even though ESDI has never unconditionally adhered to that rationalist paradigm, the notion of project as the main avenue for the practice of design has been a constant in the curriculum and in the pedagogical routine of the school, since its foundation until today. In ESDI’s project classes (which are the backbone of its curriculum), students project, prototype, and even when one thinks of design as a process, one doesn’t get entirely rid of the idea of where one wants to get. In stark contrast to this logic are experimental processes aimed at survival, such as the ones we went through in 2016 to 2018, when ESDI was taken by the urgency of keeping itself alive and active as a way to resist deep and abrupt cuts in funding and basic maintenance. There was no time to project anything! As we were challenged to run a design school in an atypical way, 12 13

Antonio Bispo Santos, “Somos da terra,” Piseagrama 12 (2018). We address this issue in our after word to the book Gui Bonsiepe. The Disobedience of Design edited by Lara Penin. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021.

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11

constantly having to meet urgent needs that rushed over us every day, we began to suspect that it would be possible to articulate a relationship between the experience of collective management in a period of crisis and a problematization of that concept that was dear to the field of design, perhaps one of its core foundations: the project.14 Prevented, as we were, from moving forward, we couldn’t do anything other than to stay with the troubles that would throw us each day into an ever thickening present. Grounded in the present, without the means to plan a way out of the troubles into the future, we decided to keep designing—even if without projecting. Gradually, we started to perceive our own experiences towards survival as acts of designing, or design actions. The word design recovered, then, its meaning as a verb, as movement, action, and at the same time it lost its dependence on the notions of development and progress. The experiences we narrate here show a call to actions which, even though not totally devoid of some type of project rationale, detach themselves, by imposition of temporal instability, from a vision of the future. We show situations and experiences in which a community managed to organically organize itself into networks of multiple actors and wills, when daily experience became a precious asset. We do not see the crisis (economic, political, social, temporal) as an external object to be studied and rationally overcome. On the contrary, for a brief period, through a window that opened and quickly closed, we could live, inside it, processes of invention that gave us the chance to envision the possibility of a design that, disconnected from pressures for development and progress, reconfigures itself as a practice of collective survival. A design that doesn’t believe in solutions that will solve anything definitively. A design not identified with progress and control, averse to grandiose plans, without prediction, a design, in short, without project. 14

We employ the term “project,” when connec ted to the field of design, in different and broader way in relation to its common use in the anglophone world (see Notes on translation of some key terms).

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When, as we face troubling times, a given consolidated field of knowledge (say, design) presents itself as a privileged locus for an urgent debate in the search for new paths, it is the everyday small acts of caring, the focused efforts for keeping things going, as apparently minor forces, free from the demand for definitive solutions and from pre-demarcated fields of knowledge, that will perhaps be the ones that will best offer alternative experiences as we move forward.

WRITING Because we lived through that period of crisis as partners in the management of ESDI, we had to bear, together, the continuous responsibility for everything that happened at the school. This intense collaboration, which, as the following chapters show, required us to decide on the most unusual themes, and created a bond of trust and affinity that led us to imagine that we could go on thinking about what had affected us during our time running ESDI by writing a book together. However, this book is not only the result of an encounter between the two authors at a design school, but rather of the collective commitments of a much broader community with the care and maintenance of the school. Thus, the book is a combining of forces, and, therefore a product of collective labor. In this book, there is a vibration that brings the experience of writing closer to the events it refers to. We had lots of support throughout the elaboration of the stories that follow. We conducted interviews with students who lived through that moment or who were in some way at school during the period covered by the narrative. We also submitted the text to the criticism of several students and colleagues, most of whom were present at that period; a few others, however, who were then new to the school, offered us some more distant reading perceptions. Some professors were also interviewed, but we didn’t ask them about their perspectives as professionals, only as former students. The chapters have been written alternately by each of us, in first person, with the exception of this introduction and the final

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chapter, both of which we have written together. Besides ourselves, many other characters will emerge. Some of them came forth as the result of entanglements between various narratives that came to us through our own memories, but also from interviews and testimonials, as mentioned above. Others, however, are roughly conceived as fictional versions of people whom we actually know. These characters, nonetheless, are the result of our effort to embody not just one or other isolated case, but to echo the collective voices of a large number of people. The school itself is a character, but one full of contradictions and internal dilemmas. At times, it will appear overly strict or conservative (austere professors, trapped inside their rationality). In other cases, it will look colorful and wildly libertarian (convivial students and professors, subverting protocols). Although it was necessary, in these stories, to make certain simplifications—some of them laudatory, others unflattering—ESDI remains complex, plural, and hard to define. The university itself, yet another character, is sometimes paradoxically presented, both in its bureaucratic rigidity with apparently unshakable structures, and through powerful and vital deformations in its organization, capable of revealing practices that are usually hidden, but which overlap and coexist with those dominant structures.15 We have not followed a chronological order for the chapters, as we intend the book to work more as a collage of stories than as a unified narrative. The order of the chapters is designed to provide contrast and dialogue between the topics we cover, in the case of a sequential reading. But the chapters can also work independently in whatever order readers wish to read them. In order to make it easier to locate events in time and space, we provide a timeline of major events at ESDI and in Brazil, a floor plan of the land and buildings for better spatial orientation, as well as cross references between the chapters. In Chapter 1, “Landing,” we describe the location where the narrative takes place, not only in the way the buildings and the

15

la paper son, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

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land stand now, but also as a place of disputes between Amerindians, Frenchmen, and Portuguese that took place in the context of the foundation of a colony in the territory that came to be known as Brazil. In Chapter 2, “Curriculum,” we explore a historical and dynamic dimension of debates around ESDI’s curriculum, in two distinct moments: in 1968, when classes at school were interrupted by students who demanded a curriculum overhaul and in 2015, when, again in order to review the design course curriculum, an arrangement of meetings among several small groups of people ensured the implementation of curriculum reform. We also explore the impact of the pres ence of cotis tas 16 on this curricular reformulation”. In “A landslide panic,” Chapter 3, we describe two different moments: 2015, when, since there was no one willing to present a bid for the ESDI direction, we decided to apply for the position as co-directors who would share the responsibility for the school’s administration; and 2018, when the dramatic socio-political situation led us to leave our positions, resigning as co-directors at ESDI. Intertwining personal stories with the violence of Brazilian politics, which took a decisive turn in 2018 with the assassination of the councilwoman Marielle Franco and the election of Jair Bolsonaro for president, we retrieve a more comprehensive approach to describe those threatening situations. In this way, we avoid sociological analysis of the context, which, if we allowed ourselves to do, would position us as distant observers or historical analysts (all that we were not). In Chapter 4, “Drawing together,” we talk about our proposal for horizontal management for the school, calling on teachers, students, and staff for a decentralized administration. We narrate the day-to-day in which students took responsibilities for important institutional matters, such as, the redesign of the school’s visual identity, jointly with us, one among many situations in 16

We have adopted the term “cotista,” commonly used in Brazilian universities, because we believe it carries a meaning that the English trans la tion, “quota students”, does not comprise (see Notes on translation of some key terms).

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which we experimented with doing in company. Considering that unexpected compositions can also present unexpected heterogeneities, we also report our association with a business corporation, to fulfil the old dream of building a new entrance for the school. In “Crisis,” Chapter 5, we detail in-depth the collaborative activities of the #ESDIAberta initiative and the student-led occupation of the school, which then became a place where people would cook, organize extracurricular activities, sleep, and wake up. This movement is one of the fundamental axes of this book, and the way we narrate it in this chapter shows but a fragment of that explosive and fertile period, which originated many other narratives besides ours.17 In “Design research,” Chapter 6, we show how research experiments that start in an uncommitted way can turn into academic research promoting disruptive scientific output in design. In order to do it, we present groups of students transforming their relationship with the environment and with their colleagues in research projects, a process that can lead us to consider the implications of reclaiming “design” as an experimental collective activity. These experimental actions are considered as seeds for the making of teaching and research environments where students, professors, and researchers are encouraged to experience other ways of being in the world, based on concrete and situated engagements. Towards the end of the chapter, we describe some of our experiences presenting #ESDIAberta experiments on a series of academic events in some places outside of Brazil. In Chapter 7, “Impasses and correspondences,” we address the importance and the impact of the presence of Indigenous researchers and artists at the school between 2016 and 2018. Thinking from the notions of “afro-indigenous relations,” formulated by Marcio Goldman, and “confluence,” as proposed by Antonio Bispo dos Santos, we comment on the afro-indigenous confluences that took place at ESDI in that period, and on the 17

See the complete list of the many student-authored publications incited by the movement in Chapter 6.

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debates that followed the meetings between some Black and cotista students with Indigenous visitors. Reflecting on these meetings, we discuss the processes of exclusion and silencing imposed on racialized and peripheral people at institutionalized places, such as the school and the university. Chapter 8, “How do you get to the university”?, narrates the efforts of cotistas to obtain a diploma. A young girl living with her mother works to support the household and struggles to attend classes. A gay student has a hard time absorbing the shock of entering an elitist environment and his worries concerning the beginning of a romantic relationship and the prejudice he is faced with. Another student is made to leave work in order to complete the course and get her diploma. We show and discuss how the entrance of these new components into the university, a place traditionally dominated by upper classes, is capable of transforming the entire organism and its functioning modes. Finally, in Chapter 9, “Walking barefoot,” we turn away from storytelling toward some theoretical reflections regarding uncertainty and metamorphoses in design education. In order to do so, we mobilize an array of works in different fields of knowledge that help us consider how it is possible to discuss design education while telling situated stories. Then, we take a stand vis-à-vis the most recent debates in the field of design studies regarding the South-North polarity, with which we do not identify. Refusing to place ourselves in the so-called “Global South,” we position ourselves and our contribution in the midstream (Ingold), in the borderlands (Escobar), and in the contact zones (Pratt), that is, as situated knowledge (Haraway). At the end of the chapter, analyzing what emerged throughout the stories told in the previous chapters of the book, we point to possibilities of thinking and designing without projecting. The darkness of the stories narrated in this book now seems less dark than it was at the time it was written. Also, the clarity brought by those experiences of resistance to destruction is more luminous than what seems to be possible now, as we are confronted with “the condition of trouble without end.”18 The chapters 18

Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2.

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were almost entirely developed after the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic, and after fascist threats and Necropolitics 19 intensified in our country. Therefore, the readers of this book cannot ignore the catastrophes that mark the times of its writing. It is from this darkness of the present that we can picture more clearly the moments of acute crisis that we lived and faced between the years 2016 and 2018. Having not yet experienced the greater darkness that surrounds us now, we could, in retrospect, perceive and relive those moments as a harbinger of things to come, which now makes us feel as if we are approaching a horrific full stop. Against all odds, though, this book insists on storytelling as a means to envision possibilities for ongoing transformations.

19

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics , trans. Steve Corcoran, Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2019.

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1

Landing Zoy Anastassakis

Before starting our story, I want to introduce the land where everything happens. A good way to start is to be mindful that it is a war zone. If we dig into the history of this land, where Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial is located, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, what we find under the humid and unstable soil are multiple layers of violent territorial disputes. The city that houses our design school can therefore be seen as a contested landscape,1 built amid succeeding struggles, which have never pacified. In this chapter, I hark back to some of the disputes that have taken place in Rio in three distinct historical moments, namely: in the middle of the sixteenth century, when Indigenous, French, and Portuguese populations fought each other for the dominion of the land around Guanabara Bay; in the 1950s and 1960s, when the first project for an industrial design school in Brazil was envisioned and implemented; and in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when the school came under existential 1

Here I’m employing the concept of landscape present in Anna Tsing’s work: “the over lap ping world-making activ it ies of many agents, human and not human” (2015: 185).

19

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threat amid the intense process of gentrification, corruption, and misappropriation of public funds in the run up to the 2016 Olympic Games. The situations recovered here are by no means repetitions of the same story. Neither would it be correct to say that each one serves as an explanation for the other. However, when woven together into a single larger narrative, these stories help us to understand what persists in all of them: something that escapes, and that, mysteriously, takes us beyond them. What seems to be at stake in these stories is a hidden force,2 something that neither the parties involved, nor us, the authors of this book, as we try to look at things from a more distanced point of view, have been able to explain. A possible designation for this hidden force3 that persists and escapes in these stories is resurgence, the work of many organisms, negotiating across differences, to forge assemblages of multispecies liveability in the midst of disturbance.4 Interested in the response-abilities5 that develop in the midst of the situations that I am now recovering, I try to focus on the ways in which such disputes affect the territory on which the design school, that is, this book’s main character, stands. However, these stories insist on taking us beyond debates over the school, education, and even the field of design. And this is the most interesting thing about them. After all, what makes a difference in what we intend to tell in the following chapters is that which 2

3

4 5

Anna Tsing, Viver nas ruínas: paisagens multiespécies no Antropoceno (Brasília: IEB Mil Folhas, 2019). In this sense, it is possible to conceive this hidden force as something that emerges from the multiple encoun ters in which unin ten tional designs produce new coordinations, continuously reshaping the landscape. According to Tsing, landscapes can be considered as “products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design” (Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015: 185). Ibid. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).

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transforms, and which we can glimpse as worlds in resurgence, in continuous transfiguration amid rubble and recoveries.6 In order to account for what makes the difference in these stories, I have adopted an experimental narrative approach that oscillates between history7 and speculative fabulation.8 In order to do that, in this chapter, I try to take the standpoint of the design student I once was, and, through her voice, I recall some of the violent disputes that permeated the land that grounds our school and these stories. I am aware that it is impossible to fully extract and recreate that student from the professor and researcher that I am now. The narrator at the start is the eighteen-year-old girl who enrolls as a student at ESDI. The year is 1993. This is a young, white woman. She descends from Greek and Spanish immigrants who arrived in Brazil fleeing war and poverty around the middle of the twentieth century. Her father is an architect and urbanist, and her mother is a geography teacher with a background in sociology. This girl was born in 1974, in the suburbs of Rio, just after both of her parents had been imprisoned and tortured by the military dictatorship. She is a former public school student, and she lives in a middle-class neighborhood. Halfway through the chapter, the narrator reassumes her current self’s standpoint, as a professor and researcher at ESDI.

FOLLOWING A DESIGN SCHOOL’S THREADS: WHAT MAKES A PLACE? Good morning, how do you do? Would you by any chance know where the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial is? I have been 6 7

8

Tsing, Viver nas ruínas. Here, I am follow ing Anna Tsing’s remarks about the erasure of previ ous stories in the eval u ation of the present. She calls upon us to think about “how to bring stories to the present, filling the present with traces of previous inter ac tions and events. This can be called the method of histor ical reconstruction. The researcher follows the traces of the past into the present” (Ibid., 172). Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

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approved for the design course, and I am looking for the school to complete my enrollment. Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial? ESDI? Does that have something to do with any university? With Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, UERJ? Oh, but isn’t that one next to Maracanã Stadium? No, that’s the funny thing about it, it seems that this school, which is part of UERJ, is right here, in the historic center of the city. I was told that I would find the school somewhere between Cinelândia and Largo da Lapa, between Passeio Público and the Military Police headquarters. It’s this way, isn’t it? But I don’t see anything. No sign. A school should have an entrance, some kind of signpost, shouldn’t it? No, I have never seen anything of the sort here. After the Escola de Música, over there, there is this gray wall about 100 meters long, and I see no indication of what is behind it. But this wall leads to this garage gate. And, inside, there is a huge slot, but I don’t know what it is. Look, there’s a sentry box over there, by the gate, can you see it? Ask someone over there, maybe those security guards know something. Er, maybe, good idea, thank you. Hello, good morning, do you know where the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial is? Well, it’s right here. Here? But . . . where? Oh, just enter here and turn left, after that tree over there, where there are those cats eating, see? You’re gonna see these gray townhouses, do you see that cobbled corridor behind the tree? Then, go over there, in front of another very large tree, midway through the first two houses in the village, in a small boulevard, is the reception. So, I followed the security guard’s guidelines and entered this 60 meter-long “boulevard,” an open-air corridor, a long, narrow pedestrian street, sided by two rows of one-story gray houses with white-framed windows. The course of the boulevard was gray as well, paved with uneven, weathered cobblestones. In between these houses, there are two immense trees embedded in the walls; I couldn’t understand how they could have grown that way, next to those little houses. I think these are rubber trees, which can grow up to 20 meters tall. There are several of them on the school’s grounds. And there are many, many loose cats out there. One of them follows me, enters one of the little houses and sits in an armchair in the waiting room in front of a

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FIGURE 1.1 School gates, Rua Evaristo da Veiga. Arcos da Lapa (Carioca Aqueduct, informally known as Lapa Arches) are seen on the right, Rio de Janeiro, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

FIGURE 1.2 Main corridor, nicknamed “the Boulevard,” ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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wooden-framed glass counter, where the reception is. I tap the glass twice. The secretary gets up and comes to see me. I hardly managed to find the school, there was no sign on the door, nothing to indicate where ESDI was. Oh, yes, the sign had fallen from the wall. The students are making a new sign to replace it. They are working on it right now, over there, in the workshop. So, this new sign should be ready soon. I came to enroll. I was approved for the undergraduate course in industrial design. Oh, welcome. And you’ve never been here, at ESDI? Me? No, never. I’ve only heard of it. The school is old, it has been here, in this place, since 1963. Out of nowhere, the secretary starts giving me an actual lecture on the history of the school. This school is very famous, they say that it was the first design school in Brazil, perhaps in Latin America. Oh, and almost 2,000 designers have studied here, people who have spread all over the world. Famous people, even, don’t you know? No, I don’t. I took the admission exams to get into ESDI, and to another public university’s design school. I went there too, but it was very far from where I live, so I chose to come and study here, downtown, where access by public transportation is easier. I couldn’t see myself going every day to that far-off place that is Cidade Universitária. That is too remote, too isolated. Oh no, I thought it best to study here in the city center, you know? And besides, they say that this school is very good, isn’t it? They have a very prestigious tradition in design education here, that’s what I hear. But it was hard to find, huh? I was on the verge of giving up when I finally got here. Oh, but it’s good that you found our school. It is really a great place to study. You see, I’ve been here for a long time. Before that, some German guys came all the way here to teach, they came directly from Germany, to help create the school, back in the early 1960s. And here, even today, many people still speak German, you will see. There was a time when they went to study there, doing an academic exchange. And many professors from there came here, too. All these people speaking in German, right here in downtown Rio, it was a funny thing to see. I myself didn’t understand anything. I hear all of this, in the professors’ conversations, in the corridors, in the breaks between classes, at coffee time. So, I learn more and more about the

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history of design and of this place. These people who work here, most of them graduated right here, and, soon after that, they became professors of the school. They teach, but they also have their own design firms. But now, people expect professors to hold a doctorate degree, and all sorts of academic honors. And our professors here, many of them don’t have any of that, no. They value professional practice more than that. And the sad thing is that they end up having their academic careers hampered, because today there’s a bunch of perks in terms of salary progression that are restricted to those who complete their academic training. And to do that, they have to shut down their design firms. And they don’t want that. But it is good that professors remain active in the job market, because students can do internships with them and learn things by doing, don’t you think? And before that, some of them went a lot, too, to the Museu de Arte Moderna, near here, you know, that modernist building right on the waterfront? It was there that they wanted to install the school, back in the 1950s, but it seems that things didn’t work out that well between the government and the museum management. Then, the group that was working on creating the school with the government had to find another place to install a provisional campus. That’s how the school ended up being right here. It was supposed to be temporary, but we have been in this place, like this, in a somewhat improvised way, since the beginning, in 1963, when the first class of students got in. And since then sixty classes have graduated. At the school’s inauguration, even the state governor, Carlos Lacerda, attended. In the photos of the event, you can see a bunch of big shots in suits, it was all very fancy. At that time, they believed that Brazil was going to industrialize, so they created this school to train future industrial designers in this country. They had already tried to make a school like this at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, a few years before, but it seems that things didn’t work over there. The students did not get jobs in industry, and they really only wanted to copy products designed abroad. So, the seed was planted. And some of those who were involved with the São Paulo school continued talking to some people out there, some Germans, some Italians, Swiss, and Argentines, too. All of this buzz about making a design school

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and they ended up settling here in Rio, where there wasn’t even much manufacturing, huh? Not even now. After sixty years, this place has not industrialized properly, has it, my child? So, these industrial designers had to turn around to find jobs, which turned out to be easier in the field of visual communication than in product design, which was one of the things those pioneers wanted to develop over here, an autonomous design style for the Brazilian consumer goods industry. And there, in that museum near here, they ended up founding the Instituto de Desenho Industrial, which was a center for research and development of industrial products. So, many students and teachers left here in the morning and went there, in the afternoon, to work. At that time, there was an exit to Rua do Passeio, did you know? So, there was that way out, it was an exhibition pavilion that was built by the students, I think that was back in the early 1960s. They held exhibitions there, I saw some pictures from that time, it was beautiful. But then they closed it. It became some government agency, I don’t know. Finally, it ended up being demolished. Do you know that they say that, even in the eighteenth century, this whole land belonged to the Convento da Ajuda? But before that, down here, around here, where the school grounds are now, they say, too, that there was a lagoon, Lagoa do Boqueirão, did you know? Well, I heard that there were five lagoons in this region where the city center is today. There were also several hills that were gradually removed so that the earth could be used for landfills over the lagoons. This area was full of mangroves, lagoons, and ponds, everything embedded between the sea and the mountains, so it was all very wet. And even before the arrival of the Portuguese, and of the French who were here before them, around the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Tupinambá natives inhabited these lands, did you know? There was a Frenchman9 who was here at the very beginning of colonization and counted thirty-two Tupinambá villages around Guanabara Bay. They say that here, near the school, there were two of them,10 Karióka, at 9

Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un Voyage Faict en la Terre du Brésil, autrement Dite Amérique (Paris: LDP Classiques, 1994). 10 Rafael Freitas da Silva, O Rio antes do Rio (Belo Horizonte: Relicário, 2020).

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the mouth of the Carioca River, and Gûyragûasu’unaê, near Morro do Castelo, a hill that was also put to the ground in the earlytwentieth century, right? And there were several paths connecting these and other villages. One of them passed right there, where there had been, decades ago, another entrance to the school. By the way, this term, carioca, which designates Rio natives today, comes from there, from the river, from the Indigenous village, did you know? I didn’t know. I only know that this lagoon was landfilled, back in the eighteenth century, because it was thought to cause lots of diseases, you know, the water was dirty, and the government thought it was the lagoon that spread the diseases that people caught. And at that time Brazil was still one of the Portuguese colonies. Hence, the Viceroy of Brazil ordered the pond to be landed and, on top of it, he built the first public garden in the country, which is still there, across the wall at the end of the school grounds. Did you know that the Passeio Público was designed by the son of a Portuguese diamond merchant with a freed enslaved woman, Mestre Valentim? Oh, I didn’t know that. I do know that, a bit later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was also a mansion here that belonged to a Portuguese count who arrived with the Portuguese royal family, fleeing the French Revolution. This count installed, on our land, a pharmacy, and, also, the Imprensa Régia (Royal Press), where the first texts ever printed in Brazil were made. The designers here are very proud of that, you know? There was even a doctoral student11 of ours who researched the many uses to which this land of ours has been put over the centuries. But no, he didn’t comment about the Indigenous presence. Why is it that this research does not reach the history of the occupation of ESDI’s land before the arrival of the Portuguese? His retrospective went back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when a convent was installed in this region. Why are we not aware of the Indigenous presence in this place? 11

Romulo Guina, Aline Barros, Carolina Fonseca, Yasmin Machado, “Uma quadra enquanto palimpsesto: em busca das camadas da memória arquitetônica do campus da ESDI,” Brazilian Journal of Development (Curitiba, v. 6, n. 1, Jan. 2020).

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By the way, did you know, girl, that for about twenty years this school was run by a woman? Mrs. Carmen Portinho was the first woman urbanist in Brazil, the first one to graduate in engineering.12 She was a feminist, quite a woman, and she was the one who planted these huge trees over here. They say that she came one day, in the middle of the 1970s, with the seedlings, called the students, and went out to plant the trees. Who would have thought they would grow so much? And we have to work to maintain them, you know? Can you believe that their roots lift the floor of the classrooms, and that the branches fall off, breaking the roof tiles on top of the classrooms? When that happens, it’s a terrible rampage, the damage can make it rain inside the rooms. One day, I arrived here in the morning, and the office was full of water, the documents were all soaking. An uproar. Besides, everything is full of termites. It’s all rotten, my child. They sprout from the underground, coming through the trees, which hollow out and fall, and then they dig across the school looking for cellulose. They eat everything: doors, windows, chairs, tables . . . They make these tiny tunnels and spread out.13 And then there are the cats! There are more than 100 abandoned cats living in this school. There is a lady who comes and feeds them. The things I’ve seen here, girl, you can’t even imagine. And then there are the parties. You know, students host lots of parties, you’ll dig that. They spend the whole night here, they hold these big parties, lots of friends of theirs come, but afterwards they fix everything, they keep everything organized, clean. This is good, you know? Everyone loves this place very much, everyone has a lot of love for this old school, even the ones who spend their lives complaining about it. And the school deserves it, it’s so old, so neglected, everything is falling. Can you believe that the cats went through a hole in the roof and pissed all over 12

Ana Luiza Nobre, Carmen Portinho: o moderno em constru ç ã o (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumar á /PCRJ, 1999). Silvana Rubino, Lugar de mulher: arquitetura e design modernos, g ê nero e domest icid ade (Professorship Thesis – Instituto de Filosofia e Ci ê ncias Humanas, State University of Campinas, Campinas, 2017). 13 In previ ous works, I thought about ESDI through the dwell ing symbi oses that make up this place. See Anastassakis 2019 and 2020.

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FIGURE 1.3 One of the trees planted by Carmen Portinho in the 1970s, ESDI, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

FIGURE 1.4 Termite trails running through a classroom wall, ESDI, 2016 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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the library? It’s a horror show, no one can stand being there anymore. Think of that, the best design library in this country! And guess what, does the university have money to fix the roof and change the carpet? No, it doesn’t. But don’t worry, girl, because that’s just how the public university in Brazil is, it’s all very precarious, everything falling apart, but the teaching, oh, that’s top notch. The teachers are all very skilled, you’ll see. Students leave here very well placed in the job market. Everyone wants to hire people who have studied design at ESDI. With the training you receive here, you end up being more complete professionals than people who go to other universities. These ones will sometimes have more specialized training, but with a less comprehensive approach. But the market needs professionals with a broader view, you know? You see, everything changes a lot, all the time. That’s what they say over here. That’s what I hear. I don’t know it myself, I just stay here in the office, listening to the conversations of teachers and students, all of them very fine people, you know, child? Here, you will live the best years of your youth, that’s what they say. And I can confirm it. We’ll see, right? Anyway, welcome to ESDI.

STARING THE PAST IN THE FACE: METAMORPHOSES AND COLONIZATION I presented my documents, filled out the enrollment forms, and left the school. On the way home, I kept thinking about everything that the secretary and I had said in that brief chat. Above all, I was intrigued by the history of the German presence in that place; but also by the scarcity of information on the occupation of the land before the European invasion. I think these stories need to be told. Otherwise, we keep walking in circles around the same spot. So, how come we are not aware of any of this? Everything is erased in time, melting into the air. Unless someone insists on talking about it. But how can we access these stories that nobody tells? I came home lightheaded, almost sleepwalking, with my mind somewhere else, thinking about all of those things that had never crossed my mind until I entered that place.

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I could not forget that story about a doctoral student who investigated the various occupations of the school grounds. In our conversation, the secretary commented that this research went back to the eighteenth century, with the foundation of a convent in the area where ESDI is located today. But what was in this place before that? What would that place have been like before it became a school? And before it became a convent? And what would that lagoon have looked like? What was there before the first European invaders arrived? Obsessed with these stories, I researched more about the region where our design school was installed. Then, I remembered a phrase from a Brazilian historian, Luiz Antonio Simas, which made sense of the things that were going through my head: “The history of a city, after all, can also be understood by what it no longer is.”14 But how do we get somewhere that is no longer there? It seemed very strange to talk about the school’s history without considering what was behind, what was underneath, everything that surrounded it, what went beyond it, all those stories that went away. And at that moment, being still so young, I didn’t know where to get it. But then, a curious phrase came to my mind, an Aymara proverb cited by Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Qhipnayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani,” which translates into something like this: “one has to walk through the present staring the past [in the face] and [carrying] the future on one’s shoulders.”15 I kept thinking about the image that the phrase evokes. How does one do that? What would it be like to walk staring at the past, carrying the future over your shoulders? I understood, then, that in order to tell the stories that matter, in this book, it would be necessary, first of all, to stare the past in the face. For that, it is not enough to recover the history of this design school. One 14

Luiz Antonio Simas, “A entrega das flechas,” in O Rio antes do Rio, Rafael Freitas da Silva (Belo Horizonte: Relicário, 2020). 15 “ Qhipnayr u ñ tasis sarnaqapxa ñ ani : hay que caminar por el presente mirando (frente a los ojos) el pasado, y (cargando) el futuro a la espalda” (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Clausurar el pasado para inaug urar el futuro. Desandando por una calle paceña,” in Premio Internacional CGLU – Ciudad de México – Cultura 21 (La Paz: Outubro de 2016).

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has to inquire, in that place, of the traces of the stories that nobody, until now, has tried to tell. For this reason, I now take a detour to the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the region around ESDI was the setting of violent battles that involved the Indigenous populations that lived there and the first European invaders. Before the Portuguese managed to ensure their dominion over the territory around the Guanabara Bay, where the city center of Rio de Janeiro is located, the region had been invaded by the French, who wanted to establish the France Antarctique colony. However, on January 20, 1567, there was a final confrontation that culminated in the expulsion of the French by the Portuguese, resulting in the definitive foundation of the city that came to be baptized with the name of the king of Portugal, which was the same as the Catholic saint of the day, São Sebastião. Up until the European invasion, however, people from a subgroup of the Tupi linguistic family lived in Guanabara.16 Among them were the Tamoios and Temiminós, who spoke the same language and shared the same Tupinambá culture.17 When the Portuguese and the French made their first settlements in the region, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the Guanabara region was already, then, the setting of intense territorial disputes, in which the two groups destroyed and devoured each other.18 The presence of the French and the Portuguese in Guanabara intensified the rivalries between the Tamoio and the Temiminó, and, by half way through the sixteenth century, the region had become a large war zone, which exploded when the Temiminó joined the Portuguese campaign in order to expel the French and the Tamoio from the Bay. In this process, disputes between

16

Jos é Ribamar Bessa Freire, M á rcia Fernanda Malheiros, Aldeamentos ind í genas do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 1997). 17 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “O m á rmore a e murta: sobre a inconst â ncia da alma selvagem,” Revista de Antropologia, v. 35 (São Paulo: USP, 1992): 21–74. 18 Maria Almeida, Metamorfoses indígenas. Identidade e cultura nas aldeias coloniais do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2013).

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Europeans were assimilated by two warring Tupinambá groups according to the frame of their own conflicts. However, we must remember that what the Tupinambá understood as war was something quite different from the European invaders’ conceptions about organized violence. For the Tupinambá, war was a key element of social organization. In making war, they did not expect to subject, nullify, or destroy their enemies, but to fully experience them in their otherness. It was not by accident that their victories in battle were celebrated with large parties, which culminated in the anthropophagic ritual. The Tupinambá war machine can be understood, then, as a radical opening to the other.19 And that was how the Tupinambá also perceived the arriving Europeans. For these peoples, revenge was what embodied their memory, not as a recollection of the past, but as a promise for making the future. What was perpetuated in time, then, as a striking cultural trait of the Tupinambá, was a certain complicity among enemies, which they understood as indispensable for the continuity of each group. In this sense, the Tupinambá wars were something very different from the colonial territorial disputes of European powers, who, however, succeeded in taking advantage of the situation they found upon arriving, inserting themselves in the midst of Indigenous conflicts and assimilating Indigenous allies in their efforts to usurp these lands from their original inhabitants. The decisive victory of the Portuguese and the Temiminó took place in the village of Uruçumirim, which was in the same place where the Karióka village used to be: on top of a hill, the Outeiro da Glória, where, later, the Portuguese built one of their many churches. In the midst of the battle, which involved more than one thousand combatants, several Tamoio leaders were killed, their heads cut off, and displayed on a stake. In that confrontation, six hundred Tamoio and five Frenchmen died. The next day, another ten Frenchmen were hanged. One hundred and sixty villages were set on fire. And more than one thousand Tamoios 19

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Vingan ç a e temporalidade: os Tupinambás,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, Tome 71 (1985): 191–208.

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captured in the battle were distributed, as slaves, among the Portuguese colonists who received land as a reward for their services rendered to the Crown. In return for Temiminó support, the Crown designated land on the other side of the Bay to the chief who had a decisive participation in the battle. Araribóia, then already a Christian, was now appointed captain-general of the village of São Lourenço dos Índios. In addition, the king of Portugal awarded him with the Habit of Knight of the Order of Christ, and Araribóia ended up being baptized with the name of an important Portuguese captain. It is precisely between the village of Uruçumirim, where the final battle between the French, the Portuguese, the Tamoio, and the Temiminó took place, and Morro do Castelo, where the city ended up being established, that our design school stands. However, what most intrigues me about this story is not the proximity between the terrain that today houses the school and these sixteenth-century battlefields. What interests me here, above all else, is what brings us to the metamorphoses and resurgences experienced by the Temiminó in the midst of the colonial wars over Guanabara territory. In her investigation of colonial settlements in Rio de Janeiro,20 anthropologist Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida formulates an intriguing hypothesis worth mentioning. The Temiminó ethnic group may have emerged in the context of local wars escalated by disputes between European powers intent on colonizing the region. After all, she underscores, throughout the sixteenth century, the group, which may well have risen as a dissidence from the Tamoio, started calling itself Maracajá, returned from exile afterwards as Temiminó, and, finally, at the turn of the century, went by the designation of Índios de São Lourenço. In less than a century, and in the midst of the colonial encounter, the Temiminó ethnic group emerged and distinguished itself. Almeida proposes that, more important than discovering who the Temiminó originally were, is to understand their actions from the perspective of their own motivations, and how they 20

Ibid.

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were transfigured and displaced in the midst of the experience of contact with the colonizers. Thus, Almeida points out, in addition to colonial interests, which certainly inflicted extreme violence over local modes of social organization, the Temiminó had their own interests and rationales when investing in their affirmation as an ethnic group that was distinguished by its alliance with the Portuguese. Their adhesion to the colonial endeavor, in the form of their conversion to Christianity, their partnership in the war effort, and adaptation to life in villages managed by Jesuits, recreating, in the midst of this process, an ethnic identity, seems to have been the way in which this group responded, reinventing itself amid the possibilities that were at hand, to those circumstances. The eruption21 of the Temiminó can be seen, then, as a process of resurgence in which the incorporation of difference and inequality in the midst of the violence of colonial encounters constitutes, simultaneously, a way of resistance and reinvention. Precarious, provisional, and contested, the world of the Temiminó was transformed as they moved and transfigured themselves from the wreckage of a broken world into a sort of recovery. One must recall, here, all the multiple forces at play in the paths of the Temiminó, which resulted in an adherence to the colonial way of life, which was, at the same time, a strategy for survival and a decolonizing metamorphoses.22 These Indigenous metamorphoses23 and all the equivocations24 that followed the explosive encounters like those that took place in Guanabara, rose to my attention sometime later, when I heard that an ESDI professor told, braggingly, as if it were a legend or an exotic curiosity that, under the school grounds, there could be an Indigenous cemetery. I wondered: but what 21

Tsing, Viver nas ruínas, 2019. Renzo Taddei, “O dia em que virei índio – a identificação ontológica com o outro como metamorfose descolonizadora,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, n. 69 (abr. 2018): 289–306. 23 Maria Almeida, Metamorfoses indígenas. 24 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004): 3–22. 22

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piece of land, in Rio, or in any other land that has been taken from Indigenous peoples by invaders, such as the Portuguese and French of this story, would not contain countless deposits of remains of people slaughtered in these violent encounters?

CARRYING THE FUTURE UPON ONE’S SHOULDERS: WHAT DOES THIS DESIGN SCHOOL CARRY? As in the case of the Temiminó, resurgence is the very fabric of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Standing precariously between the water and the mountain range, this city came into existence amid alliances forged in situations in which wars, negotiations of losses, and the pursuit of advantages converge; a place where life is constantly reinvented and rebuilt from asymmetrical and violent relationships; a city that carries, as a heritage, war and cannibalism as future-making wagers. I remembered Simas once again,25 when he says that the presence of the Tupinambá warriors still lingers in the air, on the edges of Guanabara Bay, a place that, even today, is such a violently contested landscape. As I learned of the wars of five centuries ago, I immediately remembered some other violent disputes that had also taken place here. Among them was one that took place in the run up to the Olympic Games in Rio. In 2016, the city was experiencing yet another escalation of violent territorial disputes in many different contexts: some of them rose in the midst of urban interventions aimed at consolidating the infrastructure commissioned to satisfy the International Olympic Committee’s demands, which led to the expulsion of vulnerable populations from areas near the sporting venues; others were a result of the wave of realestate speculation, which hit many neighborhoods throughout the city, accelerating a process of gentrification that had been happening for some years; many others took place because of conflicts between the state and armed groups that controlled a number of territories through drug trafficking or paramilitary

25

Luiz Antonio Simas, “A entrega das flechas.”

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practices, in which segments of the police and politics were involved. A few years earlier, in 2008, the State government had launched through its Public Safety Department a project to install a “pacification” policy, which initially was intended to institute community policing in favelas. Inspired by a public security model developed in Colombia, the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs) spread across the State of Rio de Janeiro, reconfiguring the relationships between the spaces of the city and its surroundings. At first, it seemed that the UPPs would dedicate themselves to expelling the paramilitary powers from the favelas, securing for these communities the same rights to the city that other citizens enjoy in the central areas; over time, however, poignant criticism, such as can be found in Marielle Franco’s master thesis,26 arose from the territorial and population governance procedures that this pacification policy sought to implement. Thus, what had initially been announced as a combination of policing and social policy, ended up amounting to “a policy of strengthening the prison state, aiming to contain the discontent or ‘excluded’ from the process, that is, many among the neediest, who were increasingly pushed into living in the city’s ghettos.”27 With the UPPs, the violence resulting from the militarization of the favelas did not come to an end, even after the expulsion of drug traffickers and other criminal groups, who were replaced by police forces. The latter, however, occupied these spaces, once again, imposing their rules with extreme violence. This time around, I looked at the situation as someone who, twenty years after my first visit to ESDI, was already a tenured member of faculty. In 2013, when political demonstrations started popping up all across the country,28 and a year after I had become a professor at ESDI, I was invited to participate in a project 26

Marielle Franco, UPP: a redu ç ã o da favela a tr ê s letras (S ã o Paulo: n-1 edições, 2018). 27 Ibid., 27. 28 Alexander Dent, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, “The Protests in Brazil,” Fieldsights (December 2020).

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promoted by a public agency to support small local businesses in a community with a Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, Morro dos Prazeres. In conjunction with the reclaiming of that area by the State, the agency planned to stimulate entrepreneurship in the neighborhood, and, to do that, it was considering a partnership with a design teaching institution. The proposal was to carry out field research, in order to identify ongoing initiatives in the community that could develop into actions sponsored by the agency that coordinated the project in partnership with the State government. At first, the proposal seemed interesting, since I was committed to involving students in design projects that went beyond a purely commercial scope, gravitating around concrete and particular social issues. However, at the end of the project, which took place over an academic semester, it seemed that, instead of aimed at getting to know the local reality and supporting the development of initiatives already underway in the community, as proposed, the agency was aimed at finding ways to legitimize the implementation of initiatives brought in from outside—and they sought ESDI to endorse that. In this proposal, the design school would serve as a merely decorative element in a process that, in the end, did not value local potentialities, but, rather, the top-down application, in that space, of generic and decontextualized solutions. During that same period, a similar process, which combined gentrification and silencing local voices, was also discretely approaching our school. The curious thing is that, at ESDI, as well as in the Prazeres community, the entity behind the threats of intervention was the same: the entrepreneurship-fostering agency that had requested us for the project in the “pacified” community. In a very indirect and strange way, we learned that the agency was lobbying the government to acquire the land on which the school is located, which, up until then, did not belong to the university. Instead of seeking direct contact with the school or university, once again the agency was acting behind the backs of the main stakeholders. We did not take part in the negotiations, we only heard that there were plans for the remodeling of the school’s facilities, which would be relocated in part of a new building that would house the headquarters of the agency.

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FIGURE 1.5 ESDI School yard and prom en ade leading to the new entrance opened in 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

We tried, without success, to contact the agency. At the same time, we started an internal debate about the remodeling that would be necessary to resume the school’s activities after a possible renovation. There were many differing opinions about the facilities that our campus should have. Some wanted to bring everything down, others wanted to create new buildings that could coexist with our old gray houses. Others thought that the school should move elsewhere. In this movement, a group of students began to investigate what types of space would be needed to house all the activities carried out at the school. Thus, we began to speculate about the kinds of facilities that would have to be built for the school to function properly. It seemed to us that a collective vision for the school could finally emerge out of this movement. A dream, a common plan, starting from which we could, if necessary, negotiate. The dominant narrative about the installation of the school in this place is marked by the notion that nobody had ever dreamt of setting the school up there, where it is now. The school has been housed, for more than fifty years, in precarious facilities that did not meet some of its most basic needs. Little is known about the process that led to the install a tion of the school there. We also don’t know the stories of those who inhabited the buildings in the period before their installation, in the early

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1960s. In the book ESDI: biografia de uma ideia, Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza briefly mentions a testimony by an older professor, who said that there was a “ ‘cabeça de porco,’29 full of people, parrots, and every sort of stuff”30 that had been evacuated for the school to move there. According to the testimony of the professor, the then secretary for cultural affairs of the State government, upon seeing “the old building in Lapa,” would have said: “What is this here? Who lives here? I give everyone fortyeight hours to leave. This is the place”! The renovation of the buildings was completed in seven months, and, as can be seen from some old photos, in addition to the evictions, it also involved many demolitions. The original plan had been to install ESDI at the Museu de Arte Moderna, which, in 1958, was transferred to a building on a site created by a landfill of part of the waterfront that surrounds the city center, designed by architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy, the life companion of the future director of ESDI, the one who planted the rubber trees that I mentioned earlier, Carmen Portinho. At MAM, activities related to the project of the Escola Técnica de Criação had been going on for some years; between 1959 and 1960, this idea brought together a series of Brazilian, German, Swiss, and Argentine designers, artists, and thinkers, among other people, in courses that ended up intensifying the movement that resulted in the creation of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial.31 The state government was unable to establish an agreement with the museum board, and the land next to Rua do Passeio came up as an alternative for a provisional campus. However, the school has been provisionally installed there ever since.

29

Literally, “pig head,” a derog at ory idiom for crowded, often insa lu bri ous tenements. These buildings were common in downtown Rio de Janeiro from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. Originally, it referred specifically to a tenement that housed between four hundred and two thousand people. 30 Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza, ESDI: biografia de uma ideia, Rio de Janeiro: Ed.UERJ, 1996, 19. 31 Zoy Anastassakis, Triunfos e Impasses (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina Editora, 2014).

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FIGURE 1.6 View of the school area, Rio de Janeiro, 1960s (ESDI archives).

When I studied at ESDI, the school was already thirty years old. At that time, in the 1990s, the school’s facilities were not as neglected as they were in 2016. After my first visit to the school, in 1993, I returned, as a student, for the first day of the school year, which started with a design history class. In silence, the professor, a young man who looked like he had just graduated, wrote on the blackboard a bunch of German names. Then, walking between the large drawing tables arranged in rows on each side of the room, he asked us, one by one, if any of us could tell who these people were. But no one knew about any of them. The professor grew increasingly indignant at each evasive answer, until he shouted: “How do you expect to study at this school if you don’t even know who the greatest German designers are? Where did you come from, so as not to have ever heard of these pioneers? I bet no one here can tell me where Ulm is, does anyone know? You do not know! Nobody knows, do you? Bunch of ignoramuses! How do you intend to graduate in design”? The class was silent, everyone with their heads down, avoiding the professor’s withering, increasingly furious glances. Suddenly, several older students burst into the room, laughing, wondering at how gullible we had to be for failing to notice

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that it was a hoax, a prank. It turned out that this was a mock class in design history, set up by more senior students as part of the “welcoming” activities for freshmen. The names on the board, we were later told, were of professors and alumni of the school, all of whom we could still bump into. In the end, the message was transmitted, sarcastically, by our veteran colleagues. To deserve to be there, in that place, it was necessary to know where we were, and in order to understand this properly, it would be important to recognize our ties to a German heritage. Our older colleagues were not exactly wrong. If we go back a little bit in time, both the project for the design school at MAM and the subsequent movements, which culminated in the creation of ESDI, can be read in light of their links with an industrial design tradition established in Germany. From a certain perspective, then, the establishment of ESDI can be considered as an offshoot of Swiss designer Max Bill’s stay in Rio, in 1953. When examining the project of the museum’s final headquarters, Bill had suggested that a design school be housed in the same building, following the same pedagogical philosophy of the one he was about to implement in Germany, in Ulm, the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG). On this visit, in which he became enthusiastic about Reidy’s project for the MAM building, Bill forcefully criticized a certain school of modern architecture in Brazil, publicly antagonizing one of its most prominent figures, Lucio Costa. The dispute revolved around the debate between formalism and functionalism in the modern project. This episode showcases the early stages of the trajectory in which industrial design was taking shape in Rio, marked by the differentiation and departure from the hegemonic and enorm ously success ful Rio school of modern ist architecture.32 Seeking to distance itself away from a perceived excess of formalism that Max Bill denounced in the architecture practiced by Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, ESDI invested in an 32

This debate is taken up in my doctoral thesis, which investigates the processes of institutionalization in the field of design in Brazil. See Anastassakis, Zoy. Triunfos e Impasses: Lina Bo Bardi, Aloisio Magalh ã es e o design no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina Editora, 2014.

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approach more in tune with the Ulm School, which can be defined as technical formalism.33 However, between Max Bill’s visit and the opening of ESDI, ten years went by, which saw the consolidation of the alliance between Rio and Ulm, and the strengthening of relations between central figures in HfG and a group of people who joined the project of creating an industrial design school in the city. This movement involved several visits by Ulmians to Rio, such as Tomás Maldonado, and Max Bense, among others. In the meantime, Alexandre Wollner, a São Paulo designer who had already studied at the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, no Museu de Arte de São Paulo, moved to Germany, where he completed his design training at the HfG Ulm. As soon as he returned, he took part in the movement towards the creation of the school in Rio. He was joined by another graduate of the Ulm School, German designer Karl Heinz Bergmiller, who moved permanently to Rio in order to teach at ESDI. Among the group that formed around the school at that first moment, there were also artists and architects. However, the ESDI project marked a distinction between the teaching of industrial design and the tradition and philosophy of architecture and urbanism that had already consolidated in the city. This was quite different from what happened in São Paulo, where, as late as 1962, at the Universidade de São Paulo, industrial design teaching was not an autonomous field, but a part of the training in architecture and urbanism. Meanwhile, in Salvador, Bahia, Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi formulated a third way for training in industrial design. As director of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, she was committed to creating a school of industrial design and crafts, a project which, because of the 1964 military coup, ended up being aborted.34

33

Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza, ESDI: biografia de uma ideia (Rio de Janeiro: Ed.UERJ, 1996). 34 See Zoy Anastassakis, Triunfos e Impasses. Also: Juliano Pereira and Renato Anelli, “Uma Escola de Desenho Industrial referenciada no lastro do préartesanato: Lina Bo Bardi e o Solar do Unhão na Bahia,” Revista Design em Foco, v. 2, n. 2, (July/December).

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Having thus established the first higher education design course in Brazil, ESDI ended up being responsible for training the first qualified professionals of the field in the country’s history. In addition, it served as a model for the creation of other design courses, since, still in 1968, the Ministry of Education chose ESDI’s curriculum program as a model that should serve as a basis for the development of other design courses in Brazil. Since 1963, ESDI has trained around two thousand professionals. However, even though the design conception of the Ulm school was, since the beginning, one of the pillars on which the course of the Rio school was built, its centrality has always been questioned, which ended up configuring, at ESDI, an environment of very productive instability, which prevents the school’s waters from remaining still for too long. Even without knowing these stories, the young woman I was when I first joined ESDI already sensed all the instability that hung over that piece of land. Between my arrival at school, in the early 1990s, and the moment I put these stories together, I have seen lots of transformations take place there. Just like the Indigenous metamorphoses35 that caught my attention as I tried to recover the stories of the occupation of the school’s land before the arrival of the first European invaders, I now realize that it is also in the midst of encounters and transformations, equivocations, rubble, and recoveries36 that this old, staggering school of industrial design perseveres.

35 36

Almeida, Metamorfoses indígenas. Tsing, Viver nas ruínas.

2

Curriculum Marcos Martins

IN THE CLASSROOM A black rectangle on a white background. Inside the rectangle, dividing it into equal columns, white lines stand out from the deep black—lines, so perfect that they do not appear to be drawn in chalk. On the top of the columns, between these thick lines, are the headings: FUNDAMENTAL, 2nd CV, 3rd CV . . . 4th DI. Below them, thinner lines define other rectangular fields that contain names such as “visual methodology” and “means and methods of representation.” Standing in front of the board, almost all of the school’s professors introduce themselves and welcome the freshmen. The year is 1968. In the audience, a student wearing thick-framed glasses, black like the board, smiling discreetly, giving a glimpse of his big teeth, was filled with excitement. “This must be the best curriculum in the world,” he thought. He listened carefully to the professors’ explanations about the curriculum drawn on the board. The acronyms CV and DI desig nated, respect ively, Comunica ç ã o Visual (visual commu nic a tion) and Desenho Industrial (industrial design), the two major fields into which 45

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FIGURE 2.1 Karl Heinz Bergmiller at the inaug ural lecture, ESDI, 1968 (ESDI archives).

the subjects that the student should study in the years to come were distributed. Fundamental was a first year dedicated to the intellectual preparation and sharpening of the students’ perceptions. These students came from various backgrounds: some were already employed in architecture firms, others came from fine arts courses, others, from engineering. The freshman, who had already studied design history a little, knew that this basic course was an heir to the Bauhaus Vorkurs, in which Johannes Itten, in the early days of the German school, proposed to guide pupils towards individual artistic expression through breathing, concentration, and even gymnastics exercises. Over the years, still in the Bauhaus, this course had already lost much of its experimental character. And when it was adopted in the curriculum of HfG Ulm, a design school considered a legitimate heir to the Bauhaus, it had become much more technical and less concerned with individual expressions. The student, already knowing that HfG Ulm had a great influence on the ESDI curriculum, wondered how much experimentation and technique awaited him under the Fundamental rubric. He went home excited and very impressed with the straightfor ward ness and organ iz a tion he saw in the school. He did not know that he was just about to take part in a moment of

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great turmoil, provoked both by internal disputes in the school and by political events that deeply shook Brazil during that decade.1 Four years had passed since a coup d’état had installed a military dictatorship in the country. Brazilian students had, in 1968, an acute political awareness and played an important role in resisting the dictatorship. At ESDI, students, the vast majority of whom belonged to Rio’s upper-middle class, were less radical in terms of overt political action against the government (there were important exceptions), but were fierce critics of the school’s general pedagogical philosophy, as well as of its curriculum contents and admission procedures. So, it surprised no one, except for the eager and dazzled freshman, that an irate veteran growled at such a well-ordered blackboard: “This is all crap. More of the same! These guys suck.” The freshman was shocked to see the perfect structure presented in the inaugural class collapse in three sentences. But, on the other hand, he was attracted to the freedom of expression of an academic environment in which a student allowed himself to contest, without fear, the established order. The veteran’s revolt also reflected a recent case, in which five students had been threatened to be discharged from school by a reassessment rule then in effect. This caused great controversy and escalated long-held discontent. “They have no criteria,” he raged, “they rate our work without giving any explanation. A friend of mine, for instance, couldn’t figure out why her grade was higher than that of a colleague whose work she thought was really great. She naively asked the professor about his grading criteria. The answer: ‘Would you rather have me lower your grade’? So everyone is afraid of not being able to continue the course for reasons 1

The history of the origins, devel op ment, and guiding prin ciples of ESDI’s pedagogy during its first thirty years of existence is richly narrated by Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza in his book ESDI Biografia de Uma Ideia. This partly fictional account aims to emphasize, among the complex historical layers of the passage from the 1960s to the 1970s, one specific dimen sion: the rupture of stand ard classroom proto cols—which, in the context of the debates addressed in this book—makes this return to the past pertinent, as we shall see in what follows.

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to which they are completely oblivious, because if you don’t pass the Fundamental, you have to leave school altogether” ! “But did these five guys have nice work”? the black-glassed student asked. The other one became even more irritated: “Look, it is true that they delivered almost no work at all, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that these teachers feel entitled to decide everything between them, without any transparency. This tidy curriculum that you saw there in that painting, is in a way the result of our struggle. They only agreed to explain things more clearly because of our pressure.” Indeed, the members of the Diretório Acadêmico da ESDI (ESDI’s student’s union), outraged by the case of the discharged students, had sent the following message to the board on December 20, 1967: “Students demand, through the Diretório Acadêmico, to receive the criteria for approval and failure in the school’s courses and periods in writing within the next twenty-four hours.”2 This message did not at all trouble ESDI director Carmen Portinho, who would later become known and admired for her wisdom and temperance. Besides, unlike the professors (to whom the ultimatum was actually addressed), she had strong affective bonds with students, so nothing that came from them would go unnoticed. Trying to calm the mood and offer a more transparent version of the content of the subjects, a group of professors looked at the curriculum (which was about the same as when the school had been founded in 1962), giving it a significantly clearer organiz a tion. The phys ical pres ence of almost all faculty in the inaugural class also aimed to demonstrate that the students’ complaints had not been ignored, and that there was a genuine openness to dialogue. However, the rating criteria still remained unclear, which partly explained the veteran’s discontent. The freshman laughed awkwardly: “But isn’t there anything good about this curriculum”? “Ah! The Fundamental course is cool, it’s true. We draw, we do a bunch of handcrafted things, there are plaster and wood2

Souza, ESDI Biografia de uma ideia, 144.

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work workshops, this sort of stuff. And these designers, who came here from Germany, they really know what they are talking about; in some theory lessons we also have some very important political discussions. And everything here is based on conversation. We criticize everything all the time, which is very good. But it turns out that our curriculum is practically oblivious to Brazilian reality. ESDI seems to have been built without much planning, importing a model from the Ulm school.” The freshman student chose to stop asking questions, because he found it unpleasant that, in each little recognition of something positive, the veteran was again engulfed by a dispiriting negativity. He speculated whether it could really be like that, as his colleague was saying. In that first presentation by the professors, he perceived, behind the apparent rationalist coldness of the teachers, a real engagement in dialogue, critical exercise, and experimentation. Certainly that was not, could not be the work of a mere transposition of European principles. The next day, he had his first class. He entered a classroom and saw the entire space occupied by huge drafting tables lined up in impeccable order. He did not quite understand why a school of overtly modernist lineage adopted those tilting drawing boards, so much in the taste of academic courses in fine arts. When class started, he also realized that the arrangement of that furniture presupposed a class dynamic that was very different from what was actually practiced. The professor freely roamed through the room, while students disrupted the designated arrangement for individual occupation of the tables, clumsily clustering around them to see each other’s work or even to talk about controversial issues of domestic and foreign policy. One day, a professor proposed: “Now let’s all leave our own tables aside and go sit in front of that of a colleague.” The rush was reminiscent of a children’s game of musical chairs. “Watch your step”! a girl shouted, angrily, after the student with the thick-framed glasses had clumsily bumped into her. He apologized, but she didn’t even look back, going to sit in front of his drafting table. “Oh, how unlucky”! he thought, “The cranky girl is the one who will look at my work”! Faced with the incomplete lines of a three-point perspective, she looked seriously at him,

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who was on a nearby drawing board; vigorously waving both arms at the drawing, she said, without mincing her words: “What is this? This perspective is absolutely wrong! I’m sorry, but this is unacceptable.” The student was disconcerted and disparaged, because he fancied himself very good at perspective. But he did not fail to notice the charm of that adverb “absolutely,” (which he would later hear her say over and over again, applied in the most diverse contexts), there, disproportionately applied to a prosaic perspective drawing. Nor did he miss the almost childlike sweetness of those two bare arms, outstretched, of the hands with all fingers spread like two overturned starfish. After that disagreement, they never failed to mismatch again, after almost fifty years of marriage. In addition to unconventional experiences within the university, the freshman was struck by the recurrence of strangely atypical situations. The great Brazilian designer Aloisio Magalhães, for example, was a very present teacher (even on the multiple occasions when there were plans to revise the curriculum). However, one could say that he never really taught classes: he gave conferences. Instead of going to ESDI regularly at pre-scheduled times, he would appear, unannounced, whenever he had something new to present, be it a reflection, a provocation, or some project of his own. Another example that is often recalled by those who were there at the time, was the unconventional use of the classroom for the installation, in 1967, of a moviola, in which important filmmakers, such as Glauber Rocha, Arnaldo Jabor, and Lauro Escorel, edited some classic films of Brazilian cinema. But, alongside these less disciplined experiences, there were also authoritarian outbursts that manifested themselves in an erratic and incomprehensible way. One of the causes for this, perhaps, was the great disparity in the background and training of teachers. Those who taught the design subjects and workshops had a more intuitive teaching methodology, because of their lack of pedagogical training (and also for their overblown voluntarism), while the theory professors (with laudable exceptions), following a conservative pedagogy, did not understand the flexibility that was necessary in a school that, coherently with its

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experimental philosophy, was still working through the beginnings of training practitioners of a profession that was still novel in Brazil, that is, at least according to Ulmian conceptualization. Therefore, there was a lack of coordination between theoretical and practical disciplines (a persistent problem at ESDI), regarding both classroom dynamics, and assessment methods and protocols. The attempt to organize the curriculum and address these problems in the inaugural class of 1968 did not match students’ expectations for transparency. Students were determined not to accept anything other than radical reform, which could even question the authority of the Conselho Consultivo (Advisory Board)3 as a decision-making body through which every change in regulation had to pass through. They wanted a total stoppage and the establishment of an eminently self-critical discussion space. They succeeded. Beginning on June 11, 1968, the director agreed to suspend classes. What was called a “General Assembly” was installed. Even though it suggested a singular event, the name designated a permanent convening body. It was then that the “classroom” became the setting of speeches, conversations, and meetings, with heated debates, from which, one expected, a curriculum capable of solving the many problems identified would emerge. These problems, in short, comprised the alleged inadequacy of the Ulmian model to the Brazilian context, the lack of coordination between the subjects, and the authoritarian system of admission and evaluation. In July of that year, Carmen Portinho released the schedule for the semester that had just begun, admitting that, in parallel with the standard courses, the work of reassessing the curricula and regulations of the school would be continued. She determined, however, that, by the begin ning of August, formal proposals should be presented for the various reformulations intended. She also announced the organization of a series of 3

The Advisory Board, was, from 1963 to 1969, ESDI’s highest decision-making body. It was a collegiate body composed of directors, teachers, and student repres ent at ives. Ibid., 96. Today, this instance still exists and it is called Conselho Departamental (Department Council).

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conferences to complement teaching programs. In this series, people who were prominent in various areas of activity went to ESDI to give lectures or short courses. Among them were economist Carlos Lessa, philosopher Vilém Flusser, poet Haroldo de Campos, and artist Hélio Oiticica, to name but a few. Among students, these conferences actually exerted, to some extent, greater attraction than the so-called regular classes. After the return of regular activities, the ’68 General Assembly’s turmoil did not just go away. All that turbulence launched waves that spread throughout the following years, perpetuating the loosening of conventional dynamics. Students were seldom all in the room at the beginning of classes. The dynamics of fixed schedules and regular durations now had to compete with a notable and constant flow of students between the classrooms, each one guided, at each moment, by their own interest. Disciplinary punishments were not applied. It could even be said that there was room in the school for informal and unexpected connections. One day, the student with the black-framed glasses saw his colleagues suddenly get up while a professor was in the middle of a sentence, picking up their belongings, and saying: “Come, Cacaso is going to give a class now”!4 “But who is Cacaso”? The student asked. “Oh, the guy is the best! He’s a poet, like a philosopher, a thinker, or something, I just know he’s a guy who has ideas.” “Uh, but he wasn’t there in the inaugural class with the other teachers.” “He wasn’t there because Cacaso is ours, it was us students who brought him here, he isn’t even officially a professor, but he teaches like any school teacher.” The professor who had been left open-mouthed in the middle of a sentence, swallowed his pride and followed, too, to attend the poet’s class. Like some others, this professor saw in these informalities and indisciplines a certain change of air, a freedom to come and go that protected, both materially and symbolically,

4

Poet Antônio Carlos de Britto (Cacaso) had a brief but important passage through ESDI following the 1968 General Assembly. Ibid., 314.

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in authoritarian Brazil, the continuity and circulation of free thought. This freedom was manifest in the actual physical space. The audience and stage arrangement, typical of the classrooms, gave way to more organic ways of arranging tables and chairs, which were submitted to groups that greatly varied in number. In another classroom, a workshop was set up to produce ESDI’s participation in the First International Design Biennial, which was to be held by the end of the year at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. For students, spending the day in that workshop and producing the exhibition’s museography had the same learning value as a professor’s class. The opposite could also happen: students interrupted their work in the workshop to attend a lecture or class of their interest. Even more unexpectedly, there were meetings to exchange knowledge (these could not even be called “classes”) in unusual settings: students sitting on stairs, standing together around a professor, or even in the bar of ESDI’s Diretório Acadêmico, “Barhaus,” where professors could occasionally be seen talking to students with a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other. The drafting tables were gradually dispersed from their original disposition in rows. Many were dismembered—their noble wood was used over the years as raw material for student work. Like the Apollo 11 spacecraft, which, in 1969, got rid of parts of itself to continue its journey towards the moon, the disassembly of the drawing boards seemed to point the way to a less formatted school, to be installed in uncharted territory. Some tables remained. A few of them became informal workstations for some students. Others were stored underground, where they were found, many years later, floating in the waters during a great flood. At the Academic Directory, one of them became a game table, gaining a charming pattern of circles that were imprinted on the wood over years of service as support for glasses. The vigorous momentum of that year in 1968 would eventually wane as well. One of the main object ives of the whole movement was a general overhaul of the school, conceived from working groups and frequent assembly-style meetings. But this

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format of collective meeting, despite the great democratic environment that it established, was not conducive to the completion of processes. It is true that the school did arrive at a propositional curricular structure. But the large number of democratically stated demands produced, in turn, bureaucratic demands that were difficult to implement. Many of the proposed reforms, which were not compatible with the rigid institutional forms in place, proved to be infeasible. Consequently, even though it was approved, the curricular reform failed to take shape and, after a few isolated attempts, it was gradually abandoned, spreading a sense of disbelief and frustration. It should be emphasized that the failure to implement the new curriculum cannot be explained by internal dynamics alone. In addition to the natural erosion of the process, Ato Institucional (Institutional Act) No. 5 was promulgated on December 13, 1968, giving the government unlimited powers to suppress and control any form of public manifestation contrary to the regime. ESDI was directly targeted with the persecution and imprisonment of professors and students; a specially dramatic case was that of the student Maria Valderez Sarmento Coelho da Paz, head of the ESDI’s Diretório Acadêmico, who was detained and tortured. From then on, ESDI meetings could no longer be called General Assemblies. What had started as a creative explosion, with heated debates supported by total freedom of expression, ended up melancholy, allowing old structures to resurface organically. However, the enormous set of extracurricular activities, the free transit of students between classes, the events, the workshops, and, above all, the safeguard for the coexistence of a multiplicity of opposing opinions and permanent debate, were already part of the repertoire and history of the school, as well as the indelible idea that design and politics are indissociable.

NEW CURRICULUM, AGAIN In the years that followed the 1968 upheavals, ESDI gradually returned to a routine of regular classes, following a curriculum that, after the failure to implement the General Assembly’s propos-

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als, returned, with slight changes, to the previous structure. At the end of the 1980s, once again, there were some adjustments in the curricular structure, but in a much less ambitious and incomparably less troubled fashion than the reforms envisioned in the late 1960s. After this last adjustment, almost three decades passed before the subject of curriculum reform was once again seen as an urgent and fundamental need. In 2011, once again, professors, students, and administrative technicians gathered in an assembly summoned by the director to discuss yet another reform whose urgency itself was already old. I arrived late at the meeting; when I opened the door, everyone was already seated. Standing in front of them, the director greeted me: “Good moooorning! The assembly’s rapporteur has arrived”! I gave him a half ironic smile, wanting to believe that he was just kidding. He insisted: “We are starting now. Can you be the rapporteur, Marcos”? A chill ran through all the cells in my half-sleeping body. My eyes were scarcely open behind the sunglasses. My head was throbbing and the world was still spinning, after about three hours of sleep. I had gone to a party the night before and already saw a great achievement in being able to face the morning light, taking the subway. and walking from the station to that meeting room. Without complaining, with a trembling hand, and blurred eyesight, I began to write down mechanically on a pad of yellow paper everything that reached my ears. The director proposed three topics to guide the discussion. I wrote them down, trying not to misrepresent his words: 1 What institutional renovation project is desirable to meet the demands of the contemporary design scene in the country? 2 What contents are unquestionably required in contemporary design education? 3 What pedagogical procedures should be adopted in our educational practice? My head was buzzing, but I hoped that soon the disagreements, so typical of those assemblies, would begin, and that their

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fire would wake me up. On the contrary, the conversation was still sleepily calm, and everyone was orderly following the three points stated by the director. It was said a lot that one of the main gaps in the current curriculum was in the two main areas of training, visual communication and product design, which had been inherited from the curriculum of HfG Ulm. These areas, everyone recognized, no longer corresponded to the reality of the “demands of the contemporary design scene.” The director proposed a new partition into four axes—communication, product, interaction, and services— which he considered to be consistent both in relation to the school’s history and to internationally dominant trends. One professor suggested adding a fifth axis of design theory, but the director explained that he had chosen the designation “axes” to be limited to the disciplines concerning design project, to which another added that the theory should always be present in the practical disciplines instead of being thought of as a separate support field. A long time was spent discussing whether the theory should be on, under, alongside, or within practice, until another professor declared that, in view of the expansion of the field of design and the proliferation of varied methodologies, it was capital to form a “cultural broth” that would guarantee ESDI students a solid foundation of historical and critical knowledge. Standing out on the yellow sheet of paper, this term “cultural broth” caught my attention. I had a certain aversion to the unattractive image that was forming in my already watery mind; moreover, the term seemed to indicate the yearning for a certain prestige, in tune with the idea of “leveling” that was, in my view, at odds with the heterogeneity of the student body, which always seemed positive to me (see Chapter 8). This desire for homogeneity touched on the question of the selection process for admission to the school, which had a very limited influence in shaping the entrance exams. The only concession was the exclusive prerogative of the director to determine which high-school subject would have the highest percentage weight in the candidates’ final grade. At the end of his term, the director had chosen mathematics as the most important subject. When Zoy and I joined the board in 2016, we changed

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it back to history. In 2019, the new direction once again chose mathematics. This alternation seems to reflect two positions. On the one hand, there is a more humanistic dimension of design, associated with an engagement with Brazilian social problems that require a solid background in history. On the other hand, mathematics is evoked, in general, by an idea that designers need to have a more logical mind, with the capacity to solve more “objective” problems. The difference in emphasis, which is decisive in selecting the type of student entering the school, seems to affect, in a special way, the way candidates analyze their chances of admission, an issue that particularly concerns cotistas (quota students),5 who are usually less prepared for the mathematics exams than the history ones. The students’ representatives, who had been silent until then, made their first intervention: “A candidate who chooses ESDI,” began one of them, “is someone who likes to draw and who thinks that design is a safer option in terms of financial future than the field of art.” Timidly, he added that many of his colleagues liked illustration and, after the cold silence that followed his statements, he still ventured: “There are many people who are also into games and web design.” A teacher didactically answered the students, in a way that indicated what he deduced from those interventions: “Many students choose design merely because they think it is a profession in which ‘you don’t have to study.’ But, as the course develops, the opinion changes and a more accurate view of the field is acquired, and students start to be interested in lesser-known areas, such as services design.” The discussion then went back on the trail of “serious” issues. The problems of form, as they had persisted since the Bauhaus, passing through the HfG Ulm, and arriving at the inclination towards technical formalism of the first years of ESDI, were now out of date. It was argued that issues around objects no longer made sense in an understanding of the field of design that iden5

We have adopted the term “cotista,” commonly used in universities, because we believe it carries a meaning that a literal English trans la tion, “quota students”, does not comprise (see Notes on translation of some key terms).

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tified its growing interference in immaterial practices. The proposal of the two new axes for the curriculum (Interaction and Services) reflected this historical vision and advocated the urgency for expanding the original structure, which was restricted to visual communication and product. Within interaction design, the field of “experience design” was greatly expanding the idea of digital systems, which had been originally restricted to computers; in services design, the complex variety of actors within a given system also started to push existing boundaries. The director emphatically stressed that this new structure should in no way be conceived as definitive. On the contrary, he anticipated that the new curriculum should be experimental and that students, having the maximum freedom in the conduct of their preferences, could indicate new updates. The assembly seemed to be going smoothly in designing a more open school that accommodated the new realities of design practices. Asking for the floor, a student broke this calm: “We came here to say that, among students, there is a general feeling of displeasure about going to ESDI.” The forcefulness of the sentence, contrasting with the timid tone of students’ previous speeches, left everyone quietly incredulous for some time. My pen stopped, suspended on the sheet. But, without ceding time for any kind of reaction, the student justified his statement by informing us of a survey they had conducted based on the question “what is your perception of ESDI’s teaching”? Some reasons for this were already known: the systemic lack of coordination in the sequenced subjects, the authoritarianism of some teachers (in this respect the complaint was very similar to that of the students of 1968), and the monotony of the pedagogy of project classes, in which students waited for their turn to be attended by the advising professor. Agreeing, the director added that these sessions resembled a “doctor’s waiting room,” and had, for him, an unbearable class dynamics. “I am not finished yet,” said the student, asking for the floor again. He announced that he would list topics exclusively related to cotistas and whose consideration he found fundamental in any school restructuring plan. In a loud and resolute voice, he read:

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— We question the relevance of the prior knowledge measured by the admissions exam as an index to judge the “unpreparedness” of cotistas for work in design. — The financial limitation segregates cotistas in the day-today life of the school. — Cotistas usually have to work, and have their studies hampered by the inflexible schedule of the sistema seriado (series system),6 as well as by the great demand for dedication to study that includes, in the first two years, activities both in the morning and afternoon. — There is an elitism, especially with regard to entering the labor market. Non-quota holders have “connections” and get jobs easily, while cotistas have fewer social contacts that can result in jobs or even temporary work. — Cotistas are likely to take the content learned at school to regions other than those traditionally literate in design practises, and, therefore, these professionals will be both opening and supplying new markets. — The permanence scholarship7 is not sufficient to cover the costs of transportation and food. — When it comes to working materials, the course is expensive. There he was, a Black cotista student, abruptly and confidently bringing a major discomfort into the elaborate discussions, which had mostly concerned, up to that point, curricular content. His claims were directly related to the difficulties faced by the economically disadvantaged population, calling for these issues

6

7

At UERJ there are two systems for distribution of courses. One is a system of credits, in which students are free to choose and arrange courses. In the other one, used at ESDI, the courses are prede ter mined in a sequence in the curriculum, and the students have no choice to alter that order. This is called sistema serial, which we, here, translated to series system. Created in February 2004, “the univer sity’s current program destined to assist and provide the beneficiaries of quotas with academic and financial support, PROINICIAR” (Tavolaro, 2008, 153), provides schol ar ships for cotistas.

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to be included and considered in their real concreteness in the abstract realm of a design education curriculum. I was immediately moved by the firm and truthful voice that uttered those statements, which in no way seemed to me to deviate from the general theme of the assembly. The need to work during studies, which prompted the criticism of the “doctor’s waiting room” system, showed that it was not appropriate to make a student spend long hours waiting for their turn for guidance, hours that should be available for the work necessary for their livelihood. The questioning of the evaluation parameters that deemed cotistas, in a rather fanciful way, “unprepared,” showed that, if we were to have greater interference in any specific exam test in the admission processes, we would have to take into account, in shaping these exams, a wider range of talents not necessarily acquired in formal instruction, valuing a cultural background different from canonical design skills. The lack of money to buy materials that were required to carry out school work should stimulate the writing of syllabi that would allow for some flexibility in the means and processes. I asked the students to formalize in writing their request to include those topics in the reform project. As much as that presentation surprised me, the reaction puzzled me even more: “Yes, yes, we must consider these points, they are really important. Point taken”! With this brief sentence, a professor thought himself rid of the task of having to continue the debate over these issues, promptly amending that, “the most important thing, however, is that the curriculum reform focus mainly on the type of pedagogical profile and institutional identity that we want for the school,” completing, with a self-evident tone, that, if anyone hadn’t noticed yet, that school had traditionally been configured as an elite institution. “It has always been thus and always will be.” Departing from the cotistas’ issues, the meeting ended, after debates on some more peripheral and logistical issues, with the unanimous approval of the following guidelines for curriculum reform: — Axis structure (communication, product, interaction, service).

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— Creating a special managing office for the undergraduate course. — Transitioning the academic periods from annual to semestral duration. — Redesigning the draft and project guidelines for the final works of undergraduates. — Instituting a new credits regime. — Creating new elective and optional subjects. — Instituting new mandatory internship. *

*

*

What most struck me in this turn of events, as I recall this meeting, was that this final list failed to even acknowledge the issues raised by the cotistas. It was clear to me that, in that discussion, students were considered only according to two categories: those that one wanted to attract to ESDI and those that ESDI would like to deliver to the world. Between this before and after, lurked the pulsating “now” of experiences that students lived at school with displeasure—as they were trying to make us realize. It also stood out to me that, in these fanciful projects, “ESDI” appeared as a hegemonic unit, as an abstract subject to whom a certain personality was credited, ignoring its actual multiplicity. But the intervention of the students in this assembly was not without consequences. Their bluntly expressed discontent was, for me (and I believe for others present as well), a reason to engage in a renovation project that was in danger of never taking off, as the director himself had remarked. I remember when, in 2010, newly installed as a professor, I went to meet him in a welcoming rendezvous. I was already a friend of his at the time and I had great admiration for him. With the mutual candor that our friendship allowed, he said: “Alas, do you know that I was a little bit . . . disappointed that you got this job? You have lectured here many times before, so you are not exactly new blood. I was hoping for a foreign body, a ‘wedge,’ someone who would be able to open these rigid structures that we have here and that we never seem to be able to move. This was what I was counting on to finally launch our much-needed curriculum reform,

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which has been repeatedly postponed.” Even though I felt somewhat discredited and discouraged, I told him: “You will see that I may very well turn out to be a rather strange body here.” Sometime after that assembly, with the arrival of new professors, the director set up a working group that would be in charge of starting the reforms. He wisely selected newly hired professors, such as Zoy and myself, among others, in addition to also providing for student representation. This small group, in which there were people of very different ages and backgrounds, worked hard, formatting, and discussing the items that had been approved in that first assembly. But, at a given moment, although we had advanced the project a lot, having already put together a very detailed outline of a new curricular structure, the specter of stagnation started haunting us. How would we proceed once we had set out our draft? How would we present to the community everything that had been developed so far? I remembered that welcoming rendezvous in which the director had urged me to open loopholes for action, and I came to suspect that there was only one feasible strategy for actually going through the many stages of reform, from the drafting of syllabi to the bureaucratic requirements necessary for approval by UERJ upper management. This would be based on a simple principle: avoiding large cathartic meetings at all costs. I had noticed that many projects at ESDI did not go anywhere because everyone thought that, in large assemblies, faculty could come up with solid majorities willing to support every step of bold initiatives. On the contrary, the assemblies always became the stage for great rhetorical disputes, which invariably came to an end through sheer fatigue. I thought that, in order to approve curriculum reform, it was, of course, necessary for everyone to feel included in the process. But not necessarily everyone at the same time. This had nothing to do with the Roman saying divide et impera. On the contrary, not being a tactic of conquest, the spread of small meetings aimed at a seam between diverse and sometimes divergent wills that would make possible the progress of a project that had long been desired by the collectivity. So, I started a series of invitations to small groups to discuss specific issues. Those could never be about the whole thing! It was interesting to note that in groups

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of three or four people, disagreements never reached disruptive levels. I handpicked people with very different points of view, sometimes even bringing together in the same room people who had historical antagonisms. In these meetings, facing each other at a table, in the proximity of the corner of a room, these “opponents” showed much more cordiality and openness to conversation than in large assemblies. I was not very interested in trying to understand why this was; I just saw that it worked. Little by little, the disciplines’ syllabi were prepared—with some conflicts, no doubt—but without any great question of insurmountable principles that could threaten the progress of things. The meeting in which the students raised the problems of the cotistas had never left my mind, and I thought it was a priority— more than arriving at perfectly written syllabi or exemplary regulations—to rapidly address some of the most immediate problems that had been brought to the fore. Thus, when I presented curriculum reform together with members of that working group, I was confronted by a very hostile voice that, from an audience of professors, stated: “The presentation is very well intentioned but the proposal is quite weak and is too tied to conventional structures.” I replied that yes, that was a deliberately pragmatic proposal, as it did not aim for an ideal curriculum, but for a feasible one (which I thought was already a lot). And one that met emergency demands. Of course, there were also significant content formulations: the structure of the course was redesigned in axes, the fields of activity were expanded, all disciplines were reconceived, some were merged, others were eliminated, and many new ones were created. But I saw the most important changes in the way we worked through the process. On the one hand, we prioritized concrete measures, such as reducing hours and the number of subjects per semester, aiming at an approach more sensible to the wants of needy students. On the other hand, we employed a new approach in the elaboration process that proceeded through a method of pollination, instead of the large cathartic assemblies. This is the main reason why I think we did arrive, in 2015, four years after the first and only assembly of 2011, at a new curriculum for ESDI.

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In this procedural realm, the biggest difference lay between this curricular reform, which managed to be implemented, and the unsuccessful (from the point of view of completion) efforts of the 1968 assemblies. Thus, the experiences of that distant year, which transformed the classrooms into meeting rooms and workshops, were less similar to the 2011 to 2015 curriculum reform than to the #ESDIAberta movement (see Chapter 5), in the period 2016 to 2017, in which ESDI was once again “paralyzed.” Historical moments of numbness or vigil can be characterized as stoppage or action depending on how and by whom they are seen. One may understand the periods of regular classes as the natural course of things, but it is also possible to identify, in this apparent flow, moments of entrenched stagnation, broken by untimely movements that put new energies into circulation– those moments that we usually see as times of stoppage. Whichever side one is on, looking at the student’s response, we can say that in ESDI, history does not erase the marks that were left in classrooms that are used, over the years, as tidily rowed settings for drafting tables, as circular arenas for noisy assemblies, as spaces partially intended for conversations in a low voice, or simply, as will be shown in Chapter 5, as roofed spaces under which people can sleep and wake up.

3

A Landslide Panic Zoy Anastassakis

2015: PANIC In 2015, it was election season for the rectory and for the boards of the academic units at UERJ. There are direct elections for these positions, in which each segment of the academic community— students, staff, and professors—is assigned a third of the electoral weight. That year, however, neither the Instituto de Artes (Institute of Arts) nor ESDI submitted applications for their respective management offices. I was away from my activities at ESDI, on maternity leave since the beginning of June, when, on September 17, 2015, I received an email that the then director had sent to all faculty, commenting on the situation and asking the teachers to organize to submit an application. Immediately after reading the message, I called the director. I wanted to understand what was going on. Why, after all, had no one applied? It seemed to me that we had to think together, the whole faculty, why was it that no one was willing to take over the direction of the school? That director was part of a group of former ESDI students who very early on had become teachers at the school, a job that they performed along with their professional activities as 65

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designers. Most of these professors worked at ESDI part-time, and, at first, they did not have any graduate degrees. They were professionals working in the market, and that was their main qualification. However, with the increasing pressure for university professors to hold graduate degrees, these professors either left the university, or got MAs and PhDs, completing the academic training that was now required of them. The direction of an academic unit is a commissioned position that requires daily dedication in fields for which many of us professors lack training, such as human resources and managing institutional bureaucratic procedures. Without any management training, barred from participating in graduate research activities, and excluded from the salary increments awarded to faculty with PhDs, a substantial part of the teaching staff were in a very precarious situation. For our course, and not only ESDI’s but any design school, there were, then, some additional problems: how can professors who are not integrated into the professional market teach design and the technical and productive issues related to it, amid the rapid shifts that are constantly taking place in the field? The requirement of a PhD degree to teach in knowledge fields so closely linked to practice raises a series of questions, like this one. We had, then, what is now happening in several design courses around the world: outstanding professionals being expelled or precarized, while PhD holders without any professional experience in the area are being admitted into teaching positions, and neither of them have any training whatsoever for the management work they are expected to perform. When I phoned the director, shortly after receiving his email, I told him of the issues that had crossed my mind. He had proposed a meeting with the faculty, and suggested that I present my thoughts to everyone then. I considered trying to devise some kind of collective commitment to sharing administrative tasks. For it seemed to me that if there was a collective agreement on the division of administrative labor among the faculty, perhaps the burden of responsibility on a single person could be eased and, then, at last, a bid could arise. On the day of the meeting, the director invited me to sit beside him, so that I could present my ideas. The chairs in the

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room were arranged as in a classroom, the two chairs facing all the others, as if two professors were about to teach a class of students. It all seemed strange to me, the director putting me in the position of someone who had something to propose, as if the reason for the meeting had been my proposal, and not the debate on the need to present a candidacy, originally convened by him. He and I sat in front of everyone else, the organization of the room distinguishing us from those who stood across from us, as if they were an audience, and not peers. I suggested that we rearrange the chairs, in order to create a more circular arrangement among those present. They had all arrived looking a bit wary, some were seated by the exit door, while others dispersed around the room. The director asked me to present my proposal, which consisted of bringing together those who were willing to offer some of their time to perform management tasks, even if they were not to be paid. In a way, this proposal was coherent with the guidelines he sent us in the summoning email, which, at a point, emphasized that, as professors at UERJ, and according to university regulations, everyone’s activities were governed by the same norm, which determined that we should apportion our activities at a public university between teaching, research, community outreach, and administration. I then asked: Who would be willing to voluntarily donate hours to work for the director’s office? Only a few teachers raised their hands. Among them were some of those who had arrived at ESDI in the last rounds of public tenders for the faculty, the ones that had taken place after 2010. While these few raised their hands, a professor seated by the door had fallen asleep, and two others escaped, leaving the room, so as not to have to answer the question. Following this first item, we were supposed to proceed to the next stage and tackle the very reason for which the meeting had been summoned: How could we then assemble a bid, a pair of candidates for director and deputy director of the school? Nobody answered. Nobody was willing to take the office. A professor who had previously considered launching himself as a candidate declared that, for family reasons, he would no longer

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be able to assume the job. So he had withdrawn his previous unofficial bid. Another, also one of the school’s most senior professors, and a former principal, said his wife had forbidden him to run, threatening him with divorce. Someone said that it was time for Marcos to assume his turn in a leadership role, which, for this person, should have been clear after the recent curriculum restructuring process. This final note seemed to me to be an extremely authoritarian and coercive act. As a former student, of course, I had known many of these professors for a long time, but it was in meetings like that one, and in the midst of such attitudes, that I came to know the full extent of the authoritarianism and of the lack of sense of collective responsibility that afflicted some of them. Marcos replied, refusing to accept the colleague’s “suggestion.” I felt compelled to present an alternate approach, in order to shake that way of doing things, and invite people to position themselves in and along other lines. Then I proposed something I had not yet thought of, declaring that I was willing to run in a bid along with whoever it was, in either of the offices, that is, as the director or as the deputy director. I asked myself: Would anyone be willing, now, to apply? Nothing. Nobody moved. I could read “not my problem” in everyone’s faces. The meeting ended without any tangible outcome. Marcos and I exchanged looks. We had been concerned about the curriculum overhaul in ESDI’s undergrad course, to which, as junior members of the faculty, we and some other colleagues had dedicated ourselves over the past few years (see Chapter 2). In 2012, the director had called on newly admitted professors to form a working group along with some non-tenured lecturers and postdoctoral researchers, in order to restructure the curriculum, a process that had been dragging on for many years. At that point, the new curriculum was under consideration by the university, and was about to be approved for implementation. We started to imagine what the process of implementing the new curriculum would look like without the resolute support of a director at the school. It seemed to us that all the work of the past few years could be in jeopardy. We then started to think of ways of putting a bid together. This became clear even before

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we talked more explicitly about the topic, already in that meeting as people left, little by little, with only the three of us, Marcos, the director, and myself, remaining at the end. The morning after the faculty meeting, Marcos and I spoke. It seemed to us that there was no one left. We saw each other, then, as feasible candidates. So, even without having originally planned anything of the sort, we considered running for school management. However, we put some conditions on our joint bid. Regardless of who was to be director, we would make every decision together. We would start from the assumption that we took that office not because we wanted it, but because there was no one else willing to do it. It was, then, to fill this gap, that we acted that way. This implied constantly reminding ourselves and everyone else about that circumstance, talking about it with our colleagues and students, and continuing to work to occupy that empty space, without, however, circumventing or erasing it. To this end, even before taking office, we reaffirmed our invitation for everyone to participate in decision-making processes, which would be open to all—faculty, staff, and students. We could not, would not, take those positions alone. We talked about it in the open meetings that we held as soon as we launched our bid. We would also not be there to “keep” anything that had been there previously, nor to safeguard any mode of action that would guarantee anything. It was clear to both of us that school management would have to be carried out from that gap, with that gap, and that if we were to take the positions of director and deputy director, it would have to be so as to instate possibilities of collective action alternate to what had been happening and had made the job such a lonesome and undesirable prospect. So, we made it clear, first between the two of us, and after that to everyone else, that the whole thing would only work if others made the same commitment as us, namely, vowing to care collectively for the school. If the director positions were ones that no one else was willing to hold, we should reinvent, then, what it was to be in management, making it a more rewarding experience. That was what we were willing to do. That was what we were signing up for. Opening up decision-making and partitioning the responsibility and work that had made school

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management an unbearable burden. In the following chapter, we’ll show how we tackled this. For now, I propose a chronological leap from 2015 to 2018, when we decided to leave, in advance, our positions as directors.

FIGURE 3.1 Students sitting in the courtyard between the school workshops and the library, ESDI, 2016 (Zoy Anastassakis).

2018: LANDSLIDES 2018 started, terrifyingly, on March 14, with the murder of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco. In a no less frightful fashion, the year ended on October 28, with the election of Jair Bolsonaro as President of Brazil. Between those two dates, Brazil saw the disintegration of the pact of redemocratization that had been sealed by the 1988 Constitution. With the election of Bolsonaro, the rules of politics in the Republic, such as had been set by that historic covenant, were broken, despite the fact that Bolsonaro’s ascent to office took place in an apparently democratic way, that is, through direct elections. The assassination of Marielle Franco, early in the year, foreshadowed something that culminated in the election of Jair

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Bolsonaro. Thus, the tragedy of March 14 announced what would gain ground steadily throughout the year, up to its fulfilment, on October 28. One possible name for what happened in the middle of that time interval is a landslide—the roaring, sudden slide of a large mass down a terrain previously thought to be secure. However, that which was so forcefully announced in March 2018 was a part of a broader and more pervasive process in Brazilian society: it was a sign of a movement in which authorit arian polit ical forces viol ently erupted in the name of a purported moral, political, and cultural stabilization of the country. This allows us to understand the colonial and exploitative roots from which the Brazilian nation-state project grows. This dynamic was reinvigorated after the 2013 nationwide wave of demonstrations, assum ing a clearly author it arian shape in the 2015 movement calling for the impeachment proceedings which, on August 31, 2016, resulted in the removal of President Dilma Rousseff from office. Among subsequent events, one must remember that shortly after the assassination of Marielle Franco, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then a presumptive candidate for the presidency of the Republic, was arrested on April 7, 2018, having his political rights suspended on charges of passive corruption—of which he has since been acquitted after appealing to the Supreme Federal Court in 2021. Almost two years after that, on the night of Marielle’s murder, I went to sleep early, still unaware of the news. It rained a lot all night, a thunderous tempest, a ghastly tempest that frightened me with a fear that reminded me of my childhood dread of rain, when the roaring sound of water falling from the sky appeared to herald the arrival of a thousand terrible monsters, coming closer and closer, bringing the end of the world. I slept horribly that night, sensing the arrival of something such as a landslide. In a panic, I imagined that my house was being buried by the land that would slide from the top of the hill that separates the neighborhoods of Laranjeiras and Botafogo, in the Zona Sul of Rio. In my nocturnal delirium, I remembered another tragedy that had taken place right there, next door, on General Glicério Street, fifty-one years earlier. On one of the neighboring streets, late on a Sunday night, February 19, 1967,

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heavy rain caused the collapse of a house and two apartment buildings, burying more than 100 people. Much like the building where I lived in Laranjeiras, ESDI was also built in a valley surrounded by mountains. Unlike my home, however, the school campus stood in a formerly swampy region between the hills and the sea. In the course of five centuries since the founding of the city, the five lagoons that spread between the mouths of various rivers and canals that existed in what was to become downtown Rio, were filled with land removed from the hills that lay between the lagoons and the sea. This was the land that made up the historic center of the city. Everything there was therefore still very unstable: mountains all around, the sea, and the damp soil over which the buildings were built. It was not impossible for a tragedy like the one I recalled in the night of Marielle Franco’s assassination to happen there. That nightmare had been haunting me for some time. One night, I can’t remember exactly when, I dreamt that the school had been buried. Night had fallen, and, over the little houses that make up the ESDI campus, there was a large mound of dirt. Many of us, professors, staff, and students, worked with shovels, clearing the land that had covered the school. It was raining. It was very dark. There was a strong smell of moisture in the air. We were exhausted, digging for survivors. Collapsed buildings, landslides, and floods are, unfortunately, recurrent events in Rio de Janeiro. In this city, they have always been not only in the news, but also in the dreams and nightmares of city and suburb dwellers. The rainy nights often become moments of great tension, as was the case that early morning. Those who had learnt of Marielle Franco’s murder before going to sleep, stayed up all night. When I woke up the next day, I heard the news that had already been widely disseminated on social media. In shock, I went out to work. Marielle’s body was to be laid in state at the City Chamber, which is on the same street as ESDI. In the streets and at school, a colossal, astounding silence. As if still half asleep, I felt my arms heavy, numb, and, after lunch, unable to resume work activities, I wandered around,

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FIGURE 3.2 Sand over the cobblestones of the school’s main corridor, ESDI, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

FIGURE 3.3 Main corridor pavement renovation, ESDI, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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watching the people arrive at Cinelândia for the funeral. But, while unable to get back to work, neither could I approach the steps in front of the City Chamber, where the coffin carrying Marielle’s body, which had been hit by three shots to the head and one to the neck, would pass. Around 9:30 p.m. the night before, thirteen shots hit her car as she was on her way back from a meeting with young Black women promoted by her party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, PSOL). The same shooters took her driver Anderson Gomes’s life, with three shots in the back. The afternoon after the crime, I walked, stunned, around the school and the neighboring blocks. I could feel the same dismay in the faces of the people who were next to me on that gray day. In the midst of that moment of astonishment, however, I still did not know that the year 2018 would be so hard, and so strikingly marked by that same overwhelming feeling that pounced on me in the early hours of March 14. Seven months after Marielle’s murder, on a Sunday night, October 28, after news outlets had confirmed Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the presidential election, I started thinking about how I would go back home. I was at my mother’s house, where, along with my family, I had watched the report ing of the results on tele vi sion. Once again, the atmo sphere on the streets was haunting. From the window, we could see lines of cars honking their horns and, inside, people shouting in celebration at the election of the new president, nicknamed by many as “the myth.” This happened in Laranjeiras, the only neighborhood in the city of Rio de Janeiro where the retired army captain then affiliated to the Partido Social Liberal (PSL) had been defeated. My parents, brothers, sisters, and nephews were all crying. Our family was marked by our parents’ experiences of imprisonment and torture during the military dictatorship. We knew, then, of the threats posed by the arrival of a former military man, such as Bolsonaro, to the presidency of the Republic. Moreover, since my forefathers had arrived in Brazil in poverty, fleeing war, we had always been deeply class-conscious. These marks have made it so that we enthusiastically welcomed, together, as a family, each step towards democratization since the 1980s, as

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well as the implementation of social inclusion policies since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Astounded, I couldn’t figure out how to make the ten-minute walk between my mother’s house and mine. I couldn’t find the strength to leave. I felt a grueling downward push against every inch of my body. It was the weight of a dense, gooey mass infiltrating everything, everywhere. It was intent on overwhelming everything, the ground, the whole world, and, under its weight, it was very hard to move at all, because, to do so, I would have to wield a tremendous counterforce against that sticky density that spread everywhere in me. Since that night, I haven’t been able to help feeling the weight of that sticky and suffocating mass for a single minute. At last, after gathering what was left of my courage, I got home, silently crying. My eldest daughter and my husband were crying too. I couldn’t make sense of anything. I felt that the world, as I thought I knew it, had come to an end, right there, between March and October 2018. What appeared to be the end of the world led me to the feeling that it would be impossible to resume the kind of collaborative and horizontal work that Marcos and I had been developing, since March 2016, in the direction of ESDI (see Chapter 4). Along with this new feeling—the conscience and the regret of having overlooked everything that had contributed to the murder of Marielle and Anderson and the election of Bolsonaro—I ended up feeling, on top of everything else, unable to continue to manage an academic unit in a public university such as UERJ. It too, like all public institutions in Brazil, was already very fragile and, for this very reason, deeply pervaded by the political unrest that was now emerging. Bolsonaro’s election did not resemble anything I could have expected in Brazilian politics in 2018. Neither did the murder of Marielle, whose trajectory resembled that of many of our own students at ESDI and UERJ. Between her death and his election, the political climate became radically different from anything we had experienced in recent years in Brazil. Its most striking feature had to do with that which we couldn’t articulate until much later, namely, the knots that tied the two events, and that

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marked the resumption of political power in the country by a coalition of political forces radically distinct from those that had led the Republic over the past two decades. Marielle Franco was like many of our students at ESDI and UERJ. She was part of a generation of young Black (negros), Brown (pardos), Indigenous, Quilombolas and poor people who, for the first time, thanks to an array of affirmative action policies, had access to higher education, and who, in addition to their academic training, were engaged in social movements and political struggle. Coming from different social backgrounds than the usual middle- and upper-class milieu of Brazilian undergrads of previous decades, these youngsters now combined social activism with higher education, often going on to getting masters and PhD degrees, which enabled them to participate in debates and compete for job positions restricted, up until then, to a mostly white elite.1 1

For a paper published in English about the issue of affirmative action policies in Brazil, of which the State University of Rio de Janeiro is a pion eer ing case, see Lília Tavolaro, “Affirmative Action in Contemporary Brazil: Two Institutional Discourses on Race” (2008). This paper highlights the contingent aspects in the making of these policies, analyz ing the insti tu tional discourses of race, and questioning the distinct interpretations of the current affirmative action policies in Brazil. For a detailed analysis around the same topics, see João Feres Júnior et al., Ação afirmativa: conceito, história e debates , Rio de Janeiro, EdUERJ, 2018. We follow the authors in understanding that “the creation of racial and social affirmative action policies was one of the events of greatest political and social significance in recent decades in our country. They revolutionized the way administrators, academics, and the population in general understand racial matters, racial injustices, and the solutions to fight them. They changed the face of Brazilian higher education, particularly public universities, which concentrate most academic excellence. Higher education began to represent the racial and economic profile of our society in a fairer way. Furthermore, they have changed the way society sees itself. The previous paradigm was heavily shaped by the conservative developmentalism promoted by the military regime: economic growth without distribution, that is, development without social inclusion. With the advent of ‘quotas,’ particularly racial quotas, the university began to look inside itself and identify the numerous processes, subtle or not, of exclu sion implic ated in its oper a tion, processes that in prac tice went unnoticed by the white economic elite who attended” (Feres Júnior et al, 2018: 170, our translation).

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In 2018, Marielle was preparing to run for Senate for the State of Rio de Janeiro—for a seat ultimately won by Flávio Bolsonaro, one of Jair Bolsonaro’s sons. During the electoral campaign season, Brazilian politics became polarized between those for and those against the election of Bolsonaro as President. One could see this on the streets, as well as within many Brazilian families which, at that moment, split up. Almost half of the students at ESDI and UERJ had got into the university thanks to the policies of social inclusion carried out in the country since the early 2000s. Many of them, however, came from families that identified themselves with a new style of conservatism that thrived within neo-pentecostal communities, which then went on to support Bolsonaro’s candidacy for the presidency of the Republic. At that time, several of our students at ESDI reported cases of harassment and persecution at home and on the streets. But that was not restricted to our design school. On April 29, 2018, a student at the Instituto de Artes (Institute of Arts) of our university was brutally murdered. Matheusa Passareli, dead at 21, was a member of the LGBTQIA+ movement and presented herself as a non-binary transsexual. Matheusa’s body was quartered and burned after she had been subjected to a “trial” by local drug dealers in Morro do Dezoito, a slum in Quintino, in the Northern Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Black and of humble upbringing, she had entered the university through affirmative action policies which, in addition to enabling the entry of the underprivileged cotistas, guarantee their permanence in the course through a scholarship. Her assas sin a tion had a profound impact on the univer sity community, and above all, on Black, poor, and LGBTQIA+ students, who, in their multiple ways of existence and of occupying the public sphere, confronted the ideals of bolsonarismo, which was now piling up with a fundamentalist moralism that had already been out there for some time, but was gaining ground. In the midst of this troubled presidential campaign season, a group of ESDI students started to meet weekly, looking to exchange experiences and find support from colleagues. As the school’s director, I asked for permission to attend these meetings. I was deeply worried by the stories I heard. Parents, uncles,

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and cousins were saying that they no longer recognized these young women and men, who, in their view, were being “spoiled by the public university,” which was, according to these relatives, a “left-wing den.” People in cars and passers-by were harassing these young people on the streets, not just verbally, but also with threats of physical violence. I feared for them, all the more so, because, in the course of those meetings, these students often repeated that they weren’t willing to back down, that they would not be intimidated. I feared for them, for us. At the university, we had long struggled with the legal department, which was perceived, by many in the academic community, as a bureaucratic instance that often acted against the interests of the institution. In the name of allegedly technical and legal arguments, they blocked proceedings, derailing many academic actions that were meant to be routine. At the meetings of the Conselho Superior Universitário,2 for which I had been elected as the representative of ESDI, tensions often rose in an acute and often explosive fashion. On March 26, I was invited to speak as the representative of the Centro de Tecnologia e Ciências (Center for Technology and Sciences), which comprises ESDI, in the swearing in ceremony of the new university councillors elected for the 2018 to 2020 biennium. In my speech, I remembered the murder of Marielle Franco and the likeness I perceived between her and so many of our students. I expressed my concerns for their safety in times as tense and indecipherable as those in which we were living. At that time, Matheusa had not yet been murdered, and I still did not believe that Bolsonaro could be elected. 2

According to the UERJ website, “the University Council (Consun) is the highest instance of deliber a tion, standardiz a tion, and consulta tion of the UERJ, except for matters under the exclusive competence of the Teaching and Research Council (Csepe). It is formed by the rector, vice-rector, the pro-rectors, directors of the Sectorial Centers, by a teaching representative from each academic unit, by eight representatives of technical-administrative employees, two community representatives, and two student representatives from each Sectoral Center. Consun is respons ible for approv ing the UERJ budget, agreements, and partnerships involving financial costs, general rules on the administrative organization of the University, and the administrative plans of the rector” (www.uerj.br).

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The demand for participation in public affairs expressed by Marielle and by the students who were being threatened inside their homes and on the streets was radically different from the way in which institutions, such as the university’s legal department and politicians, such as Bolsonaro and his associates acted. In The Freedom to Be Free,3 Hannah Arendt comments on this distinction. Although some wish to enjoy a public freedom that demands equality, that is, a freedom possible only between collectivities that, together, project themselves into the public sphere, others engage in exclusion, that is, in underscoring distinction and difference, which is one of the ways, the authoritarian one, of conceiving the public environment—not as a common ground for production, but, rather, as a reenactment of hierarchy and social exclusion. It appears, then, that our struggles at that time were articulated around questions about the freedom to live a political life. The arrival of those whom Arendt names as beginners, by which she means those who “can begin something because [they] are beginnings,” and who claim presence in political life, understood, according to her terms, as “the opening of the space for the coexistence of men and women where one can start something new, unpredictable.”4 To be free, to start something new as beginners, is what I thought that Marielle, Matheusa, and all of the Black and poor young people who now were in the universities were proposing. What bothered both those who ordered Marielle’s murder, Matheusa’s executioners, and those who were harassing so many young people in their homes and on the streets, was, it seemed to me, the possibility of a beginning, the unpredictability that the presence of these new elements outlined in the public arena. Black, poor, lesbian, a human rights advocate, Marielle pointed to a new path for Brazil, a counter-colonial5 one, and, therefore, full of potential, something that was growing since the restoration of democracy in 1985. Her growth as a political figure can 3 4

5

Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free (New York: Vintage, 2018). Pedro Duarte, “Apresentação: liberdade na política” in Liberdade para ser livre, Hannah Arendt (Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2018), 9–14. Antonio Bispo dos Santos, “Somos da terra,” Piseagrama 12 (2018): 44–51.

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be thus seen as a consequence of an opening process that, not without tension and contradiction, was flourishing in the country, with the recent democratization, and, more concretely, since the implementation of a number of policies for social inclusion, starting at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those young people “who supposedly ‘make’ revolutions,” such as Marielle and like Matheusa, “do not ‘seize power’ but rather pick it up where it lies in the streets.”6 So, it was no accident that there was, at the time, so much tension in the street, the public setting par excellence. It seems to me that those who endeavored to overwhelm the lives of Matheusa and Marielle, and those of so many of our students at ESDI, UERJ, and across the country, had the objective of curbing the very possibility of continuing what Marielle, Matheusa, and so many other young Blacks, Browns, Indigenous, Quilombolas, poor, and queer people were showing, namely, the potential of new socio-political arrangements in the country, a movement that was made possible in the midst of the narrow openings for democratization that Brazilian society had been conquering since the end of the last military dictatorship, thirty years before these events. My surprise at all of this quickly turned into fear, and I started to feel cornered. Paralyzed. Breathless. Amid the constant sensation of being overwhelmed, I understood that I would no longer be able to stay in my position in school management. I started, then, to consider giving up the position. However, there was still a year to go before the end of the term. I talked to Marcos, who had been abroad for some months on a leave of absence. As deputy director, if I left, he would have to take my position. However, from the moment we had launched our joint bid for the direction of ESDI, Marcos had made it clear that he would be in management for no more than two years, so he could leave in 2018 to take up a postdoctoral research period at Princeton University. This, along with our previous explicit vow to act jointly in school management, in collaboration, and not as director and deputy, was why there would be no sense in Marcos taking the assignments of the office by himself. 6

Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free, 27.

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We then decided to hand over the management together. We immediately contacted the Rector’s office to announce our decision and get advice on how to proceed. We were told that a pro-tempore director should be appointed, whose name was to be unanimously approved by ESDI’s faculty council. Recalling the moment when we decided to run for election, we surveyed the names of faculty members who were apt to take up the direction—that is, those who were neither in the probationary period, nor about to retire. We started a series of talks with our colleagues, and we under stood that, at that moment, what we needed was someone familiar with UERJ administrative procedures. Thus, we arrived at the name of a potential director, a professor, who, in recent years, had dedicated herself to coordinating ESDI’s graduate program, and who was therefore familiar with administrative procedures. She promptly accepted the invitation, so we forwarded her name for appreciation by the council, which approved it. Only then did we communicate our decision to students and staff. We did this, therefore, in a totally different way from the decision-making procedures we had put into practice during our tenure. We didn’t open our measure for debate and we didn’t share our issues with the community. After all, I felt as though we in Brazil were experiencing a new moment, and at the foreground of that new conjunc ture were serious threats to continuity of our experiment in democratization of academic management at ESDI. In my opinion, we had a violent interruption before us. Thus, it didn’t make any sense to go on with collective and experimental management at the school. After all, the political moment threatened our very existence as individuals, as well as that of our democratic process as a nation. With Bolsonaro’s victory all but imminent, I gathered that the rules of the republican game would no longer be the same. Together, Marcos and I understood then that the experience we had been carrying out in the direction of ESDI had to be interrupted. As a matter of fact, experimentalism had already become unfeasible. The landslide that had hit the country propelled us into a new, unexpected scenario. Taking into account the new state of affairs,

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we understood that several of the social covenants that the country had been endeavoring to consolidate with great difficulty had imploded. It would be necessary, then, at that moment, to reevaluate priorities, in order to ensure some prospect of continuity for some of the actions already in progress.

4

Drawing Together Marcos Martins

Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim liked to jest at his concerts. Sitting at the piano, when he finished playing a song, he would turn to the audience and say: “Now I will show you how to make a complete revolution.” Then he would take a matchbox out of his pocket and, showing it to the audience, he would rotate it, like a magician, until it made a 360-degree turn. Then he would laugh, putting the box away, and start playing the chords of the next song. The image of this jest preludes and sets the tone to the stories that follow, seeking to show discrete changes in perspective and the resulting actions, small and large, in opposition to ambitious projects of total renovation, fated, according to Tom’s ironic skepticism, to a return to the starting position. When we entered the ESDI boardroom for the first time after being elected, Zoy and I, now director and deputy director, looked at the furniture as if we were moving into a new house, playing with ideas for new arrangements. One of the changes, not much of a recreational one, was the 90-degree rotation of the director’s desk. This desk was about 2.5 meters long and 1 meter wide. For at least twelve years, in previous administrations, it had remained in the same position, typical of any managerial office. 83

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FIGURE 4.1 Zoy and students outdoors, ESDI, 2017 (Gabriel Borges).

FIGURE 4.2 Marcos and students at the director’s office, ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

Upon entering, the visitor would face the director seated behind it, and a wall at the back, of which there were some shelves and a door. Some former directors tell, humorously, that they would use this back door to escape from unwanted visitors who showed up without an appointment. In front of the desk, a few chairs were reserved for those who were there to meet the director.

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With the 90-degree rotation, the desk looked somewhat odd, projecting itself from the back of the room like a trampoline, in an awkward composition scarcely harmonious with the rationality and functionality standards of ESDI. With its head placed at the back wall, the table was positioned in such a way that it obstructed the back door, blocking the escape route. In this new arrangement, any visitor, upon entering the room, would be confronted by the other head of the table, and would find Zoy sitting sideways on the right, with me sometimes in front of her; at times, besides me, students and teachers sat in chairs or a sofa that was also close to that emblematic piece of furniture. Thus, a surface traditionally used for deliberations, dispatches, and signings, also became the surface for conversations, meetings, and even, when we got hungry, late at night, pizza boxes. In a far from merely metaphorical way, this 90-degree turn encouraged students, teachers, technicians, and anyone else who wanted to talk to management, to enter the room. Other decisions over physical arrangements also aimed to indicate this receptive spirit. The window would always be open, so that whoever passed by the office’s house could, through it, see and talk to whoever was inside. The door would also be open most of the time, thus dispensing with the prior announcement of visitors. In fact, one time, we were surprised by the visit of a woman who made us hear a long presentation of her request to hold her daughter’s wedding on the beautiful lawn of the school. We would not go that far in our opening ambitions. We wanted, within a certain range of possibilities, itself hindered by stiffened academic structures and long-standing traditions, to promote small changes in routine, aiming at a gradual rapprochement between the academic community and management. Students started showing up without an appointment. Some would not even enter the room; they stopped outside and said “hi” through the window. Gradually, they started to feel comfortable enough to sit on the chairs and on the three-seater sofa, full of stories to tell. At a point people even slept there. I remember countless meetings in the director’s office attended by students, either because they spontaneously came to make a complaint or tell a personal problem, or because they were systematically

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included. We valued the presence of students at meetings, especially those in which important university authorities participated, that is, when their presence was usually seen as inappropriate. This opening of the director’s office, epitomized in the 90-degree rotation of the main desk, corresponded to our ambition that the school be managed in a collaborative way. The first sign of this new approach was shown by the invitation made to fellow teachers to join us and address specific problems (see Chapter 3). Now, it was the students who, less by our request than by the new welcoming attitude, were also able to have their work capacity and their opinions incorporated into the dynamics of school management. Evidently, this collab or a tion was not without conflicts, estrangements, and limitations. Certain hierarchical conventions were just insurmountable. But the friendship and reciprocity between management (us) and the students is not a work of fiction. I was impressed, for example, when, at various times during the writing of this book, students were delighted to give me accounts of the things we lived together. However, it is not the factual and historical truth that legitimizes this narrative. What does so is a resolute will, a deliberate endeavor in defense of a relentless movement of approximation, as shown, now, by this inevitably fragmentary reconstruction of the events, as well as before, in the irrecoverable moments of lived experience. It was this desire that led us to organize two groups of students who would work closely with management, some of them paid with scholarships and others as volunteers: one group would work in communications, and the other would survey ESDI space use and the physical state of the school’s facilities and equipment. The two groups would comprise the ESDILab,1 and we issued a call for applications. In the selection process, we tried to distance ourselves from traditional talent-driven criteria, trying instead to focus on desires, wants, and personal aspects. As the inter-

1

This group initially comprised undergraduates Clarissa Lira, Daniela Tinoco, Gabriel Borges, Gabriel Diogo, Isabella Pedreira, Lucas Nonno, Pedro Henrique Alexandre dos Santos, and Theo Cunha.

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views went on, I would make notes on what I thought was relevant in their statements: “I want to stay at ESDI’s premises as long as possible.” “In my class, I’m among those who most appreciate the school.” “I’ve never been one to complain, but I want things to change.” “I don’t do much in life.” “I’m angry with those who have no initiative.” “I want.”

This last sentence, just two words long, was all that we managed to extract from one very introverted Black cotista student, who I suspected had much more of a history than he was willing (or able) to reveal in the tense situation of an internship interview. Much later, he delivered an emotional speech in which he revealed how proud he was for having been the first person in his family to get a college degree, and invited everyone to visit him to see the adversities he had had to face in order to finish his studies. In the end, we selected some students who were clearly very eager to join the project, but we also gave way to others whose possible contribution was a total unknown. In this way, we avoided a productivity-driven attitude of the boss who is only interested in knowing if a person will be a useful tool for his productive gear. Zoy and I wanted to see what chance would bring us. Below, I describe three important moments of the many collaborative activities that took place during this period, which point to broader developments unfolding from them.

REPRESENTA(C)TION The ESDILab communications team was split in two: a group of two students would take care of the general visual communication of the school, and another two would take care of website development. The latter two seemed, at first sight, quite shy.

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FIGURE 4.3 ESDI’s website, 2017 (ESDI Archives).

They were put to work in a windowless room and faced tedious technical difficulties. No one, other than the IT department, could install fonts on the servers, which greatly limited the development of layouts. The students waited for days, sometimes weeks, until problems like this could be solved. The computers they worked on were very slow and the internet would drop out every now and then, forcing them to finish their work at home. Not once do I recall them being in a bad mood or having stopped working on what was possible and, against all odds, as it turned out, they managed to give a true contribution to the project. The design of the school’s first website, launched in 1997, had never been updated to keep up with technological advances. The dimensions of the home page layout had been defined at a time when it was still necessary to level them according to the most common resolution, which at that time, was 640 x 480 pixels. As hardware advances increased monitor resolutions, ESDI’s “home,” confined in its original configuration, floated, seemingly shrunk, in the center of an increasingly vast usable space. An overhaul of the website was, therefore, an urgency, itself very old. We learned about the existence of a preliminary study for updating the page, started by an ESDI graduate, a project that had been interrupted some years before. We set up a meeting with the former student and other professors, in order to explore the possibility of continuing what had already been done. The

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former student gave us several technical reasons as to why he had not followed through with the project. While he was speaking, an obstacle, however, caught my attention. He mentioned very briefly that, at the time when he was working on the project, there was a lot of difficulty in approving a definitive layout. Professors who were also renowned graphic designers were at the forefront of creating the interface. Heirs to the Ulmian tradition of rationalist and formalist rigor (see Chapters 1 and 2), they would not approve any visual product that was not up to the task of publicly representing a design school as traditional as ESDI. Even before becoming a professor at the school, I had been fascinated by ESDI’s vocation for freedom, the brilliance of several of its teachers, and the vitality and creative breath of its students, an admiration that for years fueled my aspiration to work there. Despite the intensity of this admiration, I felt acutely hit by the discontentment of knowing that a project had been blocked for years for failing to fulfill excellence standards compatible with the school’s prestige. In this episode, I recognized a regressive side of ESDI, perhaps even a negative force, which became increasingly familiar from the moment when, in 2010, I became a tenured professor. Since then, I have witnessed endless discussions on the most varied topics, in which intellectual prowess was combined with scarce practical spirit. I noticed, in these endless debates, different versions of a rhetorical disposition based on a general parameter of “quality,” which each interlocutor thought to exist, metaphysically, in a singular and unequivocal place. The taste for debate was evident. Teachers relied on the hope for a consensus that would be achieved through refinement in the dialogue, on what represented the dreamed ESDI quality standards. In this exercise, beautiful arguments spiraled into the air, encountering, naturally, the fatal destiny of collision with other swirls competing for the same airspace. My impatience with the paralysis that rose from these idealizations was, little by little, intensifying an antipathy I already had towards the concept of “quality,” which was consensually seen as a positive value in these debates. A “quality” thing, be it a design product, a pedagogy, a clothing, or even time (for example,

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the idea of “quality time” to be spent with family), always overrides what comes out of the consensus. Sometimes, people evoke the word in a defensive move, as, for example, in the slogan: “In defense of public, free of charge, quality education.” Why is it that “quality” has to be named here? It seems to me that the phrase is an anticipated and defensive response to a certain sense, in Brazil, of the most privileged classes that free of charge, state-provided things cannot be of superior quality. Or, more precisely, that the very presence of socioeconomically disadvantaged populations in an academic environment would be responsible for a drop in the quality of education, as detractors of the quota policy often argue. Would a slogan, “In defense of free of charge public education” mean that we advocate the lack of quality, if we did not use the word? But the problem, I suspect, is in the non problematized use of the word itself. In academia, the idea of quality is also typically colonialist, in that it follows standards determined by a European and North American logocentric tradition. It is a category whose alleged universality has always served to impose to minority groups a supposed consensus, in fact produced by the historical plot woven from Enlightenment determinations of the idea of progress. But, mainly, what has always bothered me is the use of the word “quality” as a weapon to underestimate the viable. In the case of the ESDI website, it was probably the difficulty in recognizing the perfect translation of the school’s quality standards in the layout proposals (which we would never get to see) that halted the project of renewal. Although we had an appreciation for the not-perfect, Zoy and I also felt the need for a graphic-interactive solution that would translate our philosophy of collaborative direction. The main image that would mirror this philosophy would not be the projects developed by students and teachers, however interesting they might be. Nor would this image lay in the good position that an ESDI diploma could provide for its graduates in the job market, even though this could be a real and effective attraction for young people wishing to enter the school. From time to time, reports reached us of the good reputation that our students had in the job market. This seemed to me less because of qualities

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such as technical knowledge and theoretical grounding than to extraordinary enthusiasm and refined critical capacity. The fact is that the human and convivial dimension of the school was an aspect that we would like to see drawn up graphically and interactively in order to feature people as an institutional image on the website. To put this guideline into reality, we started in the most obvious way, that is, gathering photos by and of students in the most diverse settings and moments of their school routine. From this photographic material, the interns charged with working on the website started to develop a graphic language. Week after week, they presented layouts that were never quite what we were looking for. Either they looked very traditional, or the photos seemed somewhat artificial; we didn’t always know how to explain or identify what was lacking. I felt as if the shadow of that perpetual dissatisfaction that I had criticized in the process of developing the previous website was threatening to obscure our ability to act. I feared I was unwittingly reenacting the same paralyzing behavior I wanted to disrupt. The problem was that, even though we wanted to invert priorities, we were still insisting on thinking about a layout in terms of “representation.” If previously the aim had been to represent, through graphic excellence, the technical and formal qualities of ESDI’s modernist heritage, now we expected to see the collective dimension of the school represented, but we could not rid ourselves of the notion that an image represented something. We struggled over how to resolve this impasse, and indeed we did not resolve it. What broke this obstacle was an algorithmic operation that became available to us. Two former students2 who volunteered to take care of the programming part of the project had developed a platform dedicated to indexing, managing, and enabling numerous forms of data filtering. One of the possible views that the system provided was a kind of cobweb that linked circles of varying sizes. The diameter of each of these discs corresponded to the number of people associated with a given category. The lines that linked these circles were formed from the coincidence of interests; 2

Pedro Herzog and Sérgio Boiteux, from the design studio Plano B.

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for example, if a person interested in “epistemology” was also interested in “graphic design,” a line would be drawn between the two circles. In this way, the algorithm generated the image of a constellation of circles of varying sizes linked by wires. Each person registered on the website could enter their own profile and indicate their interests or modify their data, triggering an immediate update on the network layout. Thus, the first idea—photographs of people in school activities—was replaced by a shifting graphic configuration in which the photographic representation gave way to an algorithmically determined image. The school’s home page would then present a dynamic environment in potentially continuous transformation. Some notes can be taken from this account. The mere participation of students both in the production and in the theme of photographs was not enough to convey their presence. The algorithm, in spite of generating a representation, made it dynamic, participatory, and summoned, in a way, the presence of people, without the need for photographic evidence. Featuring the unique and instantaneous moment of photography in a communicative interface (the website), condemned it either to inevitable obsolescence, or to the need for constant updates. Its replacement by an algorithmic dynamic allowed updates made by registered users to change the visual configuration instantly and automatically. In this way, the interface of the ESDI website showcases a form of representation that becomes inseparable from the action.

SHALL WE DANCE? Another time when students were involved in institutional issues was during the development of a new visual identity for ESDI. The previous logo had been designed by a graphic design professor at the school. The desire for change did not imply that the old logo was no longer adequate, or that it was “dated.” I personally have never seen relevance in this adjective, often used pejoratively. What is not dated? Perhaps the adjective “non-dated” is only valid in the course of a brief period of time during which something gives the illusion of eternity. The current insistence

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on the word “innovation” as an unquestionably positive value in the academic world is a symptom of a certain repulsion about things not considered up to date. It was not, therefore, by aligning ourselves with these determinations that we thought about changing the school’s logo. But, if we were not going to “update” it, why change it at all? What would be gained from that? Certainly, many were asking themselves questions like these. The truth is that we saw this initiative as an opportunity to change procedure rather than product. We did not invite any of the exceptional graphic designers who, after long professional experience, had become teachers at the school. The decision to give students still in training a task of such gravity was because of our desire to try a new approach, betting on the graphic realization of a different perspective on the school, in this case, that of the students. Unlike the selection for ESDILab, the choice of students was not through candidate screening, but by opportunity and proximity. We chose two esteemed students3 who were always around, often passing by our window to say “hi.” They were known for having a special taste for typography and graphic subjects, and they were high-spirited. This procedure of choosing those who were always around became, I believe, almost a method: that of keeping always attentive to opportunities and proposals that wandered aimlessly through the air, which opposed the argumentative spirals developed by logic, described above. For the students that now faced the challenge of replacing the old school logo, which had been developed by a professor who had previously taught them, the preferred strategy was one of prudence. First of all, they immediately showed their first ideas to that professor and, despite some expected tension, they received advice that they found useful, as well as a friendly acquiescence. They decided to start from the same typographic family as the existing logo, Univers, trying, however, to use it in a humorous way. In the words of one of them, they wanted to “shake up Frutiger,” the prestigious creator of Univers. In keeping with this intention, they used a resource that was familiar to them, which had been unavailable to previous generations of designers: the 3

Daniel Rocha and Nickolas Borba.

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animated gif. The first version of the new ESDI logo was therefore designed not on a two-dimensional grid-modulated surface, but on the computer screen, through animation techniques. This animation, “putting Frutiger to dance,” as the student explained, “was composed of a sequence of frames, in which each letter of the acronym ESDI presented a different style from the typographic family created by the Swiss typographer.” “The animation created the feeling that the shape of the letters is changing, widening, expanding their limits,” one of them told me. We could not change the logo of the school without the approval of the faculty (this was a kind of precaution that we took at several other points during our time in management). We then held a meeting for the students to present the logo to the Visual Programming Department. They were anxious about submitting their proposal for scrutiny by that group of professionals of proven expertise and excellence, and they felt the unavoidable distance between their standing as students and that of an audience of professors. Zoy and I knew that we were giving leeway to students in a way that would seem exaggerated to many, and even demagogic to some. After the presentation, carefully and respectfully prepared by the students, a long silence unbearably amplified their distress. A teacher broke the ice, commenting, with humor, that the constant blinking of the animated gif was too frantic for his more mature eyes (for mine too, I must admit). This professor, with his positive attitude, dissolved the heavy atmosphere, even suggesting that the Univers should be aban doned alto gether and that a new, more explicitly contemporary typography should be developed. The students dedicated themselves with excitement, in the following months, to the task of drawing types with an obsession comparable to Ulm’s most ingrained formalists, whom, far from being belittling, they had learned to admire intensely. “We didn’t want,” they told me, “to scare away the old ghosts,” but to put them to circulate. Or, rather, to “dance.”4 Whatever 4

See “Virando uma escola do avesso,” n.d. Revista Recorte (blog). Accessed November 7, 2021. https://revistarecorte.com.br/artigos/virando-uma-escolado-avesso/.

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FIGURE 4.4 ESDI’s new logo, 2017 (ESDI Archives).

the final solution for the logo, the very idea of a student asking, “Shall we dance”? to his school, was blissful and had value in itself. The students made 72 glyphs that could be used interchangeably. They also established a palette with fluorescent colors that distanced the logo from the dark gray paint on our campus buildings, a color that for years had been notoriously associated with ESDI. The acceptance of the new logo was also helped by the fact that the students clearly demonstrated that their dancing Univers was well-grounded on the technical knowledge they had learned in the graphic design lessons they had taken during their years at ESDI. They also showed their commitment to rigorous methods, exhibiting tireless studies of dimensioning, spacing, and refinement of drawings. Even so, the truth is that the logo did not have anything special about it, and this was, in my view, its best asset. It was not a brilliant invention and it did not boast any originality. A professor warned that the result was scarcely different from very trivial typographical exercises carried out at the Ulm school and, later, at ESDI itself, and that he had already seen numerous examples of that graphical solution “out there.” The logo felt like an exercise and not a project. One cannot emphasize this enough! How can we not see, today, an enormous value in a fact that first appeared as a disparagement? Converting

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identity into exercise! How about that: a logo that results, a posteriori, from an action that took place in a certain period of time, and not a priori, such as a layout, or a plan. Is it possible that sometime in the coming years, an organization, enterprise, corporation, or government (or maybe some other yet unknown and better thing) reaches its logo, that is, its mark, at the end of its existence, and not as an expected precondition for its birth? A logo, in such a case, would be something that is left, and not a symbol that foreshadows, prescribes, regulates, or represents.

GATES, THEN AND NOW The other group of students at ESDILab (the ones in charge of the physical space of the school), were tasked with a survey of all of the school’s premises. In addition to the classrooms, we wanted to understand exactly what other facilities the school had and how they were occupied. Starting from there, we could think of a redistribution of current uses, or even of the creation of new ones. It may seem strange that such a survey was not promptly available to new directors upon taking office. However, many spaces had been forgotten over the years. There was, for example, an entire second floor above the director’s office with flat files storing a valuable collection of graphic pieces and documents. There, institutional documents, letters, and printed works were scattered with little organization, a material that is still to be surveyed by researchers, archivists, and librarians, which could illuminate unknown elements in the history of design in Brazil and, perhaps, of its intersections with developments in other countries. Some items from this dusty deposit are famous, such as the death mask of Aloisio Magalhães, a former professor at the school, considered one of the greatest Brazilian designers. It also ended up storing an important collection of graphic pieces, layouts, and artwork by Bea Feitler, a Brazilian designer of international renown. Whenever a researcher came to the school wanting to see an item from this designer’s collection, it was not clear where to find the piece, and there was no established protocol for accessing and handling such documents.

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But even outside those flat files, on the floor, there were other hidden items, camouflaged in a mess of obsolete equipment, remains of student work, half-finished wine bottles, expired construction materials, and all sorts of things. For two weeks, Zoy, a student, and a caretaker spent a few hours every day combing through the rubble to decide what to keep and what to throw away, which was not always a trivial task. A seemingly uninteresting photograph could concern the anonymous youth of a famous character. A handwritten document could be proof of some historic contract. Comments written by a teacher about the layout of a poster made by a student could be of interest in making certain pedagogical conceptions of other times visible. Many objects caused impasses as to the pertinence of their archiving. However, even with the utmost care not to risk the inadvertent loss of some historically relevant item, Zoy, the student, and the caretaker managed to fill an entire dumpster with garbage, after exhaustive cleaning. The ESDILab students also got used to entering dusty spaces, full of fungi, and even poisonous centipedes, as one of them reported, confessing that he had taken a special appreciation for the task of searching the basement where there had been a photographic laboratory, as in a horror film. Like him, other students showed an extraordinary willingness to thoroughly inspect the lesser known parts of that school where they would study for years. Some set out to measure all areas, both classrooms and the many “unoccupied” regions. The quotes are because of the fact that there was actually a lot of occupation in these areas. And its regulars were not only animals, like the ubiquitous cats that took shelter in dark crevices—actual caves in which they mated and lived their life of hiding and socializing. Students also felt free in these delightfully dark and anonymous spaces, at night, during parties, or in the evening, after school. One of the areas consisted of a huge strip of rugged terrain full of rubble, concrete, stones, gravel, and revolved earth stretched from the end of the student center’s house to a wall that marked the end of the school grounds, behind which was the busy Rua do Passeio. Students had long demanded that this wall give place to a new entrance to the school; as a matter of fact, there had

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FIGURE 4.5 School grounds before the new gates to Rua do Passeio were built, ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

already been one in the past. From there, one could get to the subway more quickly. The students also complained that the other, and only gate, imposed a dangerous route, along which robberies were frequent. This gate, being the only possible access, made pedestrians share the way in with cars, a contingency that, despite being prohibited by law, had been routine for years. It was a barely noticeable iron gate that looked much more like a garage than a school entrance. Once Zoy and I pondered privately that extreme discretion might correspond to an unconfessed desire that ESDI should remain a somewhat hidden, isolated, fortuitous place. What we wanted was the opposite: openness and visibility. Once again, an unexpected contingency presented us with the opportunity for such an opening. During the preceding management term, a civil engineering company had rented a section of the ESDI land adjacent to that strip of rubble, for use as an auxiliary construction site for the renovation of the building in the neighboring lot. For months this area housed containers for construction workers, as well as serving as a parking space for trucks and a warehouse for building materials. When we took over management, we learned that the company had exceeded in some months the contracted time for land rental and could, therefore, be fined by law. An estimate had been made

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of the amount due for the delay, which seemed rather unambitious to us. Zoy saw that debt as the opportunity of a negotiation: the debtor company, instead of paying us a fine, could use the equipment and personnel that was still available on our land to carry out the construction of an access to the school in Rua do Passeio. With the help of the university’s legal department, we recovered a document that proved the breach of the company’s contract with ESDI. We scheduled a meeting in April 2016 to talk to those responsible. We arrived, Zoy, a student, and I, in a very tidy room, with brand-new furniture and nice air conditioning. We sat around a conference table with the engineer responsible for the work, his assistant, and a man whose bluish-black mustache matched the color of his suit. His image was perfectly adjusted to the scene, which made Zoy, the student, and I, stand out, with our faces and clothes still damp with sweat from the intense heat of Rio. The one with the mustache was, of course, the money man. Zoy placed the folder with the legal documents on the polished wooden table, wrapped with a worn-off yellow rubber band around its matte green cover. In that folder, she announced, there was evidence of a breach of contract that could eventually start a legal dispute between that company and the university. But she said it as if she were saying “very nice to meet you,” without any threatening shade in her tone. She immediately made it clear that fighting with the company or even threatening it with legal action was by no means the reason for our visit. She explained that there had been, for years, a project to reopen an entrance to the school through Rua do Passeio, an access that had existed when ESDI first opened, and that was later closed by the wall that was now there. During the 1960s, in what was now a wasteland hidden by that wall, design students circulated with their rolls of paper and drawing mater i als on their way to class. It would be a great settlement, in our opinion, if the company could afford a new gate for the school and a modest landscaping project that would trans form the long-derelict area into a beautiful promenade. The hurried speech of the man with the mustache made us understand that he had other commitments. He listened to Zoy’s

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exposition with the politeness that seemed appropriate, interrupting it a few times with quick statements, trying to encourage her to conclude. When he started to speak, he immediately indicated that yes, he was willing to consider our proposal. He stressed that he had already had the same idea and that he would welcome it, not for fear of a lawsuit or any recognition that he owed something to us (we thought it wiser not to dispute this claim), but for reasons that he stated were on aesthetic grounds. The work the company had undertaken consisted of a substantial renovation of the historic building next to ESDI, and was intended to house luxury offices. The side façade of the building that bordered the school’s lot was covered in bluish glass, like the money man’s mustache and suit. Coupled to this surface, a sequence of elevators with transparent walls would offer a panoramic view to the outside. It was embarrassing for the man with the mustache to imagine the distaste that the future tenants of the building’s offices would feel, looking down, and seeing land that was, in his words, “abandoned,” which, however, we knew to actually be full of feline life and juvenile romance. How good would it be, he said, if his fellow businessmen, through the elevator windows, found nothing more than a tidy entrance with design students coming in and out like dummies in a well-executed model. With one or two smiles of feigned excitement with all that corporate happiness, we shook hands and sealed the partnership. It was thus that, what from a given perspective was no more than a well-made model, would become the fulfillment of an old desire of professors and students. The various stages of the work saw numerous meetings and discussions: between us and the engineers, choosing this or that finishing material; between us and the professors of the architecture department (which is part of ESDI, but has its own campus) that had been recently opened at the school, who had given us precious assistance in the design of the project; finally, between us and the most senior faculty, whom we made a point of asking to accompany the decisive stages of the project. In this case, we repeated a “method” of meetings with fewer people (in contrast to the tradition of large assemblies) that I had tried in the school’s curriculum overhaul process (see Chapter 2).

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About nine months after that first meeting, the new access to ESDI was completed. There was now, at Rua do Passeio, a new gate, which made the existence of a design school visible, there, in that place, establishing a permeability between the campus and its surroundings. The gate, made out of glass, opened a wide view to a concrete promenade sided by a lawn, where the very tall trees that could now show themselves in their grandeur stood and whose shade on the lawn allowed study groups and even classes to take place outdoors. Funnily enough, the cats, scattered across the grass, also seemed to be very well accommodated on their new flat pavement under the sun. We happily crossed the street to have a better view of the new gate. I remember standing in front of it, somewhat incredulous, watching students, who were also amazed, next to the glass, as the letters of the name Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial were being carefully attached by one of them. Interrupting the contemplative moment, Zoy commented: “Marcos, this new gate is very similar to a 1963 ESDI pavilion that was built a year after the school’s inauguration”! In that year, students, teachers, and technicians had come together to build, with their own hands, a gate that actually gave access (before the actual entrance to the school) to a horizontal hall that served as an exhibition space. There, visitors could see work developed at the school, thematic and historical exhibitions, or participate in book launches. In fact, the gate that stood in front of us in 2017 was incredibly similar to the one from 1963. Both were about 4 meters tall, and the façade was modulated in rectangles structured to frame large glass panels. Now, as before, the structure favored transparency so that passersby could see the interior from the street. What was surprising was that we only saw the pictures of this pavilion after our gate was ready, which seemed an amazing coincidence. What is there to think or say about this structure that had emerged in 1963 to be closed in the 1980s, and remained so until we set out, in a meeting with a money man, to reopen it? Out of the many notable aspects of this story, there is a material one that provides insight into this eternal return of sorts. This material is glass. Its transparency, its radical form of visual access, brought together in 1963, students and teachers who

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FIGURE 4.6 ESDI’s pavilion, built in 1963 (ESDI archives).

FIGURE 4.7 ESDI’s new gate to Rua do Passeio, 2017 (Zoy Anasstassakis).

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envisioned and desired a school open to the outside. There is no way of knowing whether, for them, the desire for transparency was already driven by some premonition of the bleak years of dictatorship that would follow. In 2017, we were no longer in this regime that oppressed the country for nearly twenty years, from 1964 to 1985. In the meantime, we were going through a major economic and political crisis (see Chapter 5 and Introduction) which, as I write these words, I perceive as a terrible harbinger of the storm that we are now, in 2021, going through in this country, whose future is distressingly impossible to predict. Could it be that at that moment, in front of that transparent gate, we were also anticipating a response to this uncertain present? The two moments, of course, differ significantly. In 1963, just one-year-old, the school embodied an optimistic conception of design, confident in its role in shaping the future. The school cherished products created by individuals who had had a “quality” education. In 2017, we wanted to believe in the protagonism of the experiences, events, and affections involved in the creative processes of the products, (website, logo, gate), much more than in their results. Two ways of thinking, two perspectives through this glass that retain, in their radical transparency, the continuous vocation for survival through openness.

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5

Crisis Marcos Martins

INTERRUPTIONS A small room links the school reception to a narrow courtyard that gives access to two bathrooms and to stairs leading to the faculty meeting room. In this place, there are the professors’ mailboxes and some metal drawers stuffed with folders of various documents, waiting to be organized someday. This room also has a refrigerator, a sink, and a low cupboard, on top of which stands a water purifier, a thermos for coffee, small plastic cups, a sugar bowl, a bottle of sweetener, and, sometimes, a cookie jar. The place has no designated function; in it, one will usually find professors, students, visitors, and cleaning staff, who finish the daily cleaning of the campus very early in the morning. At 7:30 a.m. on a cold morning in July 2015, I went, as usual, to have a cup of coffee in that small room, half an hour before the beginning of my class. A lady with a head scarf over her white hair swept the floor with a broom, back and forth, whispering words to herself. Only the two of us were in the room. I said good morning, but she, absorbed in her internal dialogue, did not greet me back. After vigorously mopping the floor, she picked up the 105

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broom, a bucket, a basket with cleaning supplies, and headed upstairs for the faculty room. When she passed me, I noticed that she was crying. I spent some time there alone drinking my coffee, staring into the void, with the image of the lady with the head scarf lingering in my thoughts, until I heard “Good morning, Professor Marcos.” The voice came from the oldest employee of the school, a very popular and notorious person, who had been honored many times as a paranymph of successive undergraduate classes. He was a kind of caretaker, but our small community had in him a true protector, a guardian angel. Waking from my distracted state, I greeted him back and commented that a cleaning lady seemed distressed and very worried. Did she have a personal problem? He was quick to answer negatively. Most likely, she was, like all cleaning staff, apprehensive about the delays in wage payments. That was never a good sign. “When the salary deposit starts running late, you can bet, professor, that it won’t be long before they start firing people.” All university maintenance services, such as garbage collection, cleaning, catering, elevator maintenance, among others, are provided by private contractors that the government pays through the university budget. At that time, when the government was defaulting on its payments and, therefore, the university was failing to pay the contractors, these ones would continue providing services, but would start delaying wage payments to their workers. It was common for them to have their payments delayed by up to three months. A particularly perverse cycle was instituted: the government would default on university funding; the university, in turn, defaulted on its contractors’ payments; the contractors, in turn, would stop paying employees, who, fearful of being fired, would silently accept these delays and continue to work, thus helping to keep the university’s many campuses and facilities running. At the time of that coffee in the roomlet, a crisis that was taking shape in multiple dimensions was showing its first signs in the almost inaudible conversation that the cleaning lady was having with herself. I felt sorry for her, for I wouldn’t want to be in her place. At that moment, I could still see things from the

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sympathetic vantage point of just imagining, from a distance, the gravity of her drama. However, new circumstances showed me that the signs of the crisis were starting to get more ubiquitous and closer to myself. Shortly after that day, I was called to the main campus because of a bureaucratic problem that required my presence. To get there from our downtown campus, I would usually take the subway, which, after a certain station becomes an overground railway. As the train leaves the underground tunnel, sunlight replaces the cold car lighting, something that always cheers me up a little bit. That day, after a few stations, already on the surface, I noticed that this light that made the wagon less sad was also shining over a huge mound of black garbage bags stacked in the university parking lot, in front of which the train passed before arriving at the station nearest to it. That gleaming black mound, which was almost twice as tall as the cars next to it, made a strong impression on me. As I reached the main entrance on the ground floor, the garbage bags had disappeared from view. There, I took the elevator to the seventh floor, where the department to which I was headed is. As I went through the entrance, I walked towards the elevator lobby and realized that only one of them was working, for all twelve floors of the six-winged UERJ main building. Having to wait a bit for the elevator was not anything new at UERJ. But after twenty minutes in which the line behind me only grew and barely moved ahead of me, I decided to take the stairs. Before arriving at the office, gasping in urine-scented air, I entered the bathroom on the floor, but, since there was no toilet paper, I turned around and headed for my destination. In the waiting room, a cold light shimmered feebly. I sat down, knowing that there was no prospect of anyone coming to see me, because there, too, was a long line. Despite noticing with concern those unmistakable signs of decay, at the end of 2015, I still did not see myself as belonging to that picture. In June 2016, however, the state of my bank account would no longer allow me to keep my distance as an observer. That month, without any notice, professors, and technicians received only a fraction (just over half) of their month’s salary, the remainder of which was paid only at the beginning of the following month.

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After that, for a few months, we were paid in time, at the beginning of each month. However, in November, our salary was paid in five installments, dripping into the bank account every few days, and, by the end of the month, the sum of these deposits still did not amount to a full salary. As for the December salary, no amount was deposited. From then on, the successive delays and fractionings that marked the entire year of 2017 became routine. We never knew in advance on what day the deposits would be made or how much they would be, and they always came in mysteriously fractional amounts. I might receive 316 reais on the fifth, one thousand on the sixth, and 320 on the eleventh. This arrhythmic and nonsensical routine altered my perception of time, which, now, without the monthly compass of the money inflow, seemed to be governed by unknown and unpredictable laws. Now I could see myself clearly within the picture. Anxiety, a feeling of heavy-heartedness, and vulnerability increased month by month. I stopped paying my bills on time and, as a result, penalties for the delays mounted. Some colleagues became unable to pay their rents. We had to go through the shame of renegotiating every payment. Zoy told me that, during a meeting at her two-year-old daughter’s day care center, she felt embarrassed that she couldn’t refrain from bursting into tears. The headmistress approached her and, upon learning of the financial troubles she was going through, temporarily relieved her from paying tuition. At her other daughter’s school, she was not met with the same understanding attitude, being instead coldly denied any possibility of negotiation, which forced her to change the girl’s school. I myself had some savings that soon ran out. During this time, like many other professors, I started looking for other ways to make money, working as a graphic designer, and offering online paid courses. As the months went by, I wondered if I would have to leave academia and go back to working as a designer, an activity I had all but abandoned when I chose to become a professor. Some professors went into debt, taking high-interest bank loans. Others resorted to family or, eventually, their spouses, and there were couples in which both domestic partners were

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professors, the so-called “UERJ couples,” who had no one to turn to, since the income of both depended exclusively on the university. Many suffered eviction threats. A professor went viral on social media when he shared a photo of himself holding up a poster and a plate with four coins.1 In addition to a short resumé of the professor, who spoke three languages and had done postdoctoral research, the poster read: “The State has no schedule for releasing April salaries. [. . .] Can someone get me a job? After all, I need to pay my bills.” The crowded classrooms, the meetings, the noisy agglomerations of students during breaks, in short, the whole normal school routine started to fade out in memory. The university felt like it was being eroded from within in its integrity, receiving many requests for early retire ment, witness ing an almost 30 percent decrease in applications for the entrance exams, and a flood of requests from students for transfers to other institutions. Now we could all see, clearly and evidently, the crater that was opening before us. From the rector to the cleaning lady, everyone was under attack by an invisible and sneaky force that was beyond our comprehension. The causes for this crisis are intertwined in an intricate historical plot, which would call for an extens ive invest ig a tion, incompatible with the scope of this book. An overview, however, allows us to put into context some elementary factors, undoubtedly related to the adversities we faced: diving prices of oil derivatives, which are among the main sources of revenue of Rio de Janeiro State; expenses with the organization, and production of two mega-events happening in the city (the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games); long running embezzlement schemes in State and city administrations; political instability in Brazil, which culminated in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016.

1

Marcela Lemos, “Em protesto, professor da Uerj pede emprego nas ruas, posta foto e viraliza.” UOL, Notícias, November 6, 2017. https://educacao. uol.com.br/noticias/2017/06/11/professor-da-uerj-pede-emprego-nas-ruasposta-no-facebook-e-foto-viraliza.htm.

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Even if I tried, here, to continue in an attempt to present possible explanations for the crisis, the truth is that, in the education sector, this whole scenario cannot be understood through merely factual bases. It points to a more profoundly destructive (and indeed self-destructive) movement of Brazilian society, especially pronounced in the elite strata, aimed at maintaining Brazil’s social inequality. It seems clear to me that there are, indeed, political and economic forces in the country interested in destroying places where critical thinking can flourish and, because of their public and formative vocation, threaten longestablished class privileges. Some would say that the attacks that we were targeted with at that time, within the scope of a state university, could be part of a “dismantling laboratory,” that is, a smaller scale rehearsal for the application of a project to be later applied to all public education in the country. For others, all this was no more than a conspiracy theory, not to be taken seriously. However, from 2019, with the start of the Bolsonaro administration, the concept of a “dismantling laboratory” began to take on more real contours in incidents as tangible as they were symbolic. In an act of violent interdiction and disdain for public higher education, in April 2019, the Minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub (who would later be sacked in 2020 after having called for the arrest of Supreme Court justices during a cabinet meeting, calling them “vagabonds”), blocked the accounts of a federal public university, claiming baselessly that the only thing people did there was “romping.”2 The same minister made news in the press when he stated, without any evidence, that in public universit ies there were extens ive “marijuana plant a tions.” 3 The president himself summed up the educational policy of his admin2

3

“MEC vai cortar verba de univer sid ades que tiverem ‘baixo desem penho’ e fizerem ‘balb ú rdia,”’ O Globo , April 30, 2019, Sociedade, https://oglobo. globo.com/sociedade/mec-vai-cortar-verba-de-universidades-que-tiverembaixo-desempenho-fizerem-balburdia-23631766. Ana Carla Bermúdez, “Sem provas, Weintraub diz que federais têm plantações extensivas de maconha [22/11/2019],” UOL, November 22, 2019, Educação, https://educacao.uol.com.br/noticias/2019/11/22/weintraub-ha-plantacoesextensivas-de-maconha-em-universidades-federais.htm.

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istration: “Nobody wants to have anything to do with young people with a critical sense.”4 In the news media, covert or overtly misleading attacks on the public university have been routine for a long time. An editorial in O Globo (Rio’s main newspaper), in July 2016, is an example of the ruling elite’s desire to eradicate free public education: the title (which insinuates as news what, in fact, is just opinion) read that the budget crisis would “trigger the end of unfair free public higher education.”5 The virulence of this title is reinforced by sentences that conceal disqualifying intentions, such as “a lot of money goes into the sector,” or “the payroll exceeds the entire university budget,” and the suggestion that it was time to “take advantage [of the crisis] to end free higher education.” What we suspected from our experience at that time, and which we now know for a fact, seems to confirm like never before the acuteness of anthropologist and politician Darcy Ribeiro’s famous 1970s insight that the so-called crisis in education in Brazil was not really a crisis, but a project.6 During 2016 to 2017, this project manifested itself in our lives with a rawness and violence that made a huge impact on our dignity, self-esteem, and creative strength. Until the 2016 crisis, my financial situation and my job seemed, despite some discontents, to have an unquestionable stability. The crisis undermined the sense of security provided by public employment, forcing me to imagine ways to make an income outside the university, even entertaining the possibility of moving out of it altogether. But was there anything to be found outside? Looking back, I recall a hilarious video posted by Brazilian playwright Gerald Thomas,7 in which he, with feathers plucked 4

5

6

7

Lucas Rezende, “Ningu é m quer saber de jovem com senso cr í tico, diz Bolsonaro em Vitória,” Yahoo!notícias, January 8, 2018, https://br.noticias. yahoo.com/ningu%C3%A9m-quer-saber-jovem-com-024400975.html. “Crise for ç a o fim do injusto ensino super ior gratuito,” O Globo , April 8, 2016, Editorial, https://oglobo.globo.com/opiniao/crise-forca-fim-do-injustoensino-superior-gratuito-19768461. Darcy Ribeiro, Ensaios Ins ó litos , Biblioteca B á sica Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Darcy Ribeiro, 2014), 20. Gerald Thomas. “Gerald Thomas e o ‘Fora isso, fora aquilo ’! Tô Passada !!!,” YouTube, August 12, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Rd8LNBrjI.

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into his hair, hidden between two towels hanging on a clothesline, philosophized: “People say ‘out with Temer, out with Trump, out with Putin’ . . . but where is this ‘out,’ my god? there is no outside . . . ” Minding the respective proportions, this could be understood as a comic version of Donna Haraway’s idea in “Staying with the Trouble.”8 Staying with the problem is a way of embracing situations without escape and insisting on the possibility of creating new things under the actual circumstances, without any promise of stability.

DETOURS? My personal experience of losing a stability that, as it turned out, had always been illusory, was accompanied, at the collective level, by an institutional instability that prevented school management from planning for the future. Throughout the period when Zoy and I were head of the school as directors, instability set the tone for a way of existence that had to recalibrate itself on a daily basis in the face of constant uncertainty. A week after we took up the direction of ESDI, in March 2016, our union began a professors’ strike demanding salary readjustments, but also trying to raise awareness to the government’s neglect of the university. Having just taken the job, we already had to deal with an empty school, without classes, and with increasingly precarious basic maintenance services. We had prepared to start our term full steam ahead, in order to resume the curriculum overhaul. We were also excited about the collaborative and horizontal approach to management we had envisioned (see Chapters 3 and 4). For some time there was some astonishment on our part by the frustration of our expectations for the debut. What exactly were we supposed to manage? How do we do any planning whatsoever without any guarantee of basic structure or personnel? Gradually, we turned our attention to what was within our reach, then and there, detaching ourselves from any long-term 8

Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

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strategy. There were some opportunities for action that relied neither on classroom routine nor univer sity govern mental financing. Among them was the construction of a new access to the school for Rua do Passeio, an old dream of the students, which was now within our reach. As described in greater detail in Chapter 4, a debt contracted by a real estate company because of the use of our land, provided us with means to carry out the work. This project took up a good part of our time and restored part of our initial proactive mood, triggering, as I shall describe later, a number of powerful collective activities that, in large part, are what has prompted us to write this book. As much as we were committed to building a new access to the school—a construction improvement, after all—there was a constant sensation of groundlessness. As directors, Zoy and I could feel within the administrative practices the full weight of the forces deployed against the survival of UERJ in our society. In addition to cutting funds for cleaning and maintenance, some deliberations by the State government officially halted the continuity of essential university activities. Among them was the ban on new hires throughout 2016, which was renewed for the course of 2017. The retirement of some professors at ESDI had opened up some vacancies for new hires through public tenders. These vacancies, in theory, would bypass the government interdiction because they did not constitute an additional burden on the State. Another exception would be the hiring of professors to teach in newly created courses, as was the case with ESDI’s new architec ture and urban ism under gradu ate course. Elaborating and presiding over these tenders were some of the most strenuous exper i ences I had during my time as head of ESDI management. Public tenders for university professors in Brazil go through several phases, among which is the approval of a public notice by the university’s legal department and its publication in the official gazette. It was at this stage that the government, even though it was legally obliged to accept the legitimacy of our tenders, managed to sabotage the entire process, delaying the publication in such a way that the dates foreseen for its completion expired, demanding the reissuing of the public notice.

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Even if the only change had been the dates, the entire text had to be resubmitted to the legal department. And each time it was resubmitted, we sometimes had to wait more than a month for the notice to be returned to us for review. Much to our surprise, it returned with new requests for changes in excerpts that had already been approved in previous versions. So we had to go through the entire cycle again. Week after week, month after month, holding the paperwork under my arm, I repeated the route from the school to the university main campus, doing again and again the same routine I have recalled at the start of this chapter: the subway wagon with its cold light, the ascent to the surface and the sunlight filling the car through the windows, the sun shining on garbage bags, the long line leading to the only functioning elevator, the staircase, the bathroom without toilet paper, the cold, shimmering light, the waiting room, the meeting, the news that the notice had not been published. Some days afterwards, again: cold light, sun, rubbish, line, urine, flickering light, “no, sir, not yet.” There, I was reminded of the pet hamster I had as a child: put to run, pointlessly, in a running wheel inside a cage. After a few laps stuck in this loop, Zoy and I decided to set up a meeting with a lawyer from the legal department. We were hoping to solve our problem with a well-reasoned explanation of why we thought it was unnecessary for previously approved texts to go through the whole process if the only change was the dates for the tender. Seeming not really having heard us, the lawyer said things such as, “I’m not sure about this section here, because the government can impose administrative punishment on us and then it will be much worse,” or “I don’t know whether we can clearly say that this particular issue will meet the legal requirements involved,” or “there have been changes in the legislation, and I don’t know how this particular issue is dealt with now.” Trying to overcome her obstinacy in finding possible problems, we tried to communicate to her the importance of those competitions for the actual functioning of the school, for the students, for the continuity of academic activities. Once again, seeming not to hear us, she continued her monologue, which resembled a raptured entrancement in the face of the infinite

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combinations of words that opened up a whole new universe of doubts in each iteration. It was as if I was the hamster in the cage and she was the child sitting next to it, assembling, and reassembling an infinite Lego labyrinth. We then realized, with sudden clarity, that the deterioration of the university was not only the government’s fault, but that it also came from some forces acting within its administrative body, which were at odds with its very existence. These forces were, of course, not the majority. They acted in spite of all the institutional instances that approved and wanted the tenders to take place. The government’s ban on hiring was in force until 2019, and when they were finally held, with three years of delay, I was surprised by the happy outcome of a cause on which I had already given up. This case shows, at an institutional level, the barren scenario that we faced in the first months of our term in management. Alongside this, was the desolation of the empty spaces with which we had to cope day after day, during the first half of 2016, when the human presence at the school almost came down to the two of us. By the end of July of that year, a prospect of improvement galvanized us. In view of the government’s promises to meet our demands, the professors’ union decided to end the strike that started at the beginning of the year. Because of this, classes and other activities related to the first semester of 2016 were held only in the second semester. So, all the time we had to remember that, in academic terms, we were in 2016.1, in a way, “living” the first half of the year in the second half. This was another factor of chronological imbalance that added to the delays in our salaries. The academic semester, even in conditions that were far from ideal, as the precariousness in maintenance had barely improved, was concluded. The government, however, not only did not keep any of its promises, but began, in November 2016, as previously described, to split and delay the payments of professors, technicians, and cotista scholarships, and also, because of the lack of financing to the university, to provoke the already anticipated wave of layoffs of outsourced staff. In response to that, the professors released a strike notice in December, meaning

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that, at any time, a strike could start. It was during this period that we experienced another one of those seemingly endless loops. “We have never been through a crisis like this.” This sentence was uttered in practically every single meeting of the Forum de Diretores (Directors’ Forum), a meeting between the rector, the deans, and unit directors, which, in normal times, occurred once a month, but which, since the end of 2016 through to early 2017, had become weekly. In these meetings, many aspects of the crisis were discussed, from the most prosaic and specific problems, such as the lack of toilet paper, to major issues, such as the fall of one of the elevators and the suspension of classes. The rector had been hospitalized for months, recovering from heart surgery, and the vice rector was acting in his place. Every week a ritual was repeated at the beginning of the meeting. The acting rector asked each director if their unit was in a position to return to classes. A few said they were, but most were unable to see how they could function without minimal infrastructure conditions. Some would cry while delivering these reports. On the one hand, it was painful to listen, speech after speech, to the various stories of helplessness, but on the other hand, it was exciting and encouraging to see the general commitment to defend the university and free public education. These meetings were extremely wearisome, but they provided moments of union in which we felt the collective power of the appreciation that everyone there had for the institution. Professors who had worked in UERJ for decades, who had already faced several crises, showed extraordinary resilience and an unwavering sense of social commitment. The many emotional speeches, which were not just fatalistic lamentations, sought ways to act in the face of the crisis, which grew into the movement known as UERJ RESISTE. A constant concern was raising awareness of our internal calamity to the news media in order to inform the public that we were not on strike, but that we were unable to keep carrying out routine activities because of the lack of minimal working conditions and the curtailment of government funding. To some extent, through the disclosure of our actions in official statements and interviews of some professors on TV and in news-

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pa pers, the Directors’ Forum managed to get the media to publicize the crisis through news reports. However, the insistence with which our stoppage was referred to as a “strike,” which, at the beginning of 2017, was absolutely not true—given that we were in fact unable to keep the institution running—raised doubts about the real reasons why we were being heard in such news pieces, which were scripted by communication vehicles known to be hostile to the very idea of the public university. The almost total absence of manifestations of solidarity on the part of the Rio population seemed to attest to the success of media and government campaigns in characterizing public education insti tu tions as huge bureau cratic corpor a tions, where overprivileged employees were given plenty of time off and countless benefits. And, behind this image, there was our reality: delayed salaries, suspended classes, toilet paper shortages, termites eating classroom walls, and leaks caused by the falling of tree branches on the roofs. Week after week, the Forum would conclude that there were no conditions for resuming academic activities, which led the rector’s office to postpone the start of classes for four consecutive times, until, on January 17, 2017, activities were suspended indefinitely. In view of these successive postponements, we decided to convene a large assembly at ESDI, which included students, technical-administrative staff, and professors. We heard many reports of despair. A professor said he was profoundly depressed, students spoke of their hopelessness at the lack of prospects, and one of the secretaries summed it all up in one sentence: “It’s better to just lock the door and let everything collapse.” The employee’s speech proved, once again, that it was not possible to draw a clear line between the “inside” and the “outside.” His proposal for a radical closure, reflected, as much as the obstacles that the lawyer placed against the tenders, the external attacks embodied by the government, and the news media. It seemed to me that it was urgent to counter the employee’s attitude, calling attention to the abandonment of our school and the danger it represented. I pointed out that an emptied school would serve those who would like to take advantage of the crisis and put free public education to an end once and for all. We should

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FIGURES 5.1 and 5.2 Meeting with students and alumni to discuss actions at the school in reaction to the crisis triggered by the state government of Rio de Janeiro, ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

find ways to fill that space; the image of an empty school could not be allowed to crystallize in the public’s mind. In the same spirit, Zoy argued that we should find ways to occupy ESDI with feasible activities, counting on whoever was willing to embrace the cause. At that meeting, we decided to create working groups organized around different fronts to think about forms of presence and resistance. The word mutirão9 became frequent and could 9

A word of Tupi origin used in Brazilian Portuguese to name any sort of community task force.

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FIGURE 5.3 Zoy, professors, and students at a garbage collecting mutirão, ESDI, 2017 (Carlos Azambuja).

be applied either to the renovation of mobile equipment in the printing workshop, or to classroom and toilet cleaning, or to garbage collection. In fact, our campus had its own mound of bags piled up near one of the entrances, exhaling a disgusting odor. In one mutirão, Zoy, some students, and professors, overcoming their disgust, climbed the mountain and separated those bags so that they could be moved to the school sidewalk waiting for the regular garbage collection from the city street cleaning services. There started to be an interesting shuffling of functions: as students gave classes and organized workshops (about which I’ll talk below), directors and professors could be seen sweeping the floor, or helping to remove the trash. Many promptly adhered to the proposition that occupying space was a way of ensuring that the school remained open in the midst of the most serious crisis ever to hit the univer sity, and would send a message to society and the government: it would not be so easy to make us close up our school and let it collapse. In oppos i tion to

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the idea of “closure,” we named the movement ESDI Aberta [OpenESDI].10 I remember Zoy saying that she could sense a very palpable feeling of love for the school, both from those present at that time and from many who, at some point in their lives, had passed through ESDI. One should not ignore the potential for cohesion of this force, but rather mobilize it around that object of love. She was right. Affirmative energies reached us from an “outside” both in space and time, forming a huge wave of solidarity towards the school. In January 2017, Nelson Motta, an alumnus from one of the first ESDI classes who had become a famous journalist, published a short chronicle in a widely circulated newspaper, whose title, “A escola dos sonhos” [The school of dreams], summed up the affection that ESDI inspired. In this text, he warned, scandalized, of the danger of ESDI closing: “Today I learned that ESDI is going to close, falling victim to the bankruptcy of the State of Rio de Janeiro, to the incompetence and corruption of its administrations. I want to cry, I have to do something, even if it’s a newspaper chronicle.”11 One event in particular catalyzed multiple forms of love and a large number of people in defense of ESDI. The work on the new entrance (see Chapter 4) had been completed. The enormous contrast between the general crisis that threatened us with closure and the completion of a new entrance to the campus was evident. A vision for an unveiling ceremony commensurate with our resistance efforts was indispensable. We planned a full-day dedicated to the festivity, which was held at the beginning of February. A group of about twenty people, including students, alumni, and professors, devoted time and energy to prepare for this event, working intensely. The enthusiasm that went into this

10

For a detailed account of all events and chro no logy of ESDI Aberta, see ESDI alumna Juliana Paolucci’s master thesis. Juliana was a key organizer and activist for the preservation of the school, and dedicated her graduate research to making a moving and detailed report of this time at the school. Juliana Paolucci, “ESDI Aberta: design e (r)existência na Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial” (Master thesis, Rio de Janeiro, UERJ, 2018). 11 Nelson Motta, “A Escola Dos Sonhos,” O Globo, January 20, 2017.

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effort made it possible for us to see a new, much more positive tone, for the practice of frequent meetings that were usually so boring. These were turned into creative events. It was as if a new and promising layer of reality was beginning to impose its presence on the cycle of loops and asynchrony that was stunning us. In an organic way, preparing this party showed us the pleasure of living together dynamically, on a daily basis. Doing things gained ground against analyzing and planning. Now it should become clear why there is a question mark on the title of this section. The word “detours” implies a situation full of obstacles in which one would have to find alternative ways. Now it is worth asking whether the word comes close to what I try to describe here. We didn’t really circle any obstacles. It was more about overlapping or coexisting with the hardship we were living in. If there are stones on the way, let us put them in our pockets to keep going, even with an additional burden. The joy of this party was not a flight from the perverse and destructive reality, but it over lapped it, without denying it, without forgetting it, showing us a strange mixture of light and shadows, with which we got used to living.

FIGURE 5.4 The ESDI Aberta party, February 12, 2017 (Ana Clara Tito).

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FIGURE 5.5 Zoy and Marcos speak ing on stage at the ESDI Aberta party, February 12, 2017 (Philippe Leon Anastassakis).

During that party, there were, from morning until night, many activities, such as the painting of the outer side of the school walls, creative workshops, a fair in which clothes, books, and student-made graphics could be bought, various “unconferences” (conversation circles without predefined themes), food stands, and, towards the end, a concert. On the more institutional side, we, the directors, and the acting rector, gave speeches, clearly stating the political nature of the event to a modest audience that, at noon, still did not give us the clear image of the success that the event would attain. On this day, about 1,500 people passed through ESDI.12 Other ESDI Aberta events had a more formal character, such as the public lecture taught by former professor Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza, several speeches in defense of the school, and a tribute to one of its founders, Karl Heinz Bergmiller. Eighty-nine years old at the time, he was also present. But, even in these more ceremonial events, the atmosphere was quite light-hearted. The sunny day with its summer breeze cast that day with a feeling of 12

Paolucci, “ESDI Aberta: design e (r)existência na Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial.”

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FIGURE 5.6 Karl Heinz Bergmiller lectures at the ESDI Aberta party, February 12, 2017 (Philippe Leon Anastassakis).

peace and normality, which did not weaken the sense that this was an act of resistance and struggle. At dusk, the stage held an array of musical performances in which prominent artists played alongside others, less famous, at the beginning of their career. Some ESDI student ensembles performed, unpretentiously. At the end of the party, a fanfare brought the spectacle down from the stage to the ground, and one could no longer tell musicians apart from the audience. A friend of Zoy’s daughter drank too much and became sick. Sitting on the grass, Zoy, her daughter, and I tried to help him out from his indisposition, while, further away, the crowd had fun at the sound of the fanfare. The organization of the party allowed us to grasp a practice of collaborative work that, by the end of the day, had captivated its participants as well. The party had also been a success in raising money, both in donations and sales of items from the bazaar, drinks, and food. This money was precious to support both the activities that would come in the following months and basic maintenance costs. Now it became possible, for example, to salvage old chests of drawers and movable-type machines from termites; these were put to work in work shops that attracted a young and enthusiastic audience. It was also possible

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FIGURE 5.7 Temporary tattoos on students’ arms at the ESDI Aberta party, February 12, 2017 (Philippe Leon Anastassakis).

now to pay months of salary bonuses for the oldest employee of the school, of whom I spoke at the beginning of this chapter. The revenue from the party was especially important for helping students in need to pay for their public transportation tickets. But the main success of the party was not the money. That very act of collective mobilization brought people together, and that proved to be of value in itself, almost independent of the cause for which it was summoned. After February 12, the day of the party, the situation at the university and the school only got worse. Technical staff were on strike and, to handle some essential tasks, they took turns working in the school, which was quite insufficient. But the mobilization for the party had awakened an inventive power that showed no signs of decline.

OCCUPATION Student initiative and political action were essential to create a basis for keeping the school open and active. One event was especially relevant. It was about a month after the grand opening party for the new gate to Rua do Passeio, when a group of students

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appeared in the director’s office, interrupting a meeting, and told us that they were starting a school occupation. They handed us a document that read: We students of ESDI have decided to start an occupation movement today, March 14, 2017. Due to the systematic delays and defaults of wages, student scholarships, and maintenance costs for UERJ infrastructure, we follow the Forum de Diretores13 in declaring the impossibility of returning to regular activities in the university. At the same time, leaving the university empty imperils the very existence of these spaces. If the academic community fragments, looking for private solutions, we will lose our sense of the collective good. In view of this context, we understand that occupying the campus is an alternative that can foster activities for the creation and sharing of knowledge that is pertinent to the surrounding reality. This being the essence of the university, occupation is our true means to reintegrate the community in defense of public and popular education.14

From the day the new gate was opened, one could already hear, on the Boulevard,15 rumors that the students were considering, still without much certainty, the occupation of ESDI. It was during an event organized by ESDI Aberta, that they decided to occupy. On March 9, 2017, the launch of the magazine Piseagrama [“do step on the grass”] was accompanied by a roundtable about experiences and possibilities of self-management, in which a school was horizontally managed by students and professors. At the same event, the documentary Acabou a paz—isto aqui vai virar o Chile [No more peace—This is going to turn into Chile], by Carlos Pronzato (2017), was projected on the school 13

This directors’ Forum consiste em reuniões regulares onde os diretores de todas as unid ades da UERJ se re ú nem com o Reitor, o Vice-Reitor e pr ó reit ores de Gradua ç ã o; P ó s-gradua ç ã o e Pesquisa; Extens ã o e Cultura; Políticas e Assistência Estudantil; e Saúde. 14 Paolucci, “ESDI Aberta: design e (r)existência na Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial.” 15 Nickname of the cobbled road between the school houses.

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FIGURE 5.8 Mattresses on the classroom floor during student occupation, ESDI, 2017 (Juliana Paolucci).

walls as an attentive audience spread across the lawn. The film showed the uprising of high-school students, who, protesting the closure of almost 100 schools in the state of São Paulo in 2015, started an occupation movement that had great repercussions. The striking example of courage and boldness from these teenage students and the enthusiasm that rose from the subjects discussed at the roundtable were essential for the final decision of ESDI students to occupy the school. In the first- and second-year classrooms, students installed mattresses they had brought from home. There was a heterogeneous dynamic that showed flexibility, informality, and significant multiplicity of needs and motivations. For some, the presence in the occupation was only during the day for working in activities. For others, sleeping at school was an essential condition for them to organize and attend to the many actions that occurred during this period. For veteran students, it was about discovering and exploring new forms of existence within the classroom space of which they knew only the daytime and functional face. For the freshmen, sleeping at school, even before they had any classes, was a fascinating adventure, very different from a first day of normal school, full of fears and insecurities (see Chapter 7).

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There were, indeed, rules. Some came from outside, others from within. For the occupation to happen, it was essential, first of all, that management did not try to suppress the movement. We communicated what was happening to the rector, who instructed us not to promote or encourage the occupation, but left it up to us to decide whether to repress it or not. Zoy and I realized that a dividing line had been reinforced between management and the students, a line that we had been trying hard to blur (see Chapter 4). We understood that the students, at that moment, imposed a certain distance on us, which—we were also informed by the rector—could not be abolished. When someone from school management or even a professor questioned us about that apparent disorder, we asked them to directly address the students, who had our permission to be there. A 10:00 p.m. limit for entering the campus was set. The students delivered a list of names of those who were there to the security guards on a daily basis. They also needed to articulate with the Prefeitura dos Campi [Campus Facilities Office], a university body governing its physical installations. They needed support from this sector to provide and obtain authorization for several interventions demanded by the occupation, such as a gas cylinder for the kitchen. It is very likely that, in times of regular school functioning, these supports would not have been attained. The state of widespread crisis brought this advantage of opening up communications between sectors that were usually scarcely connected, as was the case between the students and the various managers with whom they had to negotiate directly. Regarding internal rules, students decided on most issues as things developed. Are we going to stay the whole week? Only during working days? Who will stay over the weekend? It was necessary to coordinate finances, shop at the supermarket, organize the kitchen, and even to attend to special diets. A wall in the Centro Acadêmico16 was used as an announcements board, and had a list showing the tasks of the day, past events, and even 16

This is the current name of what in 1968 was called the Diretório Acadêmico, cited above, that is, a student’s union. In 2008, the body was renamed Centro Acadêmico Carmen Portinho, in honor of the famous ESDI director.

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desires for activities that might or not materialize. In comparison with the 1968 blackboard (see Chapter 2), which showed a fouryear curriculum grid that faculty members had drawn with impeccable geometry, the students’ calendar in 2017, successively scribbled and erased, was a repository not of plans for posterity, but from past, ongoing, or upcoming experiences: Breakfast at 9:00 a.m.; 1.00 p.m. sewing machine assembly workshop; On the 31st Carol turns 28; 16-hour design and sustainability study group.

Squeezed in a column, a cartoonish thought bubble remembered: buy paper, paint + screws. Below the schedule grid, there were scattered notes with wishes and suggestions for activities to come including: LGBTQIA+ film club; anti-dengue fever taskforce; After Effects course; botanical illustration workshop. Financially, the occupation was maintained with a system of voluntary contributions from those who could afford to meet the needs of those who could not. One student proudly tells me that, during this period, with R$ 7.50 (roughly USD 2.50 at the time), it was possible to pay for one person’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A kitchen had been installed near the new entrance to the school (see Chapter 4), and these students were the first ones to put it to use. Some professors also shared collective lunches, suspending hierarchical barriers. A strong sense of community brought ESDI together during this period. “It felt like an alternate world,” said one student. A domestic logic allowed itself to enter the institutional space, which showed the sense of confidence and welcoming that the students enjoyed in occupying the school premises. With the knowledge of the directors and even of the rector’s office, in addition to the collaboration of security, it could not be said that the movement was of radical opposition to the administrative order, or that it explicitly broke with it. But that did not stop it from stating its positions very clearly and having a strong political presence. Occupation was also a way of bringing the sacrifice of cotistas to attend school into evidence. With their scholarships cut,

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going to school every day was impossible, and the students of the occupation announced that they would guarantee their right to be present through their own administration. There was also an understanding that that acute crisis was, for the cotistas, in fact, only an aggravation of the daily difficulties that they had always faced. The occupation wanted to show the reality of the obstacles imposed daily on that group, and it did. In addition to this basic motivation for the occupation movement, there was also a general awareness that ESDI needed to keep busy to survive the threat of government neglect. In this regard, the students who organized the occupation had a fundamental role in the various fronts of activities opened in this period (see Chapter 5). They made it possible to hold a large number of events: they were the ones who woke up early and installed microphones, they arranged chairs on the lawn for lectures, they kept the school’s security informed, they opened the studios to carry out jobs in woodwork, bookbinding, and printing. Among the daily activities of the occupation, the Colaboratório was one of the liveliest spaces. As mentioned in Chapter 6, Colab, as it became known, was a self-managed space with a hacked inkjet printer, which gave students the possibility to print their work at a low cost. In exchange for this service to the school, the organizing group had the autonomy to act as an informal publisher. Students worked there with enthusiasm, making printed materials that included a wide variety of formats and purposes, from student-made zines with texts and drawings commenting on the turbulent political scenario of that time, to various writings, usually but not always directly connected to the theme of education. An example was the cycle of public lectures, “50 years of Tropicália,” which were later turned into publications. People from the most diverse backgrounds also started going to the Colaboratório. “Some guy was selling poetry books in Lapa [the neighborhood where the school is located] and someone asked: ‘Do you know about ESDI? There is a printer there that prints for 8 to 15 cents per page, it’s a lot cheaper than the copy shop next door.”’ This permeability between the most diverse interests (even if only for the sake of saving money), made the Colaboratório a door through which the local community could

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enter the institutional space. I am reminded here of the time of poet Cacaso in ESDI—he had been brought to the school by students in 1968 (see Chapter 2). As in 1968, not everyone was very happy with the freer and seemingly undisciplined use of institutional space. Classes that dealt with printing processes had used the graphics workshop for years. It is important to note that this space was not always well maintained by professors, and, in 2017, it was far from operating in its full productive capacity. Now, printers stood on box piles, there were papers scattered everywhere, and small notes with instructions for using the printers, as well as a network of clotheslines where silkscreen printing sheets were left to dry, from which we had to dodge so that the ink would not get into our hair. Although appearances gave the opposite impression, this was the exact opposite of sloppiness. However, people started to complain: “I saw a strange guy yesterday near the printing shop, there is a lack of security”; “This graphics workshop is a mess”; “It has to go back to what it was, a space only for students in printing classes.” The occupation and public of Colab were therefore seen as a threat to the balance of regular class routine. But the neglect in which the government had left the school and which caused the suspension of classes had already given rise to the growth and flourishing of spontaneous and unusual relations between the institution and life beyond the school walls. Curiously enough, even though this exchange is one of the functions that national higher education agencies mandate for the universities, this permeability between teaching, research, and community outreach was not recognized and valued there. Regular undergraduate classes resumed at ESDI in April 2017. However, there was still no normalization in wage and scholarship payments, or even in maintenance costs for the bare functioning of academic activities. Administrative technicians were still on strike. In view of this precarious situation, we could not see this as a return to normality. Consequently, student occupation and extracurricular activities went on for some time. In particular, the possibility of sleeping and eating at school for free or at a very low cost, was a fundamental condition for cotis-

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tas to be able to attend the regular classes that were gradually starting again. Thus the organization of the occupation, despite having to leave the first- and second-year classrooms for the return of regular classes, did not give up the space for sleeping over and started to occupy the projection room. The coexistence between the occupation model and normal classes proved to be unfeasible, as it prompted confrontations between the occupants and other sectors of the school. As time went by, some basic operating conditions were restored, without, however, ending the practices initiated and valued by the occupation movement, such as the task forces for cleaning and organizing events, which continued to happen in parallel to the regular classes. With the institution of the “little box,” as will be shown below, cotistas were able to come and go from school without having to sleep over. The kitchen continued to be used for a long time and collective lunches have become a tradition to this day. In any case, we noticed that the mattresses started to disappear from the rooms, the extracurricular activities became less frequent, and, at the beginning of 2018, with the full reinstatement of maintenance, wages, and scholarship payments, the school seemed to have returned to what it was before. The occupation lasted a relatively short period of time, but it was lived with great intensity. In the words of one of the students who helped me in remembering this period, “It lasted some three or four months, but in my memory, an entire school year had passed.” Some questions remained in my head: did the occupation and all the movements of this period leave no mark at all? Could it be that, if the quota policy is ever to be discontinued, ESDI will go back to being a totally elitist school again? The answers I would entertain in my thoughts were skeptical. But the student replied without hesitation: “No, not at all! Many cotistas passed through here. They confron ted profess ors, demanding them to actually look at their living conditions, and to recognize the contributions they brought to transform the school. Today I realize that it is a much more democratic place than, say, when I got in. The experiences are recorded in the way

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the classes are taught, in curriculum changes, in the very understanding of design and of our place within it”!

LITTLE BOX The ESDI Aberta period was one of experimenting with different formats of knowledge sharing. During one entire day, we held several “classes,” debates, and other activities addressing topics voted on by the students, such as “strategic design” or “urban agriculture,” in a modality that we called “ESDIão,” in reference to a long day.17 Many short courses were offered to both ESDI students and external ones, with no pre-selection process. In total, about 200 people attended these activities, in a total of fifteen course offerings. We reserved a number of free places for university students, but the courses were paid and raised significant revenue, which went towards paying the teachers and school maintenance. All of the financial part of the initiative was managed by the association of alumni and friends, Associação de Professores, Ex-alunos e Amigos da ESDI (Aexdi, ESDI Professors, Alumni, and Friends Association), which had been paralyzed for a long time because of legal issues, and which had been reactivated to make donations viable and to promote other activities. With regard to finance, there was, however, an almost imperceptible form of money circulation that deserves mention. This system, for a brief moment, allowed us to glimpse, on a minuscule scale, the utopia of a balanced income distribution. It was inspired by a simple practice, instituted by the students, but which had always struck us as astonishingly inventive. I’m not sure when, but we started to see a small plastic table on the Boulevard, covered with plastic contain ers, such as Tupperware and small cylindrical cans of different sizes. Inside the cans, there was money; inside the packages, pies, brownies, pastries, brigadeiros,18 and even small whole meals. Whoever 17 18

“Ão” being the most common informal augmentative suffix in Portuguese. A sort of chocolate confection, very popular in Brazil.

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wanted to buy something could put the exact amount advertised on sticky labels on the sides of the packaging in the can. Zoy and I always bought one or more brownies every day. Sold by a student, those brownies, made by his mother, were considered a rare delicacy; they gave us intense waves of pleasure at the first bite. We had to buy them before leaving for lunch because, if we waited until after we had returned, there would be no more of them. The amazing thing about this table system was that it required no surveillance or control. No one stood next to the money cans and there was no way to prevent eventual thefts. Even so, the snacks stand worked for a long time without any deficit in the cans regarding the items consumed. It is true that there was one incident of this type, which prompted the immediate mobilization of the students in order to disclose what had happened and request that the missing money be replaced. The group of salespeople went from class to class to explain and emphasize the value of that type of commercial exchange based exclusively on trust. The realization of this mutual trust was what allowed us to create a similar system. With classes suspended indefinitely and with the intermittent payment of their scholarships, cotistas, as mentioned above, were unable to pay for transportation to the school, which, despite the suspension of official activities, was teeming with extracurricular activities produced by the community. To make the attendance of these students possible, we decided to install a little wooden box at the entrance of the reception, on which we glued a piece of A4-paper with the handwritten message: “We want all students at school, learning, teaching, exchanging. Therefore, we are raising funds in this box to finance the transportation of those who need it. If you can’t afford your commute to ESDI, feel free to take some.” In another paper fixed above the first one, it read: “If you can, put some of your money in this box and help us bring more students to ESDI.” As with the food table system on the Boulevard, there would be no surveillance. Whomever was able to afford to donate could deposit any amount, and whomever needed to take some could do so without any constraint. There was no abusive use of this money, which went away little by little, without major withdrawals. When the box was almost empty, we replenished it with the

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money raised through the ESDI Aberta party. But there were days when we realized that, late in the afternoon, there was more money than the amount we had put in in the morning, which showed that people were chipping in anonymously. The strength of this system affirmed mutual trust as something more valuable than the notes and coins inside the box. The importance we attribute to such a fragile and modest arrangement must not be read, of course, as a claim that it should inspire major institutional restructuring. In the course of the various interviews and paper reviews that Zoy and I have gone through concerning this period at ESDI, we always got questions such as: “Where are all the radical experiences”? “Where’s the innovation”? “What is so special about this that calls for expenses in ink, paper, or bytes for publication”? “Where are you going with this”? Questioning and undermining the relevance of these utterances is undoubtedly part of the ambitions of this book. We consciously frustrate—by valuing small, punctual, and sometimes not entirely original achievements—expectations that we provide problem-solving frameworks, such as toolkits intended for use by other schools, professors, and students. The ESDI Aberta party and the activities that followed it were a window that opened and closed, and the experiences lived there are not intended to validate anything other than the experience itself. Therefore, I do not know if there is ever any answer to questions that arise from the yearning (which is understandable in capitalist logic) for tangible and innovative results. The new school gate was, in fact, an admirable achievement, erected on the unstable soil of a severe crisis. But here, we do not privilege the work, the monument, in short, the “product.” Our endeavor is directed at emphasizing the importance of attention to everyday life, in the “for now,” looking around us, seeing who and what is at hand, in each moment, available for the exploration and invention of possibilities. Other less tangible achievements, such as the party, the different formats of classes and educa tional exchanges, the collaborative garden experiments and graphic practices (the latter two are described in detail in Chapter 6), because of their

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transience, they are more easily forgettable. Insisting on recording these achievements emphatically reveals our commitment to accepting and valuing the temporary, the small, as the locus capable of harboring a joy that, if it does not “change everything,” is capable of making living with garbage tolerable, surviving it. After we took over school management, we were forced to face a routine that, as we have been pointing out, constantly switched between two different movements. On the one hand, we fell into bureaucratic loopings caused by paralyzing forces both on the “outside” and the “inside” of the school. On the other hand, we experienced successive postponements and sudden interruptions in routine practices, such as salary payments, basic maintenance, and continuity of school terms. Whether lost in seemingly eternal cycles, or startled intermittently by random cuts, we realized that the new temporality that had been installed no longer allowed the foundations of a present on which a future could be envisioned and planned. Paradoxically, this very disruption in organization standards unveiled powerful collective forces, which had always been there, but had been hidden under the apparent stability of normality.

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Design Research Zoy Anastassakis

In this chapter, I seek to show how research experiments that start in an uncommitted way can turn into academic research that contributes to raising disruptive scientific output in design. Some of the experiences presented here started in a very experimental way during the time when academic activities had been suspended between 2016 and 2017. But they ended up resulting in academic research. Harking back to these experiences, I reflect on how instigating and unsuspected research agendas can emerge, fostering new modes of study in design. In presenting these cases sprung from unexpected collaborations, this chapter shows some of the most fruitful outcomes of the entire process narrated in the book, namely, the relationship between freedom and relevant knowledge making. I approach these experimental actions as seeds for the making of teaching and research environments that encourage students, professors, and researchers to experience other ways of being in the world, based on concrete and situated engagements.

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FIGURE 6.1 Patio between the school’s workshops and library covered with fallen leaves, ESDI, 2016 (Carlos Azambuja).

ESPA Ç OS VERDES Back in 2015, a group of students started to collect the leaves that fell from the more than twenty rubber trees (Ficus Elastica) on the ESDI campus. Planning on creating a space for composting, they gathered the leaves in a part of the land that was out of use, where there were some fruit trees and lots of weeds. To bolster the composting process, they started to bring organic waste from home. They began the work by removing the weeds. They would do this work between classes. Soon after that, they also had a small vegetable garden. Quite informally, they started experimenting with ways to build plant beds, for which they used the school’s materials laboratories. They also started to inquire as to how to create a biodiverse environment in a small area of soil that was very worn out. ESDI caretaker, Mr. Carlos Ferreira dos Santos (Carlinhos), had already been growing some fruit trees in the school grounds for a number of years. The orchard yielded avocados, bananas, passion fruits, papayas, and many other fruits. Thus, Carlinhos promptly joined the group. The group also joined with a doctoral

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FIGURE 6.2 Students prepare part of the school grounds for the installation of the community garden, ESDI, 2016 (Zoy Anastassakis).

student who had been developing projects and research on urban agriculture in favelas.1 More students joined the group, and the planting effort yielded its first harvest: vegetables and greens that were displayed in front of the classrooms, so that they could be purchased, through voluntary contribution, by other students, teachers, or employees. In the same period, another PhD candidate, who was developing materials from organic compounds, approached some of those students to create a material made from kombucha bacterial colonies.2 They carried out a series of experiments on the resulting material, a kind of bacterial leather from which they developed product prototypes, such as a wallet. Thus, little by little, the movement around informal composting and planting activities was also unfolding into formal research. From the start of the process, the interest of those students was not exclusively directed towards the cultivation of the land 1

2

Diego Costa, Projetando para agricultura urbana (Master thesis, Graduate Program in Production Engineering, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2016). Pedro Costa, Pedro Biz, “Cultivando materiais,” Anais, III SPGD (Simpósio de P ó s-Gradua ç ã o em Design) , (Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, 2017).

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itself or into the institutionalization of investigations in masters or doctoral research; they were, first of all, intent on creating a space for experimentation around the cultivation of land at the school. There was no program or project defined a priori, nor was there any central leadership, or even any sort of mentoring. This was a group of design students interested in experiencing what it would be like to grow food compounds and plants in the grounds of a design school, in the heart of a large city. As an outgrowth of his involvement with the activities in the Espaços Verdes (green spaces), one of the students who was a partner in a company specializing in sustainable materials and products, redirected his MA research to that space, investigating the possibilities for developing pieces of furniture, such as lamps and chairs, in trees planted there.3 At the same time, another student in the group, who had finished a master’s dissertation

FIGURE 6.3 Students and alumni work in the community garden, ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

3

Pedro Themoteo, Design Cultivado (Master thesis, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2019).

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FIGURE 6.4 Student shows vegetables harvested in espaços verdes, in front of a classroom, ESDI, 2107 (Zoy Anastassakis).

in communication design, joined the PhD program proposing an investigation on selective rubbish collection for composting in favelas.4 While cultivating the vegetable garden, the group also started to mobilize other students and professors for initiatives around experimenting with the land. For this purpose, they proposed themes that were incorporated into two exercises of product and service design in the undergraduate course. One of them concerned designing agricultural products in urban environments; 4

Pedro Biz, Arranjo Local Penha (Doctoral Qualification paper, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2021).

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the other one was about waste management services, composting, and planting in the city. They also mediated contacts between the school and Ciclo Orgânico (organic cycle), a company (founded by college students) that provided composting services. Through this partnership, the company installed large composters on the campus, thus expanding the collection of leaves and the exchange of knowledge on composting processes. Little by little, the movement around the Espaços Verdes grew into research projects for the conclusion of undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees.5 The group was integrated into the Laboratório de Design e Antropologia (Design and Anthropology Laboratory).6 Some of these students became involved in a partnership with an association from a slum community in Penha, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, developing initiatives on waste management, growing vegetables, and creating seedling plots to bolster the income of locals. Within the scope of actions with the Arranjo Local da Penha,7 they established a partnership with the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia (National Institute of Technology), where they held workshops for prototyping seedling plots with community dwell ers and design students. This part ner ship had several academic results.8

5

6

7

8

I refer here to Camille Moraes, Diego Costa, Flavia Soares, and Pedro Biz’s PhD dissertations; to Pedro Themoteo’s master thesis; and to Miguel Moreira’s graduation final work. LaDA is a research lab coordin ated by myself and by Barbara Szaniecki. For more information on some of the experiments we have been doing at LaDA, see: Zoy Anastassakis, Barbara Szaniecki, “Conversation dispositifs,” in Design Anthropological Futures, edited by Rachel Smith, Kasper Vangkilde, Mette KJaersgaard, Ton Otto, Joachim Halse, Thomas Binder (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 121–38. Also: Zoy Anastassakis, Barbara Szaniecki, “Entremeios,” Transnational Dialogues Journal (European Union, 2015): 34–7. Diego Costa, Pedro Biz, Julio Silva, Ana Santos, “Sementes Urbanas,” Anais do Simpósio de Design Sustentável 2019 (São Paulo: Blucher, 2019): 673–84. Among others, see Camille Moraes, Nutrir com: uma experiência degustativa sobre Design & Saúde (Doctoral dissertation, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2021).

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Over time, the vegetable garden on the school campus ceased to be the central axis of the group’s actions. After the return of academic activities, in mid-2017, students had to return to classrooms and regular research activities. There was also a lack of investments for improv ing the condi tions of exper i ments in the vegetable garden. Thus, in 2019, weeds were burgeoning again in the campus area where, for four years, the numerous espaços verdes activities had been developed. However, the group published papers, describing the research activities carried out in that space, and making some theoretical and methodological proposals9 that resulted from their work on ESDI land. In this movement, they devised the notion of mycelial design, “a speculation about the possibility of a design in conjunction with all forms of life.”10 Despite the suspension of activities in the garden, after 2019, some students developed new projects and research around the Espaços Verdes. Thus, a new cycle of activities based on the work on the school land was outlined, so that the research agenda launched by the group in 2016 would unfold into a series of ongoing investigations.

COLABORAT Ó RIO Another initiative that culminated in teaching and research activities was the reopening of the school’s graphic workshop. When Marcos and I, having just taken over management, invited a group of students to work with us, some of them were charged with surveying the spaces and their uses, considering possibilities of readjustment. They scanned the whole school, listing everything. Many places were closed, long out of use. There was also a large amount of idle equipment. 9

Pedro Themoteo, Pedro Biz, Diego Costa, “Design plantado: questões para desenvolvimento do método,” Anais, III SPGD (Simpósio de Pós-Graduação em Design) (Programa de Pós-Graduação em Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, 2017). 10 Pedro Biz, Diego Costa, Diego, Pedro Themoteo, Flavia Soares, Barbara Szaniecki, Zoy Anastassakis, “Design micelial,” Lugar Comum, n. 53 (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2018).

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One of these places was the graphic workshop, which had a typography, a silkscreen, and several other printing and graphic production machines. This workshop had been closed because the university couldn’t hire a qualified technician to handle such specific machinery, so students had been unable to work in it for years. Right at the beginning of our term, we tried to find out what the requirements were for getting the workshop running again, even without special ized tech nical support. Some professors knew the machines quite well and could train students who were interested. There was also lots of equipment that could be put to work without the support of a professional tech ni cian. Thus we started to consider how it would be possible to reopen the graphic workshop in a safe, albeit improvised way. As we speculated on how to do this, a former student of mine who was a constant informal collaborator at LaDA, spoke of an experience of hers, which consisted of an experimentation with the collaborative management of a studio-residence by a group of young design ers and artists. At Casa 247, the rooms were organized in specialized workshops, such as printing, sewing, painting, carpentry, etc. There, the group had developed a tech nique for hacking inkjet print ers, which cut print ing costs. They printed several zines and books of some young poets and writers. This project was collectively funded and carried out in printing mutirões, in which the group that already worked in the house brought in friends and relatives and trained them. At that time, the group was about to leave the property, so they were looking for another place to house the graphic workshop. Listening to this story, I thought that, by coming to work at ESDI, they could help reactivate our own graphic workshop. I suggested that the group take their machines to the school, and that, in return, they would strive to encourage as many students as possible to use the space. Thus the three persons11 responsible for graphic experimentation in the Casa 247 project installed the 11

André Aranha, Carolina Secco, and Roberta Guizan.

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hacked printers in the ESDI workshop and began to meet regularly to think of things to do there. They were soon joined by two undergraduate students who were already very much involved with the movements that were happening at ESDI: the first one was working on the new ESDI website; the other was developing ESDI’s new visual identity. With time, they identified the equipment and materials that they found there and rearranged the space. They were joined by other young designers and artists, who were not formally linked to the school, but who already had some knowledge on graphic produc tion. Apart from their imme di ate interest in using the workshop, they were trying to find collaborative ways of managing the space, in which uses and knowledge could be shared, without any leaders or oversight. In order for that to happen, they developed a signaling system to make sure that every eventual user would have the means to use the equipment without help or oversight. The space started to be constantly open, since access was granted to anyone willing to abide by the protocol that was gradually established. They named this initiative the Colaboratório. For about three years, students, young graphic artists, writers, and poets gathered there. They worked on an array of graphic and editorial experiments. One day, a freshman undergraduate organ ized, by herself, in one after noon, the movable types that had been in a mess for years. We used part of the funds raised at the gate opening party (see Chapter 5) to clean up the furniture that stored the types, so that after some meetings with a professor and a doctoral student who taught them how to make prints with movable types, we could use them to print book covers and zines. The screen printing machine was also repaired, and there were experiments with printing on paper and fabric. Some students donated sewing machines to the studio. There were also several sewing and bookbinding workshops. On Fridays, the graphic workshop was crowded with poets and street zine makers, who would print material to sell in the many bars of Lapa, a bohemian neighborhood in the city center right next to the school.

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FIGURES 6.5, 6.6 and 6.7 Collaborations between students and outside partners in the occupation of the graphic workshop, ESDI, 2016–2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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FIGURE 6.8 Mutirão for production of editorial projects, ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

WHEN LIFE SPILLS OVER RESEARCH The former student who had brought the graphic experiences of the studio-residence to ESDI, signed up for the graduate program proposing to do research on the Colaboratório experience.12 Also by that time, another MA student decided to change her research theme to report on all the activities carried out at ESDI during the suspension of academic activities, between 2016 and 2017.13 This work was very important in recording the events narrated in this book. Along with the thesis by one of the students involved in the Espaços Verdes project, which investigated ways of composing pieces of furniture in living trees,14 these works integrate an 12

Roberta Guizan Silva, Colaboratório (Master thesis, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2019). 13 Juliana Paolucci, ESDI Aberta: design e (r)existência na Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Master thesis, Programa de Pó s-Graduaç ã o em Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2018). 14 Pedro Themoteo, Design Cultivado (Master thesis, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2019).

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important academic record of part of the initiatives that we try to deal with in this book. Sometime later, another MA student made a thesis in which he thought of ways of turning the kind of work developed during the ESDI Aberta project into formal community outreach activities, seizing on the recent tendency of integrating outreach hours (which are now officially mandated for Brazilian public universities) into the curriculum.15 In parallel, two other students, who became ESDI alumni in recent years, directed their MA and PhD research to the academic and professional production of the cotistas.16 Not only students were redirecting their research to investigate our experiences at ESDI. Like them, Marcos and I started to shift our attention, as design researchers, to what was happening around us at the school.17 In mid-2017, as I rode the bus to ESDI, I received an email from Tim Ingold inviting me to participate in a collective book that he would edit with Julien Dugnoille. The book was organized around the notion of “living together,” and they proposed that I contribute to a session on “architectural symbiosis.” When I arrived at the school, I met the student taskforce of the professor specializing in termitology who was responsible for cleansing campus facilities. As it had already happened sometime recently, he showed me a piece of window that had been devoured by termites. In these meetings, he made vivid descriptions of the lives of these insects, which inhabit the underground,

15

Victor Silva, Cotidianos e escre viv ê ncias sobre a curricular iza ç ã o da extensão universitária na ESDI/UERJ (Master Thesis, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2021). 16 Jonathan Nunes de Souza, Jovens negros entre a arte e o design (Master project, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2021). Ima í ra Medeiros, A pol í tica afirm ativa e a ESDI (Doctoral qual i fic a tion paper, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2021). 17 The resulting publications are listed in the Bibliography.

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and reach the surface boring through trees. After that, they spread out looking for cellulose, which they could find everywhere in the old school building, as it was full of damp and weathered wood. On their way, the termites gnawed at doors, walls, windows, tables, and chairs, leaving, wherever they went, tunnels that formed a complex road network. I soon realized that the ESDI campus was going through a process of architectural symbiosis. On a certain level, it was performed by termites, trees, and buildings; on another, by an academic community trying to find ways to resist precarity. I imagined that I could use this contrast between these multiple performances to discuss what happened at our school, in the terms proposed by Ingold and Dugnoille. To present these ideas, I sent them an abstract, to which I attached the material of some students of mine who were documenting the movement in the school at that time. Then, I started writing, back in the middle of 2017, in the eye of the storm. Marcos and I had been documenting what went on at the school for some time, as advisors to the MA student who was recording the activities around the ESDI Aberta initiative. In our meetings with her, we commented on two issues that seemed crucial and complementary to us: first, the importance of documenting what had been happening at the school; and second, the need, we felt, to make what was happening at ESDI become part of our own research. This was not only important for the institution or for design research; it was vital for our own survival: could we manage to transform what we were living into producing knowledge in design? Otherwise, as the school’s chairs and tables, we would be devoured by everything that passed through us. And, devoured, we would no longer be able to continue researching, teaching, and directing the school. We had no alternative, then, but to make that experience also a matter of investigation. To think with the situations as we lived them. And to make this investment the subject matter of our research. Still in 2017, we received another invitation, which allowed us to deepen this research investment. Frederico Duarte, a design researcher and curator in Portugal who had been conducting

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FIGURES 6.9 and 6.10 Installation featur ing the ESDI Aberta move ment in the exhib i tion organ ized by Frederico Duarte, Lisbon, 2017 (Juliana Paolucci).

field research on contemporary design in Brazil for some time,18 invited us to participate, as representatives of ESDI, in the exhibition “Como se pronuncia design em português: Brasil hoje” (How to Pronounce Design in Portuguese: Brazil Today), organized by himself in the Museu do Design e da Moda, in Lisbon. Together 18

Frederico Duarte, The Contemporary Challenge of Curating Brazilian Design (Unpublished PhD thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK, 2021).

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with a group of students and teachers who were already involved in the movement at the school, we started meeting to prepare our contribution to the exhibition, in which we presented an installation collecting the living memory of what happened at ESDI at that time. Frederico also organized a seminar on ESDI at the Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa. The event “A ESDI nos (pre)ocupa” (ESDI (pre)occupies us) was aimed at showcasing ESDI’s past and legacy, discussing the teaching of design in contemporary Brazil and in Portuguese-speaking countries. We obtained funding to participate in the event accompanied by two of the student leaders of the ESDI Aberta move ment. 19 Another undergraduate student who was among the students most engaged in working with the director’s office in decisionmaking processes, also participated.20 Still in Lisbon, we were invited to write a text21 about the situation at ESDI for Londonbased Eye Magazine. On that trip, we also went to Spain and Croatia, where we presented ESDI’s situation in schools and scientific design meetings. At that time, realizing the international interest in what we were going through was essential for us to gather a little more strength to survive after almost two years in the midst of the storm. A few months later, in April 2018, I had the opportunity to spend some time as a guest researcher on the project “Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design,” coordinated by Tim Ingold, at the University of Aberdeen. On that occasion, I was accompanied by two other students.22 In Aberdeen, I resumed writing my piece on the architectural symbiosis at ESDI,23 and started to prepare a second text, this time about our experiences collaborating with Indigenous artists and

19

Jonathan Nunes de Souza and Juliana Paolucci. See note 1 of Chapter 4. 21 Zoy Anastassakis, Marcos Martins, “Smoke signals from Brazil,” Eye, The International Review of Graphic Design, v. 24 (London, 2018): 14–15. 22 Maria Cristina Ibarra and Daniel Rocha. 23 Zoy Anastassakis, “Remaking everything,” Vibrant v. 16 (Brasília: Associação Brasileira de Antropologia, 2019): 1–19. 20

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researchers (see Chapter 7).24 The two texts were originally published in English, and, after that, I collected them in a small book, edited in Portuguese,25 which I finished during the sabbatical period I spent in Lisbon, shortly after we had left school management by the end of 2018. In March 2019, Marcos and I were invited to participate in an international parliament of design schools, within the framework of the Bauhaus centennial commemorations in Dessau, Germany. On that occasion, we were accompanied by another undergraduate student who had an important role during our term in management.26 I had just arrived in Lisbon with my family for a sabbatical year. At Bauhaus, our story was enthusiastically received by members of other schools and educational projects who were taking part in that meeting on the future of design education. These days were intense in the sharing of unorthodox experiences. I was very encouraged in realizing that Bauhaus Dessau had dedicated part of its centennial commemorations to bringing together people who were trying to teach design in unconventional ways. The invitation to this meeting on contemporary and unorthodox educational experiments, combined with a proposal to think about design education from these spaces of experimentation, happening in such an iconic place for the history of design education . . . it all had a strong effect on me. Being there, experiencing these meetings, brought a little more meaning to what we had gone through over the past three years at ESDI. A kind of breath of relief, perhaps hope. And joy. A few months after the trip to Germany, I was invited to participate in an international meeting of design education insti-

24

Zoy Anastassakis, “Redesigning design in the pluriverse” in Design Struggles, edited by Claudia Mareis, Nina Paim (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), 169–86. 25 Zoy Anastassakis, Refazendo Tudo (Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro: Zazie Edições, 2020). 26 Marcos and I were joined by Lucas Nonno and Juliana Paolucci in a conversation with Jilly Traganou, which was originally published in Design and Culture magazine in 2019, and reprinted afterwards in the 2021 book The Design of Dissent.

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tutions. This time the meeting was held in the Northern region of a Northern European country. Once again, I presented the ESDI Aberta initiative. This time, the reaction of fellow design school administrators was quite different. One of the people present immediately reacted to my speech, saying that she was not there to hear sad stories, since she came from a very violent country, and the last thing she expected was to hear stories like that at an academic event . . . Another person asked if, with my presentation, I was expecting to get some kind of help for the school. I replied that I was not there to tell a sad story, nor to ask for help, but, rather, to share a real case of a design school that, in my view, posed questions that were pertinent to design education and research today. In that sense, I under stood my contribution at that meeting as an invitation to reflect on what a design school could be. But no one seemed interested in exploring what, in our story, pointed to a debate about design practices, educational approaches, and theories. Instead, my colleagues at that working group chose to put me in the role of a killjoy.27

27

I refer here to the concept of “killjoy” as developed by Sara Ahmed.

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Impasses and Correspondences Zoy Anastassakis

CORRESPONDENCES 1 WITH INDI GEN OUS ARTISTS AND RESEARCH ERS One of the actions that remained in the Espaços Verdes (see Chapter 6) consisted of a partnership with two Indigenous anthropologists living in Rio, for installing an Indigenous vegetable garden at ESDI. Francy Baniwa and Sandra Benites were already our partners in the extension project that I had coordinated since 2017, promoting rapprochements with Indigenous artists and researchers at the school.2 However, as in the case of the Espaços Verdes, which was organized in a rather informal basis, this project did not result from a predetermined program, but, rather, from the confluence of movements which, because of their intensity, ended up unfolding into 1

2

The title of this project was inspired by Tim Ingold’s notion of “correspondence” (Ingold, 2016, 2020). ESDI students Giulia Cezini, Ilana Paterman Brasil, Julia Sá Earp, Marina Sirito, and Samia Batista were involved in this project, among others.

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FIGURE 7.1 Guarani Ñandeva anthropologist and curator Sandra Benites presents her proposals for an Indigenous vegetable garden at ESDI, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

FIGURE 7.2 Laborat ó rio de Design e Antropologia (Design and Anthropology Laboratory) research ers meeting with Indi gen ous anthro po lo gists Francy Baniwa and Sandra Benites, ESDI, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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academic activities, thus impacting the fields of teaching, research, and community outreach. In early 2017, I was approached by two former students who were returning to ESDI as MA candidates.3 Both worked as designers at the Museu do Í ndio, the only Brazilian insti tu tion exclusively dedicated to safeguarding Amerindian ethnographic collections, linked to the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) and to the Ministry of Justice. The museum had been closed to the public since July 2016, because of renovation works to prevent and fight fires, which, barely after starting, were interrupted because of insufficient funding. The “technical” issue—adapting the collection and the building to security standards—was mixed up with political contingency, because the federal agencies responsible for the museum had for some time been headed by political operatives linked to agribusiness, who were, therefore, sworn enemies of Indigenous peoples and interests. Faced with this difficult situation, the museum was seeking to increase institutional liaisons with other educational and research entities. At the Museu do Índio, these ESDI MA students were conducting expographic and editorial projects for scientific and cultural divulgation, and also making didactic and paradidactic materials destined for Indigenous schools. The museum also undertook research and projects, and promoted dissemination actions in non-Indigenous schools. Thus, there were a number of design issues that could be addressed by our students, in prospective collaborations between the two institutions. After an initial conversation with museum staff, we decided to start this institutional approach process gradually, because we understood that, before coming up with an action program, we had to identify the possible synergies between the museum’s demands, potential school interests, and Indigenous issues at stake.

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Simone Melo, Projeto de exposi ç õ es e Cultura Ind í genas (Master thesis, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2016). Priscilla Moura, A produção de material didático para escola indígena (Master thesis, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2018).

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To start things off, we organized a series of seminars, which were deliberately informal. However, we soon altered our initial plans, considering a suggestion that proved to be fundamental for carrying out that, which at first, looked like an institutional rapprochement between ESDI and the Museu do Índio. Upon learning of our conversations with the museum, an anthropology student from the Terena and Kadiwéu nations, Idjahure Kadiwel, suggested that we should not only bring researchers (from the Museu do Índio) and white anthropologists to ESDI, but that we should invite Indigenous researchers and artists as well. Having fully embraced this idea, we decided to invite Indigenous artists and researchers to their first seminars. Despite the fact that the Indigenous population in Rio is relatively small, the number of Indigenous students at universities in Brazil has grown over the last decade; meanwhile, a scene of contemporary Indigenous art was also consolidating. These movements ended up bringing many Indigenous artists and researchers to the city. The Museu do Índio also brought together many Indigenous researchers in its projects and research initiatives, so that we quickly managed to contact and secure the participation of filmmaker Alberto Álvares, anthropologist and art curator Sandra Benites, and artists Daiara Figueroa, Denilson Baniwa, and Jaider Esbell in the first meetings. Around that time, I participated in a debate promoted by the company Tucum, which works to foster the development, distribu tion, and commerce of arti facts produced by Indi gen ous communities in Brazil. One of the speakers was the architect and visual artist Wally Kamayurá, who lives in the Parque Nacional do Xingu (Xingu National Park). After the event, Wally and his companion Ynê Kuikuro talked to one of my former students, commenting on their interest in studying design. I approached the group and invited them to visit ESDI. With two of their children, Wally and Ynê spent the next day with us at the school, getting to know our laboratories and workshops, and interacting with professors and students. From our conversations on that day, several ideas for future collaborations emerged. Wally specializes in building Xingu houses, huge structures that house several families. He knows

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FIGURE 7.3 Wally Kamayur á paints a student’s arm. On the right, Ynê Kuikuro and the couple’s children, ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

Kamayurá drawing techniques in depth and also paints murals, while Ynê makes body ornaments with beads. Visiting ESDI, they considered returning for an extended stay with us, so we envisioned a design residency project for Indigenous artists and researchers like them. Ynê was interested in learning about silkscreening, a printing technique still unknown in Xingu. She imagined all the products she could develop combining screen printing and beads. Wally was excited about research possibilities in the rapid prototyping and 3D printing laboratory, for making small-scale prototypes that could be used in the workshops for building Xingu houses, which he taught to non-Indigenous architecture students. Like Ynê, he was also considering the possibilities of experimentation and graphic production around Kamayurá graphics. In order to formalize these proposals, I registered an outreach project with the university. One month later, in the Reunião de Antropologia da Ciência e da Tecnologia (Symposium of Anthropology of Science and Technology), at Universidade de São Paulo, that same Indigenous anthropologist that had suggested that I invite Indigenous researchers to come to the school introduced me to Prof. Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, a pioneering figure in the Indigenous contemporary art movement in Brazil. On that occasion, I commented

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on the initiatives we had been trying to promote at ESDI, and invited Ibã to visit the school. He introduced me to Amilton Mattos, professor at the Universidade Federal do Acre, his advisor in the interethnic undergraduate course at the Universidade Federal do Acre, who became an important collaborator of the Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (Huni Kuin Artists Movement, MAHKU), founded by Ibã. MAHKU stood out in the movement of Indigenous contemporary art in Brazil, both for the innovations it promoted in figurative practices of the Huni Kuin people, and also for the ways in which it promoted artistic activities among young people in the Huni Kuin community of the Jordão River, in Acre, a state in the Amazon region. In recent years, MAHKU has promoted a number of art and perception workshops in museums, art centers, and universities throughout Brazil and around the world. Accompanying MAHKU, Amilton had produced two documentaries4 on Ibã’s work with the young Huni Kuin. Taking advantage of a quick trip from Ibã and Amilton to Rio, we arranged for one of these films to be exhibited at ESDI. After the session, we held a debate with an anthropologist specializing in Huni Kuin art, Elsje Lagrou. The exhibition took place outdoors on the newly opened school lawn, and the night ended with Ibã inviting us to form a circle. Hand in hand, we danced to the sound of him singing some of the ritual music of his people, the songs of Nixi Pae. Excited about the possibility of getting closer to the work that Ibã had been doing, we agreed to organize his return to ESDI. He was to teach in an art and perception workshop that would unfold into two, one on singing, the other on visual experimentation. Luckily for us, Ibã returned to the school two more times. For his first visit, in October 2017, he stayed for one week. In the mornings, he participated in undergraduate activities, in the course we set up in partnership with the Museu do Índio; in the afternoons, he taught a visual experimentation workshop, for about twenty attendees, which included ESDI professors and students, as well as people from outside the school; finally, in 4

Amilton Mattos, “O esp í rito da floresta” (2012); “O sonho do Nixi Pae. O movimento dos artistas Huni Kuin,” 2015.

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the evening, we held a singing workshop with about thirty attendees. A few months later, during his second visit, Ibã returned to ESDI for another workshop on visual experimentation. The workshops fostered non-Indigenous rapprochements with Huni Kuin ways of seeing. It was, therefore, an experimental laboratory with images, but, above all, a practical investigation on seeing. Like many of the Amazonian Indigenous peoples, the Huni Kuin developed very sophisticated “vision machines,”5 which can be defined as “devices created or used to alter perception. The idea of visual here is the same as that of visionary, vision, or miração [looking].”6 In the first two days of the workshop, Ibã introduced us to the visionary universe of Nixi Pae, which articulates that people’s visionary perception. Nixi Pae is the Huni Kuin word for the ayahuasca drink. However, in art and perception workshops, such as those carried out at ESDI, Ibã invites us to visit the Huni Kuin visionary culture in other ways, without drinking ayahuasca. Thus, in the proposed activities, he dissociates the ingestion of ayahuasca from the visionary experience, encouraging us to activate our abilities of miração through other means, such as the narration of myths, music, dance, and visual experimentation. In the first part of the workshop, we investigated ways of seeing sound, which is one of the hallmarks of visionary activity among the Huni Kuin. All of the exercises proposed at that stage were intended to awaken the participants’ ability to glimpse and make the Huni Kuin myths that Ibã was singing into images. Thus, Ibã sang in his native language, Hãtxa Kuin, but also narrated, in Portuguese, the myth of Huni Kuin’s origin that was the subject of the songs. He then invited us to re-enact a scene from the myth in which a tapir invokes the boa-constrictor-woman, throwing three genipap fruits into a lake. After playing with the water, we joined the Huni Kuin collective dance-song, this time, around

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Amilton Mattos, “Máquinas de visão,” Revista Metamorfose, v. 3, n. 1 (setembro de 2018): 49–72. Amilton Mattos, “The Visionary Art of MAHKU.” Chacruna (October 2019). Amilton Mattos, “Máquinas de visão.”

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the Huni Kuin fertility ritual, the Katxa Naua. We left the classroom, dressed in leafy clothes, and recreated the ritual that the Huni Kuin perform to celebrate the arrival of the vegetable spirits, the yuxin, responsible for the fertility of their gardens. For the Huni Kuin, the confluence between music and the rhythmic movement of bodies carries a visionary potential for altering perception, initiating the process of visualization, that is, a cinematic mental experience triggered by singing and dancing, which they call miração in Portuguese. Encouraged by these exper i ences, we painted and drew the sounds of the songs

FIGURE 7.4 and 7.5 Professor Ib ã Sales Huni Kuin during one of the art and perception workshops he taught at ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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performed by Ibã and, also, what we glimpsed during the experi ence of meeting with the yuxin. So this first moment was organized around an immersion in the synesthetic experience, a striking feature of Huni Kuin culture and aesthetic. In the second part of the workshop, we combined Huni Kuin visual experimentation with research carried out at Laboratório de Design e Antropologia (LaDA), in collaboration with the occupation of ESDI’s graphic workshop, which included making animation films with “rudimentary” techniques, and graphic and editorial experiments. As a result, each participant developed a prototype of an animated book, or flip book, in which, with very simple tools, we recreated the relationships between image, movement, and rhythm that we had experienced during the workshop. As Amilton Mattos pointed out, what we did in this workshop was, above all, an approach to visual experimentation as a vision machine that is not in service of representation, but, rather, of synesthetic experience itself. Thus, listening, singing, dancing, drawing, and painting were the constituent elements of an immersion whose purpose was the cultivation of attention to the possibilities of intensifying or expanding perception that can be activated by collective encounters and engagement. While attending Ibã’s classes, I relived the classes in “visual perception studies,” “means and methods of representation,” and “visual methodology” I had taken in my first year on the ESDI design course, which at first, just like at Ulm and at the Bauhaus, was labeled a preliminary course. In completely distinct ways and means, those classes seemed very closely related. We were encouraged to make drawings, with the main objective of learning how to see. Now, as a professor and a design researcher, I ponder about the mysterious links between the classes taught by Ibã Sales Huni Kuin and those taught by some ESDI professors, such as Silvia Steinberg and Roberto Eppinghaus. Dealing with these mysteries helps me consider, from different perspectives, something that has intrigued me ever since I first joined ESDI as a student: standard practices in a design school classroom mark a very stark contrast between education in design and conventional education. In other words, in a design school, we are invited to experience other ways of learning. Very

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seldom as an ESDI student did I attend lecture-type classes where students would sit still as a professor stood up and spoke from a distant position. For the most part, our classroom experiences would involve groups of people doing things together, big collective desks, lots of drawing, scale models, lots of conversation, and, above all, lots of motion. But going back to my initial ponderings on the history of ESDI (see Chapter 1), now I can think with those mysteries in a different way: if even today one can still sense, at all times, the ambivalent presence of the Ulm School within our school, in Rio, why is it that the visit of a professor from the Amazon Forest was what brought me back, not necessarily to Ulm, but to other even more remote places, such as Dessau and Weimar? Mysteriously, Ibã’s classes led me to revisit the first moments I ever experienced as a design student, and they suddenly transported me to the classes of the preliminary course at Bauhaus and HfG Ulm, whence some possible distant relat ives of ours, design ers, may have laid the ground work that binds our school to a certain heritage. If we take the HfG Ulm to be ESDI’s closest direct ancestor—its “mother”—and the Bauhaus—its “grandmother,”—in Ibã’s chanting, then, I was hearing the calling of this grandmother. In 2019, however, as seen in Chapter 6, I finally had the chance to visit the old Bauhaus premises in Dessau. As I set foot in that place, I immediately recalled the classes by Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, Silvia Steinberg, and Roberto Eppinghaus. No sooner than I had those classes and professors in mind, my thoughts turned to Johannes Itten. I tried to find something about him and his classes at the bookshop, but was left empty-handed. I kept walking around the building, thinking about Weimar, Dessau, Ulm, Rio de Janeiro, and Acre, and the mysterious ties of kinship that perhaps, who knows, might bind us together. A little bit earlier, in 2018, we held a seminar at ESDI that expanded our conversations with Indigenous researchers and leaders beyond the Brazilian context. On that occasion, we received an Indigenous communication activist and researcher who came from the Nasa and Misak nations in the Cauca region of Colombia, Vilma Almendra, and also a couple of leaders from her community

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who were under death threats because of their political activities for Indigenous autonomy amid the escalation of armed conflicts in that region. In addition to them, there was another Indigenous leader coming from Bahia, in Northeastern Brazil, who, just as Ibã had done, invited us to form a circle to dance and sing. In the circle we commented on our final impressions of the discussions of that meeting. The poignant presence of these Indigenous leaders at the seminar had a huge impact on all of us, professors, students, and guests who took part in the event. How many worlds were being put together in these encounters? Many. And that was a big deal.

FIGURE 7.6 Two leaders of the Nasa people of Colombia during the seminar “Indigenous Struggles, Good Living, and the Crisis of the Notion of Development,” held at ESDI, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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AT THE MUSEU DO Í NDIO Let’s return now to the partnership between ESDI and the Museu do Índio. As I have mentioned before, we must note that, like ESDI, from 2016, with the intensification of the political crisis in the country, the museum was in a situation of acute financial and institutional fragility. Therefore, at that time, working alongside the museum also meant an association between these two institutions’ resistance efforts. However, we were aware that acting in the museum was not the same as acting with or on behalf of Indigenous peoples. Assessing any design project in that situation therefore implied a critique of the conditions, limits, and possibilities for design actions, so that they could engage and be committed not only to institutions, but, above all, to the issues affecting the interests of those for and with whom they were designed. For that reason, once again, it was essential to be in constant dialogue with Indigenous researchers and artists, such as Alberto Álvares, Denilson Baniwa, Francy Baniwa, Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, and Sandra Benites. These conversations were instigating us to open up time and space to debate broader issues that brought about a kind of suspension in usual design practice, in which we are led to provide answers in the form of design projects. Allowing ourselves to refrain from providing answers that come from planning and projecting activities, we were able to pose different questions at each meeting with the museum’s teams. In doing so, we reconsidered our ways of acting as designers, and, at the same time, we were trying to change the perception around the role of design in that institution. In the midst of this process, we opened new dialogues with museum staff, who were already used to working with professional designers, so that, together, we could speculate on what else, apart from formulating projects, a group of designers could do in a place like that. At our first meeting, the museum’s director, anthropologist Carlos Levinho, showed me a work of communication design that investigated the visual relationships between Indigenous graphic art and the shapes found in animal skins. With this example, he sought to illustrate the kinds of collaborations he imagined

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we could pursue in the partnership between ESDI and the museum. At that time, they had just signed an agreement with the Google Arts platform to display expographic and audiovisual content. Coincidentally, the work that he presented to me had been done by one of ESDI’s professors, who was, at the time, the school’s undergraduate studies coordinator.7 Soon, he joined us in planning the partnership between ESDI and the museum. We decided to propose a design studio class, which brought together undergraduates and graduate students. This class comprised around fifty students and took place over two academic semesters. Classes took place twice a week, once at school, and once in a specially desig nated classroom at the museum. There, we had quick access to spaces and teams respons ible for differ ent museum sectors, such as ethnographic collections, the museum library, education,

FIGURE 7.7 Filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro visits one of the classes given by Zoy and Ricardo Artur Carvalho at the Museu do Í ndio, Rio de Janeiro, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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Ricardo Artur Carvalho, Grafismo Ind í gena (Final project in Industrial Design. Major in Visual Communication. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2003).

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communication, research, etc. There, too, we had the opportunity to interact with several other researchers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. The proposal was not the development of any specific type of design project, but rather the prototyping of a design laboratory inserted in a concrete environment, in which, based on their presence in situ, students could get in touch with the partner institution’s staff, in order to investigate possibilities for proposing future design actions. Thus, there were no predefined guidelines or briefings. What mattered here was that, thanks to our day-today presence in the museum, we were identifying design issues that could inform future actions, which did not have to be carried out necessarily. Our commitment had to do with this: more than developing or delivering something specific, the most important thing about this experience was the environment of the design laboratory that we created from the interactions between us, professors, and students of ESDI, and the teams of the Museu do Índio. Our goals for the first semester were: 1) for each group of students to explore the possibilities and integrate into a museum team with which they would collaborate; 2) that they survey the design issues pertinent to those teams; 3) that they devise design proposals to be carried out in the following semester; 4) that, individually, or in pairs, they write papers that could articulate the readings and experiences of that semester. At the end of the first period, they presented their research and proposals to a panel formed by the two professors responsible for the course, the museum’s director, the research coordinator at the museum, anthropologist Thiago Oliveira, and artist and designer Denilson Baniwa. During the second semester, new groups were formed, and students started to develop the proposals from the previous semester alongside the museum teams. Once again, we were not so much inter ested in the end results, but, rather, in the process of build ing rela tionships,  that  is, in the envir on ment of a cooper at ive design laboratory. We were committed to encouraging students to foster dialogue and cooperation, which would not be built from their position

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FIGURE 7.8, 7.9 and 7.10 Student project presentations at the Museu do Índio, Rio de Janeiro, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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FIGURE 7.11 Sided by Amilton Mattos, Ibã Sales Huni Kuin speaks to ESDI students on the course in partnership with the Museu do Índio, ESDI, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

as “designers,” that is, as service providers, but rather as partners on design issues. The most vital thing was, then, the engagement with the museum staff, not in order to meet institutional demands, but to have a glimpse with them in how to foster collaborations. The investment in conversations with the teams was a fundamental condition for the continuity of the work. Throughout the two semesters at the Museu do Índio, students had the opportunity to interact with many Indigenous researchers and artists. These meetings were remarkable for the class, and fostered an array of fundamental debates, in ways I had never experienced in a classroom before. In the first semester, in addition to the design studio classes, we taught the same students another course, in which we proposed exercises on visual experiments based on reading and discussing anthropological texts dealing with Indigenous issues. It seemed important to us that the students initially got in touch with a certain anthropological literature so as to provide them with a basis from which they could elaborate, in an anthropologically informed way, on the encounters and experiences they would experience at the museum. Each week, we suggested readings to which each student should respond with an image. In the classroom, we would put the works together on a large table and analyze them in light of

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FIGURE 7.12 Guided tour with the curator of the exhibition “Dja Guata Porã” Sandra Benites, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

what we had read. We were thus able to link the reading of anthropological texts, with which our students were not familiar, with visual experiments that they were used to make. In addition to the readings, we received classroom visits from Indigenous researchers and artists, such as Denilson Baniwa, Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, and Alberto Álvares, who ended up establishing a regular relationship with some students whose exercises dealt with issues related to Guarani people. We also went to the Museu de Arte do Rio (Rio Museum of Art) for a guided tour of the “Dja Guata Porã” exhibit, which addressed contemporary Indigenous presence in Rio de Janeiro. On that occasion, we were accompanied by one of the curators of the exhibition, Guarani anthropologist Sandra Benites. In the midst of these experiences, some questions emerged that we tried to address in the process: like many of us in Brazil, the students who took the course at the Museu do Índio were not fully aware of how Indigenous peoples live today. Upon real iz ing their aston ish ment at the sudden aware ness of the contemporary Indigenous presence in Brazil, we decided to extend the time for them to get more familiar with introductory materials to Indigenous issues. This led us to modify our initial course plan.

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AFRO-INDIGENOUS CONFLUENCES 8 When the students realized the gravity of the violence that has affected Indigenous peoples since the beginning of European colonization in the Americas, some of them also began to talk about their own different positionalities. Sometimes, this process manifested itself in an extremely intense way: in discussing the human rights violations that affect marginalized populations in the country, and, consequently, in the university environment, some Black and other cotista students ended up bringing their own life stories to these debates in the classroom. In one of these classes, students gathered around the table on which they had placed self-portraits produced from reading the essay “Os Involuntários da Pátria,” by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.9 Some of them shared stories in which they identified themselves as victims of discrimination, and racial and social prejudice. One of these students had made a self-portrait in oil pastel, in which she appeared in dark green, holding a handful of brownish earth close to her chest. By that time, we had already commented on almost 8

9

Here, I refer to Afro-Indigenous relationships, as defined by anthropologist Marcio Goldman: “more as a modality of relation than as the denomination of an empir ical reality where one could distin guish what would be Afro, what would be Indigenous, and what would be the result of their mixture— or which would not be any of them” (Goldman, 2018, 3). By “confluence,” I mean the principle according to which, following Quilom bola leader and thinker Antonio Bispo dos Santos, “not everything that comes together mixes” (Santos, apud Goldman, 2018, 13). With that, I intend to remind something that is crucial in the proposals of Bispo and Goldman, as it was in the stories reported here: what we notice in the meetings between AfroBrazilian and Indi gen ous peoples are “visions that do not presup pose homogeneity as the horizon for the interaction between differences. Visions that do not proceed as if the combin a tion of elements of diverse origins should neces sar ily end up either in syncretic confu sion or erosive homogen iz a tion. Rather, these visions proceed by means of a modu la tion of diversity in which in the coexistence of different elements there are levels at which they actually combine, but also levels where they remain in some way distinct” (Goldman, 2018, 2). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Os involuntários da pátria. Elogio do subdesenvolvimento,” Chão da feira, Caderno de Leituras, n. 65, 2017.

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everyone’s work. However, she had not yet taken part in the debate. I then asked her to introduce herself. She apologized, saying that she was not sure that she had the emotional conditions to present her work. She removed the work from the table, clutching it against her chest and facing her colleagues. Then she told her story and linked it to the issues raised in the text. In this article, Viveiros de Castro argues that Indigenous peoples are those who recognize and claim their belonging to the land where they live and where they come from. However, as he points out, this is not a claim to the ownership of any particular piece of land. Quite differently, what the peoples who belong to the land demand, is the possibility of continuing to live in the lands whence they came. In colonial enterprises, this becomes the subject of violent disputes, since the establishment of colonies consists precisely in the destitution and displacement of those who originally lived in certain territories. By assaulting land hitherto inhabited by native peoples, the invaders—the colonists—then become the self-appointed owners of the land in question. In colonial contexts, then, land ownership necessarily relies on the coercion, expulsion, or extermination of Indigenous peoples. That student said that, as she was reading the text, she realized how much she lacked a place of her own—she felt like she belonged nowhere. Not to Brazil, where she lived, nor to her place of birth, in another South American country, where her family had come from. Her parents, university professors, lived in São Paulo. She had moved to Rio to study at ESDI. She lived alone. And she had no friends. Listening to her testimony, many started to cry. Gradually, other students raised their hands, asking for their turn to share similar stories of displacement and unbelonging. Among them, a Black student who declared herself to be upper middle class, and who revealed that she had always felt a strange discomfort, which she did not know how to name. When reading the text, she finally realized that this annoyance had to do with racism, which had manifested in a veiled way throughout her entire life, leaving a latent mark that she had not been able to voice until then.

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IMPASSES After listening to some of these testimonials, I tried to bring the session to a close. I was hoping for a cue to allow me to resume, in a calm and reassuring way, the discussion of the themes originally proposed for that day. When I finally managed to conclude the class, another student approached me, very timidly, asking if she could follow me. I said yes. When we left the classroom, she started to cry. The school corridor was full of people. I was concerned about her privacy, so I proposed that we go to the director’s office, where it would be quieter. She sat on the couch, and I sat in the armchair facing her. Soon after that, the student who had cried while presenting her work during class entered the room. We stayed there for some time, the three of us. She couldn’t stop crying. In the following days, I met a few more times with the student who approached me at the end of the class. In our first meetings, she repeatedly sat on the couch in the director’s office, crying. And I remained seated, in the armchair facing her. After meeting her a few times, we engaged in a sort of conversation, until I ended up inviting her to participate in a research project I was coordinating, which would give us more time to interact and would grant her a scholarship. We have never lost contact since. In that first moment, part of her anguish had to do with the difficulty she encountered in addressing her academic situation. Classes had resumed, but the wage and cotista scholarship payments had not yet been normalized. Therefore, many of us had no means of commuting to school. This problem was a reality throughout the university, which had decided that teachers take this atypical situation into account, since many students were not yet able to attend classes. After all, the return of classes, financial and institutional chaos notwithstanding, was first and foremost a statement of the university’s ability to resist government neglect. This was the subject of several debates, when it was decided that the best way to face the threats to the university, at that time, was to resume academic activities, even in precarious conditions. After all, the government and the news media were relentless in their attacks on the university, implying

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that teachers and staff were content with not going to work, and that the university had lost its social relevance, since many students canceled their enrollments, migrating to other higher learning institutions. The student had performed very poorly in her exams, and did not know how to approach the teachers to deal with her situation. She lived far away from school, and had no means to pay for her commute every day, so she would come when she could, which was not every day. Her parents were unemployed. She and her sister studied at UERJ. The scholarship the two sisters received from the university (as part of the policy to prevent student evasion) accounted for most of their household’s income. In our conversation, I argued that many other students, staff, and professors were also without incomes, and that the university was aware of that. I remembered that the little donation box (see Chapter 5) was still there, at the secretary’s desk. I myself had started using it, since I was often out of money for lunch or transportation. I emphasized that she should contact her professors and tell them about her situation, which only then could be considered. However, she could not gather the strength to take some money from the box or to talk about her situation to her teachers. In the situation of vulnerability in which she found herself, she did not meet the emotional conditions to ease, if minimally, the suffering and shame she felt. At that time, at ESDI, we were exper i en cing an intense community movement. Many students, professors, and staff, as well as the central administration of the university, were committed to taking care of what was being thrust so violently into every one in the community, and which—it was known and discussed—had a much stronger impact on the poorest and most needy among us. But, even in the midst of such an intensity of collective care, this student could not help suffering and feeling ashamed for her falling grades. Even though she exchanged ideas almost every day with a colleague, one of the students most engaged in the school movement— who was a neighbor of hers and with whom she shared the long commute to school—she did not have the emotional conditions to state her situation in public.

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The way in which she experienced this process always reminds me that the vulnerability may be so intense as to silence those who are too fragile to gather strength and join the movement. With her story, I continue to think, then, about the limits of collective investments for re(ex)sistence, and about the impasses that are posed for the politicization of our daily experiences. Most of all, I think about all the suffering that I saw so many people go through in that period, and about what one can, or cannot, do when suffering. Much of my time as director went into making space where suffering could be cared for, right there in the school environment. People often sat on that couch and started crying. I myself cried, over and over again. And I thought it was important for the management of this design school to be a welcoming space for what did not fit in the classroom. Creating an environment of community and care, then, involved the operation of opening the director’s office as a collective space for welcoming and caring. Inhabiting that room in different ways was one of the vital operations for creating a collective awareness of the many ways one could be in the school, when it was not possible to resume the daily routine of academic activities. I was well aware that many of those who suffered the most silently retreated to their homes. But a large part of our effort was to affirm that what passed through us, each one of us, was part of a broader, collective process. This urged us to respond collectively, as a community. A school community prevented from performing what it was expected to: classes, advisory sessions, research activities . . . Thus, opening school spaces, decentralizing decision-making processes, collectivizing and politicizing suffering, as well as making it the starting point of a partial recovery of our existence as an academic community, was what Marcos and I tried most to do as directors. Now it seems crucial to me to underscore that each one of these actions are design actions. Above all, because they broaden horizons no longer through an approach of prospective plans, but, rather, by the emphasis on lived and shared experiences, and in creating places where affection circulates. With actions like these, when we insist on lived experience, I believe that we

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can reactivate design, claiming its survival beyond projecting, planning, innovation, and the obsession with the future, which, I think, always implies a dangerous dissociation from the present and from lived experiences.

FIGURE 7.13 Student working at the ESDI director’s desk, 2018 (Zoy Anastassakis).

There is a picture that does not go out of my mind, one I took of that student sitting at the table in the director’s office. That morning, she had appeared in the directors’ office window to tell me that she had finally managed to buy the computer she had dreamed of. A year had passed since our first meeting. In addition to the scholarship in the research project that I coordinated, she had been hired as an intern at a design company, and had started seeing a therapist. In the afternoon, while we were working on research, I recorded in a photograph the strong image of that student sitting in the director’s chair. She laughed, very shyly, as I took the photo. At the time, I remembered how much, as a former student, I felt uncomfortable and displaced sitting behind that table every day. At that moment, I imagined the lineage that was drawn there, of women who had sat in that place. Before her and I, engineer,

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urbanist, and feminist activist Carmen Portinho had been the director of ESDI for twenty-one years since 1966. I pictured the three of us together in that room. Like that student, and unlike me, Dona Carmen also lived far away. She crossed the city every day to go to school. But, unlike Dona Carmen and I, two white middle class women, this student was among the needy youngsters who managed to gain access to university only after the implementation of the quota policy. Therefore, her experiences were also marked by racial and social discrimination. At that time at ESDI, some of the cotistas started to propose design themes that put racial and social issues on the agenda, affirming their position as cotistas, and confronting, with that, the white elitism of the school. But it was not her case, as she felt mostly lonely, and deeply distant from the whole cotista initiatives. Considering the importance of broadening the debate around the persistent violence of racism as a social prejudice, I decided to invite historian Ynaê Lopes dos Santos, a specialist in the history of slavery in the Americas, who also studies the teaching of African history and ethnic-racial relations in Brazil, to give the inaugural lecture of the 2018 school year. On that occasion, she introduced us to other ways of perceiving the development of the city of Rio de Janeiro, which had originally been an important port of the Atlantic slave trade in Brazil. As she talked, she highlighted the asymmetrical ethnic-racial relationships forged by the slave economy, which resulted in a segregationist way of producing spaces and sociability in the city. This lecture was extremely meaningful, since about 40 percent of our undergraduates get into the school through the affirmative action policy, and are therefore either Black, and/or needy. Today, ESDI has two Black professors, both working at the department of Architecture and Urbanism, which is on a different campus in another city. It was very emblematic that Ynaê had been the first Black woman to teach the inaugural lecture of a school year at ESDI. Right after that, in 2018, we received Maria Eni Moreira, Makota Arrungindala, and her companion Luiz Ângelo da Silva, the Ogã Bangbala, who is the oldest ogã in Brazil, with whom an

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ESDI PhD student had made a set of films.10 On that occasion, the student presented their latest collaboration, an animated film based on the videographic record of the orixá dances performed by Arrungindala. Dancing to the sound of the atabaques [AfroBrazilian hand drums] played by Bangbala, Arrungindala narrated her painful life story. For the first time in ESDI’s history, the auditorium was filled with an audience that included students, professors, and people from the terreiro [candomblé temple] who came to honor these two important figures of African religions11 in Rio de Janeiro. At the end of the session, the atabaques filled the room with music, and there was a procession joined by the drums collective Baque Mulher. Based on this collaborative investment with Eni and Bangbala, this student developed a doctoral thesis on the implications of doing research and making design projects based on exchanges that mobilize design know-how in partnerships committed to the partner’s cosmologies.12 This also involved other beings, not always visible, who materialize in other ways, differently from those presumed in Eurocentric epistemology, such as the orixás, who, in religions of African origin, such as candomblé, guide people’s dance and music. Although all these events have in many ways broadened the scope of what was considered as matters of interest in a design school, not always, at ESDI, could we move forward with these discussions and experiences in order to expand the limits of what was considered possible in a design school. At one of the meetings with our Indigenous partner researchers, one of them

10

Ilana Brasil, Zoy Anastassakis, “Il faut danser, en dansant,” Multitudes v. 70 (Paris, primavera de 2018): 202–9. 11 According to anthropologist Marcio Goldman, “the phrase ‘African religions’ designates, in a somewhat coarse fashion, a diverse but articulated ensemble of reli gious prac tises and concep tions whose main axes were brought to the Americas from enslaved Africans” (Marcio Goldman, “Quinhentos anos de contato,” Mana, 21(3) (2015): 644). 12 Ilana Brasil, Criando com o corpo e com os deuses (Doctoral qualification paper, Graduate Program in Design, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2021).

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told of her brother’s interest in participating in the recruitment process for ESDI’s MA in design. This young man lived in Amazonas State, where he had finished his undergraduate studies. I joyfully welcomed the prospect of receiving an Indigenous student for the first time at the school. So, it seemed to me that this was an opportunity to act concretely to create a means for the inclusion of Indigenous students in the school and in the university. I took the case to the Comitê de Pós-Graduação (Graduate Commission), which comprises students and teachers, who decide on the Graduate Program’s regulations. After my presentation, two of the most senior professors at the school quickly manifested their opposition to the idea of a study to consider changes in the selection process so that Indigenous students could have access to ESDI graduate courses. I had already researched the subject, when, in view of the prospective implementation of the quota policy in the graduate courses, I noticed the opposition of several of ESDI’s professors. At that time, I had listened to some colleagues from UERJ’s Graduate Program in Social Sciences, and also from the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the National Museum, where I had obtained my MA and PhD, who had pioneered the debate and implementation of a post-graduate affirmative action policy that made it possible for Black, Indigenous, Quilombolas, and other needy students to get in. Because of the prospect of having an Indigenous candidate in our next selection process, I presented, again, to my colleagues at ESDI, the frameworks for the selection processes that had already been adopted by those programs. One of my fellow professors argued that it would not be possible to change the selection process, removing the English test, as the PPGAS did, because in design, unlike in anthropology, he argued, it would be impossible to study without reading texts in their original language, that is, in English. Many arguments along the same lines followed. In the end, in response to all of my replies to each of the objections they presented, the two colleagues acknowledged that they just did not see how it would be possible for ESDI to take Indigenous students in. Period. A student representative then suggested that we consult with the university’s central administration for a closer look at the

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ways in which other graduate programs had been conducting affirmative policies for Blacks, Quilombolas, Indigenous, and other needy students. We set up a meeting with the responsible sector. The coordinator was very receptive, but she pointed to the difficulty that our university had found in formulating differen ti ated selec tion processes, since Rio de Janeiro State legislation, which governed our university, mandated guaranteed univer sal access to public educa tion. The word “univer sal” was used to prevent the creation of differentiated selection processes. What I realized by analyzing the measures taken by graduate programs that received Quilombola and Indigenous students, is that without special selection processes, it was not possible to guarantee the entry of young people who, over more than 500 years, throughout the history of Brazil, were prevented from getting access to formal education. From my perspective, only differentiated selection processes could provide them conditions of access similar to those of white middle- and upper-class candidates, who traditionally filled most seats in public universities in Brazil. My understanding was that, because access was never really universal, it was necessary, then, to create public policies with special access conditions. Otherwise, it would not be possible to repair so much historical violence that had marked the building of the nation, which excluded from so-called citizenship those who had been segregated, beaten, enslaved or exterminated. After all, as in any other society shaped by colonialism, the process of constituting Brazil as a nation-state was grounded on racist, enslaving, and misogynist colonial practices. In view of these impasses, I realized that there was still a long way to go before we would be able to formulate instruments providing for the admission of Indigenous students into ESDI. Our university has been very successful in promoting the entry of cotistas into undergraduate courses. However, affirmative policies have not yet been consolidated within the scope of graduate studies, nor have they reached students who live in rural areas, let alone Indigenous and Quilombola people. Access seemed restricted to those who had the means to travel daily through the network of public road and rail transportation.

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Beyond these conditions, the gates still seemed to be closed. So, it should be noted that there are still many people who are excluded from universities such as UERJ, and, consequently, from design schools such as ESDI. And there are also those who, having obtained access, find it immensely difficult to fit in to these environments. Just as institutions are unable to notice and integrate those who are still excluded, they also do not know how to deal with those who, after getting in, remain marked or invisible and, consequently, end up being ignored. Often, the institutional procedures that keep them marginalized and silenced end up causing their evasion.

8

How do you get to the University? Marcos Martins

BY BUS, BY TRAIN, ON FOOT I start class punctually at 8:00 a.m. When I arrive, I usually arrange four large tables, around which the students and I sit down to analyze their work together. It is very rare for them to be all there at the start of class. They arrive little by little, gasping, fearing they will miss the roll call I make at 8:15 a.m. Whoever fails to answer is marked as late in my roll call sheet; reoccurring latecomers are penalized in their grades. I have come to realize, over my years of teaching, that if I do not impose punctuality as a basic requirement, students will always arrive late, sometimes very late, more than an hour after the start of class. This phenomenon intrigues me. Why is all this control, strenuous for both the teacher and the students, necessary? Going to class at the university should be part of every undergraduate’s personal aspirations, it should be a desire, not a burden. Especially in a tuition-free public university, a student who did not attend classes, who was always late, was wasting, I thought, a valuable opportunity, and, even worse, was taking the place of another person who would 183

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hypothetically give greater value to that experience and to prospects that it provided. Why such a lack of interest? The terms in which I was making the question betrayed how out of touch I was, alienated over years of a privileged, sheltered upbringing. Although my Portuguese paternal grandparents were illiterate, in Brazil they prospered in the jewelry making business. Their wealth enabled my father to study and become an engineer and a professor. My mother, a school teacher, comes from a traditional, cultivated, middle-class family of predominantly French descent. Despite my not-so-white skin color, my official documents and upbringing leave no doubt as to my whiteness. Having always attended private schools, I had never been in a classroom side by side with people of humble origin, with the exception of a few Black schoolmates, who, having been adopted, had got the chance to study at a private school attended by wealthy children and teenagers who often discriminated against those “odd ones” with jokes about their color. There, no one seemed to realize the privilege of studying at a renowned school. Studying was just an obligation, and school was a drag. Now, as a professor, as I stated this question of “why the lack of interest,”? I was coming from assumptions rooted in my own history. Absences and delays could only be explained by laziness or by a blasé attitude towards studies, typical of the student I had been. But, for a fair number of my students, as I would end up being compelled to acknowledge, there were much less subjective and more material reasons. At the beginning of 2019, a group of professors, including myself, received a long email from a student in which she explained her constant delays and absences at class, and made a request to the professors of the courses she was taking. She asked us to assign her additional activities that she could do at home, as a way of making up for her absences. She presented, in her argument, a combination of very personal and private circumstances. First, she cited the neighborhood where she lived. Her street gave access to a slum where police operations, invasions, and curfews were frequent and, often, prevented her from leaving the house early enough to arrive at school on time. Then, she

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reported with detail on her mother’s medical conditions, epilepsy, and migraine, both pathologies that she controlled by prescription medicines, to which she attributed, through prolonged use, a gradual deterioration of the mental health of her mother, who was now suffering from severe depression. Since mother and daughter lived by themselves, with no close relatives to help, it was up to the student to schedule, in advance, precious medical appointments, in which she could not fail to accompany her mother, and which often coincided with school hours. She was also responsible, alone, for providing for her household. In addition to her salary as an intern at a design firm, she got a monthly Bolsa Família1 stipend, as well as a scholarship for affirmative action recipients, totaling a monthly income of R$ 983.00 (about 180 US dollars at the time of this report, November 2021). She made it clear in her email that she did not want our pity, but understanding and help. This email remained unanswered for a long time. I suggested that the matter be dealt with in a faculty meeting, with the aim of reaching a consensual decision. At this meeting, the professors read the guidance that university regulation provided for class absences under an exceptional learning regime. Cases in which repeated absences were to be tolerated included the following: patients with morbid, congen ital medical condi tions; pregnant women, starting from the eighth month; participants in artistic or sports competitions; enrollment in Military Reserve Training Institutions; and exchange program participants. These were the cases that provided students with an extraordinary permission for distance learning. Someone soon felt the need to

1

Bolsa Fam í lia was a federal anti-poverty program imple men ted by the Brazilian govern ment, signed into law in 2004 and extin guished by Jair Bolsonaro in 2021. Bolsa Previdência guarantees students benefiting from the affirmative action program at the university a basic amount to help with their school expenses. However, this payment has become a way of supplement ing the family income of poorer famil ies. For a histor ical report of these programs, see Sader, Emir, org., 10 Anos de Governos Pós-Neoliberais No Brasil: Lula e Dilma (S ã o Paulo: Boitempo Editorial; Flasco Brasil, 2013).

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draw attention to the fact that there was nothing about depression, poverty, want, and the like on that list. In view of those rules, the case seemed already promptly solved in an objective way: it was a matter of norms, laws, and not of opinions. For my part, I thought that the case might be an opportunity for us to ask the rector for an overhaul of the list. I found it disgraceful that someone was allowed to miss classes because of participation in a military, sporting, or artistic event, and not because they lived in a conflict zone, or had to watch over the welfare of a relative. In any case, at that meeting, it seemed to me that the focus on the legal aspects was just a way to avoid the discomfort that the case brought up. The affirmative action2 issue had always been controversial, not only among university professors, but also in Brazilian society as a whole. Some defended so-called meritocracies, opposing the quota policy, while others valued the democratization of knowledge and the prospects of social mobility fostered by the policy. Now I, who already belonged to the second group, in the face of this student’s case, started to see another more essential value in the quota system. The sheer physical proximity in a learning environment, between elites and historically oppressed people, makes it difficult for the former to ignore the latter, and progressively fosters a context where these issues can be brought into an explicit debate. The student’s letter posed this inconvenience in an unusual way. Despite the frequent and routine requests for absence allowances, grade flexibilizations, and reviews, such a vivid exposure of personal circumstances was atypical. Such subjects were not easily taken by figures of authority, as are professors, in particular, this group of white people who, probably, had never gone through difficulties of that sort. I noticed a reluctance to any way of dealing with the issue. Objections piled up. Nobody was there to do charity, people said. One could not adopt a double standard, granting a privilege to

2

See Notes on translation of some key terms.

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that student, while ignoring other students, who perhaps had problems as serious as hers, but weren’t making the same request. It was inconceivable, for those objectors, that anyone could get a degree in design without attending classes. And there was the main argument, which was very dear to everyone, with which I somewhat agreed: the basis of all design teaching at ESDI was the systematic face-to-face meeting of teachers and students. It is through this practice of class discussion of their work that students develop an understanding of what design is and rise to the school’s renowned quality standards. So the rejection of the student’s request was seen as the end of the matter. All resources had been exhausted. “There’s just no way.” One couldn’t set a precedent. Even so, I wanted to explore possible ways to circumvent the strict limiting conventions of what was understood as a classroom. I thought that an actual meeting between us and the student could bring about the reality that was missing from our reading the email and that formal deliberation. Not without a certain annoyance, it was agreed that the meeting would be scheduled soon, so that she could expose her problem in person. Nothing came out of this. A month had passed since we got the e-mail and the student remained without an answer. I decided, on my own, to talk to her. She was a young, Black woman with dreadlocks, and in her eyes she showed sweetness, pain, and determination. She started by saying that she occasionally saw the police van pass a few inches from her window. It was hard to leave the house at any time of the day. When things calmed down, when there weren’t so many bullets flying through the street, she was able to get out. To get to school, she woke up at 5:30 a.m. and left at 6:00 a.m. Before that, it was too dark and too dangerous. This description was consistent with reports from several other students I interviewed later for this book: “If I miss the 7:00 a.m. bus, I can already give up arriving at school on time for class. The next one is already packed and sometimes the driver misses the stop and just leaves me there hailing.”

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“The train commute is supposed to take forty-five minutes but usually takes ninety minutes, and sometimes the train stops, waiting for gunfire on the way to stop.” “It often happens that trains collide, but the news media rarely reports it, so you don’t even get to know.” “I take the train and after leaving the Central Station I walk to school, because I can’t afford a subway ticket.” “Today the train stopped because they realized that a girl was being dragged along the tracks with her clothes stuck on a wagon’s wheels.”

For the neediest, mostly Black students, who live far away from downtown, the sheer physical movement of going to school requires a much greater effort of the body than just planning the commute. One has to wield great power, every single day, not only of the will, but also physically, in order to get to class, if one is lucky, on schedule. When asked what was the main reason that prevented her from attending school, the student who had sent us that email answered straight away: fatigue. The reason seemed banal, almost petty, when compared to what she had mentioned before, like the risk of being hit by a stray bullet from the conflicts between police, paramilitary militiamen, and drug dealers (one couldn’t know which of them was shooting at each time) that had been increasing exponentially in Rio de Janeiro. From 2013 to 2018, the number of deaths because of police interventions more than doubled.3 The situation is worse in conflict-ridden neighborhoods, especially slums, where police act with particular brutality against the population, with the excuse of fighting organized crime and drug trafficking. Some of the many deaths resulting from routine police invasions in the favelas make headlines: Teachers use music to calm students during operation killing eight in Rio. 3

Felipe Grandin and Marco Antônio Martins, “Número de mortes por intervenção policial no RJ mais que dobra em cinco anos,” G1, August 15, 2018, Rio de Janeiro, https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/08/15/ numero-de-mortes-por-intervencao-policial-no-rj-chega-a-895-em-2018.ghtml.

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Every day, Rio de Janeiro police kill five people. Police officer mistakes umbrella for rifle; kills waiter in Rio, witnesses say. “They are the hunters and we are the prey down here,” says favela dweller hit by shots from a police watchtower. Police attack demonstrator with rifle shots during burial in Rio.

A Rio de Janeiro native, the student also seemed unsurprised by the violence around her. I first thought (again taking myself as reference) that she had got accustomed to living in a conflict zone, just as I had become accustomed to the foot soldiers on the beaches of Rio’s South Zone. A student, who also lived in a dangerous area, upon reading this passage, alerted me that it was possibly not a matter of “getting used to it.” People who live in slums were usually born there and, therefore, simply haven’t known any other reality. This close relationship with violence (so different from mine) may account for the fact that she did not declare danger but tiredness as the main reason for her absences. This justification provoked a sort of disbelief among some of us. How could a daily routine of violence and terror be less important than a sensation that everyone goes through from time to time? For professors, “weariness” is a banal feeling, promptly received with solidarity when a colleague, after class, or in the middle of a meeting, asking others not to mind any inappropriate behavior, vents: “I’m exhausted.” “Weariness,” for the student, more important than a shooting, more threatening than a police car, meant a relentless, lonely condition, permanently inscribed on her body through inescapable responsibilities. The two meanings of the same word—for her, for us—coexisted but could not coincide. It was not enough that the student had exhaustively explained the dire and smothering state she was in, and that she had, on more than one occasion, passed out at school. The source of her weariness, very different from that of the teachers, did not seem

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exceptional enough to make for an exception in a learning framework they saw as untouchable.4 After that faculty meeting, in which nothing was decided, the case dragged on for weeks. Professors plunged back into their busy routines and, while the days in Rio de Janeiro went on with the usual splendor, the student waited. Procrastination seemed almost intentional, but its most probable cause was sheer indifference, or, in a more optimistic case, a desire to avoid a persistent, uncomfortable subject. I was concerned about the fact that the student was already on the verge of failing my class for her constant absences, and that her situation was exactly the same regarding other professors.5 This scenario would not just significantly delay her graduation, but it could also, I was informed, trigger the suspension of her scholarship. She was scared. She thought that, by exposing her situation frankly and openly, in search of a solution without subterfuge, she would reach an agreement that took the reality of her predicament into account. Instead, her plea was met with the stark barriers of bureaucracy and allegedly unshakeable pedagogical principles.

4

5

This calls for a brief digres sion, in order to adjust this narrat ive to what happened between this 2019 story and the writing of this text in the final months of 2020. Ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic brought teaching in person to an abrupt halt, and the entire univer sity was forced to continue its academic activities remotely. The mandatory isolation showed that it was not impossible to carry out courses and develop projects in the way the student was asking us to do, even though it was seen, at the time of her request, as inadmissible. In retrospect, the pandemic refuted the main argument behind the rejec tions of the student’s request, which stated the absolute necessity of face-to-face dialogues, which professors saw as a core tenet of project teaching. Despite the seriousness and inflexibility of those concepts, the fact is that in 2020/21 our bodies–mine, the student’s, and those of other professors–were prevented from going to school. Students fail for low attend ance in Brazilian higher educa tion when they miss more than 25 percent of classes. At ESDI, if someone fails more than three subjects in the same school year, they are preven ted from taking courses from the following year’s schedule until they are approved in the ones they failed.

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Faced with prolonged silence, and starting to realize that no formal response was ever going to come, the student began to look for ways to better profit from the little time she had to go to school. She pondered that some professors were willing to ignore some of her absences up to that point, so that she could complete the course, provided that she started attending class. She knew, too, that there were others who were not very strict in controlling student attendance, and that others just didn’t keep attendance sheets. There were also some who missed their own classes without even telling the students. One had to ask, in view of the evident incoherence in the application of this norm, how could it be presented as an objection to the student’s request, in the name of the equal treatment of students? Based on which practice was this alleged equality to be established: that of the professor who kept a strict attendance sheet, or that of the one for whom even his own presence was optional? Perhaps it was the very awareness of these flaws in the structure that made some feel the need to recrudesce in their care for a paradoxically fictitious structural integrity. Realizing that her mistake had been to make the problem clear, the student decided that she, too, would act as if nothing happened, freeing herself from the task of imagining any official solution for the problem. She then carefully examined the risk of failing in each course and devised a plan of her own. She would go to the classes of some professors, but she would work from home for others. Taking advantage of the actual, diverse dynamics and practices that each teacher adopted regarding attendance and evaluation, she managed to pass most subjects, thus avoiding the loss of her scholarship. But no special concession was made for her. This case goes to show that normative bureaucratic structures provide abundant argumentative material for anyone willing to defend them. The same is true of long-established pedagogical principles. Thus, certainties pile up and triumph effortlessly over the nuances and ambiguities of a reality of precariousness. I noticed, with some puzzlement, the ease with which structures, norms, and goals raise spontaneous and even enthusiastic adherence among people in positions of power. A strange fascination

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with the rules overrides considerations over the real impact of regulation enforcement, be it positive or passive. On the other hand, despite the silent outcome of the case and the appearance that nothing happened, this student’s story reminds us of the existence of a vital flow that runs under the structures, which, even without directly challenging them, is capable of showing their loopholes and internal inconsistencies. These are active movements, which are not always perceived, and are very difficult to historicize.

GETTING A DEGREE In Brazil, the academic excellence of a university is based on its personnel’s bibliographic production and research output. Funding for research is apportioned by state agencies based on the sum of awards, books, published articles, cita tions, and participation in editorial committees, among other criteria. Schools, in turn, are rated according to their research projects, laboratory and equipment quality, library collections, bureaucratic effi ciency, in short, for their good func tion ing as productive machines. However, in these measurement systems, nothing that occurs within the classroom is considered worthy of examination. This dimension of the professor’s activity does not gain visibility and is not counted. The same neglect happens with students: the system cares neither for what they think of the structural dynamics to which they are subjected, nor for the quality of their social interactions. In short, the practices that make up the daily life of an educational institution do not enter into any measurement in which they could be recognized. Even further from the system’s sight are the various affections, desires, disappointments, and personal difficulties that, nevertheless, also make up the path one goes through in order to get a degree. Perhaps it is the very invisibility of these things that guarantees, under the institutional framework, the survival of a flow of relationships that are perhaps even more crucial for anything deserving to be called an education than official certi-

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ficates of “teaching and research quality” that schools like to boast about. At ESDI, there is a special place where experiences of all sorts guarantees a living space for non-institutional practices, from which we may have a few things to learn. It is a small house, where the outside and inside walls are covered with collages of posters, drawings, sentences, photos, projects, and announcements. It houses ESDI’s student representation, named in honor of a former director, Centro Acadêmico Carmen Portinho (CAPO). At any time of the day, students can be seen there, talking, reading, looking at their cell phones, lying on threadbare sofas, or sitting on the sills of windows from which sunlight enters, filtered through the leaves of the large trees in front of the house. For us teachers, it is an impenetrable world; not once have I entered there without feeling like an intruder. On party days, the room of little more than twenty square meters fills up. These parties vary a lot in size, sometimes occupying only the house’s interior, sometimes spilling over a little bit to the outside, occupying the front porch, or, on some days, they spread into the cracked cement floor in front of the door. If a party, for whatever reason, causes special excitement, it occupies the entire area of free open space around the buildings that house the

FIGURE 8.1 Centro Acadêmico Carmen Portinho, ESDI, 2017 (Zoy Anastassakis).

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classrooms. Everything is very well organized. The students make arrangements with the school’s security guards, ask for authorization from the director, rent the sound equipment, and use ticket revenue to make the beer cheap, and even amass sizeable profit. One of these larger events is the annual freshmen welcoming party, organized by the class that is starting its second year at the college. It is then, when they become “veterans,” that many of them experience, for the first time, the feeling of belonging to that community. They are no longer as frightened as when, twelve months earlier, they were in the place of those whom they now welcome. Many students have shared with me their vivid recollections of the strangeness of the first day they set foot in the school. But it is the cotistas who seem to be most affected by the striking feeling of nonbelonging. One of them, a skinny, young, white man tells me, with his low and sincere voice, about the path he has gone through since he took the risk of leaving his parent’s house in a commuter town next to Rio de Janeiro, to enter the design course at a college in downtown Rio. In the place where he lived, no one had much interest in going to college. His sister, going down the same road as many girls in her community, became pregnant at sixteen and had to stop studying just before giving birth. Soon after, she went to work as a manicurist in a beauty salon, in order to support her son and contribute to the household’s budget. The brother, on the contrary, decided to go against the will of his parents, who did not encourage his studies and were not willing to pay for them. He planned to get a job so he could pay for a private college out of his own pocket. However, during a preparatory course for university admission exams, he learned something that surprised and encouraged him: there was a quota policy in Brazilian public universities that gave scholarships and reserved places for needy candidates. I was amazed when he told me that, before applying to join the course, he had never heard of the quota policy: not in any local news outlet, nor had he seen any posters, or television ads about it; bar conversations he would overhear didn’t mention the issue. I noticed from his report that, in communities like his, the existence of the Brazilian government’s affirmative action

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policy was not known. Like him, other students reported that they only learned about the quotas from volunteer teachers of preparatory courses. This was a game changer. He had never even considered going to a public university, for he knew that admission was very difficult and competitive. Ironically, in Brazil, it was the affluent children of the middle- and upper-middle classes who went to these renowned universities because they had, in private school, a supposedly better education. The quota policy, by reserving places for disadvantaged social groups, allowed people like this student to compete with other people of similar backgrounds and history, and not the wealthy. It was in the preparatory course as well that he first heard of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, and design as a profession. His parents were startled by the word “desenho” (Portuguese for “drawing”); they feared that their son would study something in the uncertain field of the visual arts. But he went anyway, unaware that the affirmative actions that enabled him to enter higher education could not spare him the violent shock of codes of behavior and cultural repertoires totally unknown to him. On his first day at school, as soon as he passed through ESDI’s gates, he felt relief that he had left behind the tumult of hurried people walking on the pavement by the school’s entrance. In front of him, he saw a cemented courtyard stretching for about fifty meters, between him and the houses where he would soon have his first classes. Walking through this courtyard alone, he saw on his left the big red letters, E, S, D, I, staked somewhat precariously in a thin and irregular green. A few steps from him, ahead and behind, other students were also walking towards the houses. These people looked weird. He did not speak to anyone on the first day and he did not speak to or make friends in the months that followed. He soon realized that these young people “listened to different music” and “wore other clothes.” At lunchtime he asked himself: “How am I going to survive here”? He saw groups of students and teachers leave through the gate towards the restaurants near the school. He hardly knew how to get around and find his way through that area of the city, and was afraid to leave and not be able to find his way back. In

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any case, he didn’t even have half of what he would need to pay for a meal at these restaurants. What was familiar to him in terms of eating out were the lunchboxes prepared by his mother, which his father took to work every day and which he also now carried in his backpack when he went to college. During this first year, after he got used to the new school and felt more at ease, which took some time, he started dating a young man in his class, who was also very skinny and was about the same height. People often mistook the two for one another. Remembering that time, he says that every time he was called by the boyfriend’s name he felt as if the two were the same person, and did not exist as a couple. But it was only afterwards, by the time he told me this story, that he was able to articulate this strange sensation into words. At the time, he recalls, he did not realize the subtlety of prejudice, because he was bewildered by the coincidence of two powerful new discoveries. While he was experiencing the dazzling glow of life among the wealthy for the first time, he also felt the dizzying thrill of the speed with which he came out of the closet (“very old”) directly into his first romantic relationship. Oblivious to hostile looks, he debuted. He didn’t notice the disgust with which some reacted to those erotic and amorous discoveries, which for him were as wonderful as they were difficult. But he would soon be introduced to the subtle ways of college homophobia, a covert version of ostensibly violent high school bullying. He realized that he always got very low grades in a certain subject. He could not understand why, since, in his view, his work was at least on the same level as that of other students. It was after scoring a ten, the maximum grade, for the first time in a collectively graded group assignment that he started to suspect that the low grades he received when working alone were based on his sexuality rather than on his output. A colleague confirmed: “in case you haven’t noticed, my friend, it’s obvious that this is pure homophobia.” His naivety also kept him from noticing the aggressions disguised as jokes that he occasionally heard, some of them quite rude, as when, he told me, he was asked by a professor if he was always late for staying home ironing his boyfriend’s underwear.

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He didn’t understand that jest. Does anyone iron their underwear? Some may think that cases like this one are isolated episodes in a school that is overall quite progressive, where freedom is generally defended as an essential value. In fact, nowadays, at ESDI it is common to see gay students holding hands, or making out without inhibition, as well as polyamorous throuples and trans students passing through the “Boulevard,” the pedantic nickname of the cobbled road between the school houses. For those who see this flow, it really looks like a place where prejudice is nowhere to be seen. However, the stories of this young gay man and the woman with the dreadlocks show that even in a generally progressive school like ours, a gay freshman still feels the need to measure his gestures and modulate his speech, and a Black cotista student ends up silenced in the face of institutional rigidity. It was certainly the memory of that first shock that caused many cotistas I interviewed to answer “yes,” without any hesitation, when I asked them if they considered ESDI to be an elitist school. My expectation was that this affirmative answer would be followed by ample examples of ostensibly elitist lines or attitudes, heard from teachers or other students. Not corresponding to what I expected, they showed me an elitism that, rooted in established habits and practices, can dispense with explicit manifestations. The sheer self-perception of their bodies cohabiting the same space as other bodies that profusely flaunt the distinction markers of a culture and way of life to which they had not had access, already imposes a sort of shrinkage on them. In classes, the teachers utter with familiarity the names of unknown places: Bauhaus, Ulm, MoMA, Louvre. The absence of any introduction to these references indicates that knowing what and where they are was something taken for granted. The feeling of inadequacy intensified when they heard rich students also refer, with intimacy, to the same places. You could tell by the pronunciation that they not only knew about them but also knew how to speak the languages of the countries where Bauhaus, Ulm, MoMA, and the Louvre are. They also realized that it was assumed that everyone

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had a computer, knew basic design software, and could buy basic materials to do their work; printed work was also expected to be presented in a standard that they couldn’t afford. But there is another circumstance that meant for these students a source of great inequality, and was therefore an unquestionable elitist trait of ESDI: unlike the middle- or upper-class students who can choose when to start internships or working, most cotistas have to split their time between school and some kind of job—their scholarship is barely enough for paying their commute to campus. Working while studying increases inequality between them and those who can afford not to work. On the same day that I heard a wealthy student complain about having to arrive at school so early, claiming that his biological rhythm imposed an unavoidable need for him to wake up later, a cotista told us that she had not woken up in time because of a deadline that made her stay at the NGO where she worked until 11:00 p.m. the night before. When she was hired as an intern, this Black, very intelligent and politically engaged cotista student expected that working at an NGO—an institution focused on social causes—would offer her healthier working conditions, allowing her to share her time with her studies. She found herself quickly caught up in a routine that forced her to work every day at least two hours in excess of what her job contract stipulated. Her boss spoke to her about “fighting” for a more just society and, inviting her to “wear the shirt” of the organization (that is, in typical Brazilian corporate jargon, to give her best), as if renouncing adequate work conditions for a moral reward was a fair exchange for someone in desperate need of money. She had to insist a lot so that her boss would agree to give her a day off to finish a school assignment (in fact, one that I had requested). The stressful routine led her to what she called her first “freakout,” or panic attack, in which she had to be rescued in the office bathroom by a coworker. She was pale and breathless. After getting better, she was not released by her superiors, since the person who could authorize her to go home was not there. She decided to step down from the job so that she could at least try to end the semester without failing any subjects. But

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her fragile state still scared and worried her. One day, going to ESDI, she had to repeat to herself silently many times: “You are going to college and not to work.” Each time, she relieved herself with the assurance, but soon after, distracted, she would forget her actual destination and think that she was on her way to work again. The thought of having to work returned inexplicably and occupied her thoughts, even after leaving the NGO. She decided to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed medicines, on which she started to depend to get away from what she described to me as “dangerous ideas,” her way of revealing, euphemistically, her suicidal thoughts. I failed her, on account of her many absences, right at the time when all of this was happening. Now that I heard all these things, I became aware, in a single stroke, of several dimensions of her reality that had not reached me before. I realized, then, that I had got into a system that limited that person’s existence to the institutional role of the student, and mine to that of the professor. This tactlessness, which I now saw in myself, also afflicted my colleagues, and was not restricted to particular facts and events. It stood for a permanent state of obliviousness to the reality of the poor and needy, who were very easy to ignore, except when it threatened the routine of standard procedure in an institutional space, as narrated here. I now think about how the first ESDI classes in the 1960s must have been different from those of today, after the reservation of places for Blacks and other needy youngsters was implemented in the admission process, starting in 2001. In its first years of existence, the school adopted extremely rigid admission processes. It is known that, for eight years after the foundation of the school, admission procedures remained more or less the same. Anyone wishing to fill one of the thirty spots offered every year had to undergo an arduous selection process that included a foreign language test; as well as exams for Portuguese grammar, writing, vocational testing, drawing, cultural level, and general knowledge, and, finally, an interview. A statistic of those who passed the first selection is indicative of the typical social background of students: only ten students came straight from high school, while the majority already had degrees or were studying architecture or fine arts;

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there were also those who were already professional designers, and even some who worked in advertising. Of the thirty who were successful, twenty-five were men and five were women.6 None of them were Black. Within a group so homogeneous vis-à-vis their financial and cultural background, it would probably have been safe to assume that learning design was aimed at those who knew words like Bauhaus, Ulm, MoMA, and Louvre. Considering that the level of previous training and socioeconomic conditions was structurally guaranteed, admission criteria would also have seemed objectively linked to desirable quality standards. This common background of the student body would also have allowed the school to dedicate itself to debates on topics such as the modern project of progress, the fate of design in Brazil, and the role that a school of that kind could play in the country’s development. It is not a matter here of issuing a moral judgment of dynamics and parameters in teaching design from times so radically different from the current ones, but of showing, by contrast, all the modifications, not always comprehended, that the quota policy introduced in a school so umbilically linked to a European project. Once, Zoy and I were criticized by one of the peer reviewers of an inter view we gave about ESDI, for seem ingly overestimating the quota policy. The basis of the criticism was that this policy would not in fact have had a major impact on “power structures,” and that ESDI has always been (and remained) an elitist school, with teachers with German names and a curriculum faithful to European traditions. In this book, the lives of the cotistas (and not the quota policy) emerge in their materiality, close to lived experiences on a micropolitical level, presented in deliberate deviation from any technically oriented attempt to measure the success or failure of affirmative action. The arrival, permanence, and graduation of the cotistas at the public university have, in my view, added an additional dimension, one that is seldom recognized, and runs beyond the access of disadvantaged groups to knowledge, skills, and jobs. The quotas have given us the privilege of physical and raw coexistence, in 6

Souza, ESDI Biografia de Uma ideia, 91.

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the same space and same period of time, of people with very heterogeneous bodies, cultural repertoires, desires, frames of reference, and responsibilities. Even though they do not appear to shake the many structures that pervade the institution (including structural racism), which have been hardened for years, decades, or even centuries, the shocks provoked by these encounters are capable of producing, within those same structures, daily events of transformation.

FIGURE 8.2 Rua do Passeio ESDI entrance, 2017 (Gabriel Borges).

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Walking Barefoot Zoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins

BEGINNING AGAIN, OTHERWISE Now we seek to re-elaborate the memories and insights that erupted from the experiences narrated in the previous chapters, in order to know them again, otherwise. In a theoretical and a critical effort, in this chapter we meet broader issues that have been theorized by important contemporary thinkers in several areas of knowledge. Even though they are not ostensibly directed to the design field, some of these debates help us rethink some urgent issues in this field. In Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway emphasizes that all of us, on Earth, are living in disturbing times. For her, given the challenges that come before us in this time of catastrophes, marked by increasing social inequality, pollution, pesticide poisoning, exhaustion of raw materials, groundwater depletion, etc.,1 we have to become capable of responding, in the present, to the devastating events that 1

Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

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surprise us. Thinking about the need to cultivate ways to go on with life, not seeking to let go of it, but rather “staying with the trouble,” she devises the category of response-abilities. In her book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, Isabelle Stengers2 also tells us of the strange times we are all living in. She remarks that when an era seems to have come to an end, we need to produce witnesses, narratives, and celebrations, in short, experiences that propose new relationships between politics and an experimental production of new capacities to act and to think. Drawing on Spinoza, she defines what drives these experiences as joy: the joy of first steps, even if it’s hard to take them; the joy of thinking and imagining together, which brings forth cooperation and solidarity. In The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Tsing3 defends the importance of recognizing and embracing our precariousness and vulnerability. At the same time, she reminds us that there is something that persists, even in the midst of devastation and ruins: the potential for regeneration and resurgence, and the potential to create new forms of habitability. In several recent works, Tim Ingold reminds us of the need to educate our attention to the ways in which we live and make worlds. Attentionality, as he calls it, is a means from which we can cultivate our abilities for correspondence practices.4 Caring, rather than innovating. Corresponding, rather than projecting. In Shannon Mattern’s5 terms, keeping and repairing, rather than destroying. Studying ways the world gets put back together, she focuses on everyday activities of maintenance, repair, and caretaking, concluding that, in combination, these actions could be reconsidered in terms of a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause.

2

3 4

5

Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Open Humanities Press/Meson Press, 2015). Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. Ingold, Tim, “On human correspondence,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n. 23, 2016, 9–27. Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and care,” Places Journal, November 2018.

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With them, we can reclaim the cultivation of our responseabilities as the most fundamental requisite for us to care and correspond. By caring and corresponding, we can learn to live (and die) well in the precarious conditions that this thick time of catastrophes imposes on us, in a world on the brink of collapse. In extreme situations, such as those narrated in this book, what remains for us to do is learning to be truly present, recovering our response-abilities to deal with what threatens us. Another way of doing this is telling stories. By telling stories, as Ailton Krenak indicates,6 we can postpone the end of the world. And this is increasingly urgent, since, in times like these, as Haraway and Stengers argue, we have to fight the idea that the game is over, looking for new ways to correspond with others. Here, once again, a theme dear to design debates emerges, namely, the emphasis on the future. After all, as Haraway points out, the “game over attitude that can and does discourage others, including students, is facilitated by various kinds of futurisms.”7 The obsession with the future is one of the main tenets of design, a direct heir of Western progressive developmentalism. However, as Arturo Escobar, Tony Fry, and Eleni Kalantidou8 remind us, in recent centuries, with the advance of the hegemony of the progressive Eurocentric monoculture (which has resulted in what has been called the Anthropocene), more than the promised futures of safety, the outcome has been defuturization. Escobar goes beyond fighting and denouncing the evils of the Anthropocene, proposing alternatives, which include the redesign of ways of life, in a commitment to living and doing based on the present time. It is not by chance, then, that, both for Escobar, Ingold, and also for Bruno Latour,9 a design attitude 6 7 8

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Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 3. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse; Tony Fry, Eleni Kalantidou, Design in the Borderlands (London: Routledge, 2015). Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse; Ingold, Making; Ingold, Being Alive; Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus”? in Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society (Falmouth: Universal Publishers, 2008).

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becomes the key to the reinvention of worlds. Here, then, would be the key to a reconsideration of the meanings of the term design, which, consequently, can lead us to a reappraisal of the assumptions that inform the characterization of design as a specific field. In line with the warnings issued by these authors, what we experienced at ESDI, from 2016 to 2018, has taught us to distrust and deviate from the defuturizing futurisms, which are, for us, some of the most serious pitfalls of design. By recounting these stories in a Brazil on the brink of collapse, we thus seek to open paths for the reinvention of our lives, but also of design practices and design education. Furthermore, as Escobar proposes, we think design can be a fundamental element for the building of an ontology of repairing broken beings and worlds. But what does one need to do in order not to let everything get lost? How to take forward some of the good things that emerged from our experiences surviving at the school? How to incorporate into formal teaching, research, and management the diverse experimental practices that we experienced, through improvised means, in that period of so many uncertainties? These are a series of questions for which we don’t have the answers, but we can, once again, keep thinking. The movement to collectively recover a sense of maintenance, community, care, and repair10 for the school led us to some unusual experiments. What we saw at ESDI at that time leads us to bet that the rationalist, progressive, and universalist apparatus can be redirected according to ways of perceiving and experiencing the world that are not at the service of homogenization, but, rather, of the recognition of spaces for coexistence in difference. We thus realize that design practice can be reconsidered as a transitional tool between the hegemony of the Western universalist ontology and the pluriverse of socio-natural configurations. Which is to say, as Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold ponder: “Design, in this sense, does not transform the world. It is rather part of the world’s transforming itself.”11 10 11

Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care.” Caroline Gatt, Tim Ingold, “From Description to Correspondence,” in Design Anthropology Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Charlotte Smith (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 146.

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But, instead of continuing to use the word design, we can think, with Latour, of “drawing things together,”12 which would imply the recomposition of the ties that were broken when design was defined as an activity exclusively aimed at capitalist economic development. As designers, more than anticipating futures through projection mechanisms, we would dedicate ourselves, then, to the tasks of “knotting and weaving,”13 with those who live and build worlds otherwise. As we approach so many other worlds, we also have to pay attention to the unintentional designs14 that challenge the assumptions that have shaped the professional field of design, as well as design education.

CLEARING THE GROUND Retelling these stories was important, first of all, because the experiences we narrate in this book have not been consolidated as formal practices, either in the curriculum of our design course, or as a set of politico-pedagogical procedures in school management. So, if we don’t tell these stories, and if we don’t think with them about what design education means, the stories and the lessons we bring with them will get lost, and end up disappearing. However, we know, because of our experimental practices since the regularization of academic activities at ESDI in 2018, that something we had experienced in that atypical period persists at the school. It persists while escaping. Vinciane Despret and Isabelle Stengers15 help us perceive some possible relationships between remembering, narrating, resisting, and thinking. They warn us that fighting amnesia is also a form of resistance. In other words, writing is one more way to resist the consensus that imposes itself as a pacifying force after troubled times. To make something out of these experiences, like telling them in a book, and thinking from them about 12

Latour, A Cautious Prometheus?, 12. Ingold, Correspondences (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020). 14 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 149. 15 Despret, Stengers, Women Who Make a Fuss, 24. 13

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what design education can be, are ways of encountering our best hopes for precarious survival,16 but also of producing critical theoretical knowledge about design education in a situated way.17 Since the beginning of our experience running a design school in the midst of a mounting financial and institutional crisis, we felt we had to share our experiences and to examine them collectively. This book is the result of that quest. Once again, we are not alone. Back in 2017, some students joined us in writing, making exhibition materials, and taking part in academic events, sharing our experiences at the school. By that time, some of them were working on documenting and thoroughly analyzing, in their undergraduate, masters, and doctoral works, what was going on among us at the school, as seen in Chapter 6. We thus ended up creating multiple versions of the ESDI Aberta movement that we mentioned several times in the course of our narrative. A multiplicity of demands, needs, and desires was not only one of the most striking features of ESDI Aberta, but also a focus of our attention as directors. In other words, we both knew that we had to ensure that this multiplicity, both among those who were engaged in the movement and among those who were not, would not end up being neutralized by any attempt at stabilization in a consensual or unified narrative. We both knew from the start that this multiplicity was more than necessary. It seemed to us that it was what allowed experiments around other ways of inhabiting that design school to flourish. If it was not possible to resume regular academic activities, and if we were to fight to keep the school open, we had to start somewhere. We started, literally, clearing the ground, with collective efforts to clean up and remove debris from the campus. In acting this way, we had to be together, as a community, in direct contact with the physicality of the school, which ceased to be a place for classes and meetings and became a space for the coexist ence of bodies, which had also been stripped of their institutional positions (students, professors, directors, secretaries, etc.). 16 17

Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 34. Haraway, Situated Knowledges.

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Since we affirm an ethical commitment to the lived matter, we believe that, if any theory is to be found in this work, it should be territorialized, grounded, perspectival, situated, and partial.18 After all, by involving ourselves in all these actions, we already understood that each one of our actions were acts of design education. In this sense, with the Indigenous educator and activist Célia Xakriabá, we can speak of a territorialized education: You have to start from somewhere, and the only clue I can give you in that direction is this one: learn to take off your shoes to walk along paths and access theoretical knowledge produced at the center. Let your feet touch the ground in the territory. Your shoes will become small and will not fit the collective feet, they will tighten our minds so much that they will hinder access to knowledge in the territory of the body. If there is no open path, start with a track; if the trail already exists, open a trackway; if there is already a path, widen it, make it a road. Only with this exercise can we broaden our horizons and make a territorialized education.19

If, in living the experiences told here, we were committed to learning to walk on the ground, why, then, as we write, should we read the world with texts and not with what touches our feet? Remaining close to the ground, refusing the transcendental operations of abstraction, generalization, totalization, synthesis, and universalization, does not imply, however, that we declare the impossibility of building relations from these stories. Here, we follow closely Ingold’s approach in this matter: the distinction [. . .] between the documentary and the transformational is absolutely not congruent with that between empirical and theoretical work. It is almost a truism to say that there can be no description or documentation 18

Ingold, Being Alive . Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology.” Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.” 19 Célia Xakriabá, “Amansar o giz,” Piseagrama (Belo Horizonte, n. 14, 2020), 110–17.

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that is innocent of theory. But by the same token, no genuine transformation in ways of thinking and feeling is possible that is not grounded in close and attentive observation. [. . .] My entire argument is set against the conceit that things can be “theorised” in isolation from what is going on in the world around us, and that the results of this theorising furnish hypotheses to be applied in the attempt to make sense of it.20

We understand that what we have lived and told can indeed be related to various themes and issues current in design thought and practice—whether in the Brazilian context or beyond it—in a theoretical operation that we do not perceive as separate from the narratives, which could be considered as an ethnographic account. However, what we are doing here is not ethnography in the strictly documentary sense. Brazilian anthropologist Marcio Goldman suggests another way to understand the ethnographic approach, through the concept of becoming, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In this sense, ethnography would not have to do with “simple observation processes (of behavior or conceptual schemes), or with forms of conversion (taking the other’s point of view), or with a kind of substantial transformation (becoming native).” Ethnography as becoming implies the cultivation of the capacity to “build new existential territories in which to reterritorialize. Becoming, thus, is what pulls us not only from ourselves, but from every possible substantial identity.”21 It is, then, about letting ourselves be affected by what affects others, and, in this movement, giving way to processes of transformation of ourselves, others, and the environments in which we interact. Therefore, if we adopt this understanding of ethnography, we may conclude that our effort in this final chapter approaches what Goldman defines as ethnographic theory.

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Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 4. Marcio Goldman, How Democracy Works (Lightning Source, 2013), 21–2.

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The central objective of an ethnographic theory is to build a model of understanding of some social object (language, magic, politics, etc.) that, even when produced within and for a particular context, can work as a matrix of intelligibility within and for other contexts. In this sense, it allows us to overcome known paradoxes of the particular and the general, just as perhaps, we can overcome those of practices against norms or those of realities in opposition to ideals. This is because we are attempting to avoid abstract questions about structures, functions, or even processes, and direct them toward workings and practices.22

By following Goldman’s terms for an ethnographic theory, we are opening the way for the intelligibility of what happened at ESDI between 2016 and 2018, and, at the same time, we open the ground for creating a matrix of intelligibility for issues relating to design education in our times. In this sense, we could also think that what we point out here as an effort at theorization “is not a theory so much as an attitude,”23 as Ingold puts it. Readers may be wondering why we sought anthropological approaches in writing this last chapter. When we consider, however, that one of the fundamental purposes of this series about designing in dark times is “to push the boundaries of both design and thought, to make each more capable of opening genuine possibilities for thinking and acting otherwise,”24 the rapprochement towards an anthropology committed to intervening and not just understanding the world becomes clearer. For Ingold, the purpose of anthropology is educational, that is, it makes us draw on what we learn from others and speculate on what the conditions and possibilities of life might be. Anthropology is not, therefore, about interpreting or explaining the behavior of others, but, on the contrary, about sharing their presence, 22

Goldman, How Democracy Works, 18. “A way of knowing rather than a frame work for know ledge as such. Fundamentally, as a way of knowing it is also a way of being” (Ingold, Being Alive, 239). 24 https://www.designdarktimes.net/home/designing-in-dark-times/read:more 23

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about learning from these life experiences, and applying this knowledge to the design of future conditions and possibilities. In this perspective, the world presents itself not as an object of study, but as its medium.25 Both in Goldman’s notion of ethnography as becoming and in Ingold’s criticism of ethnography understood as a mere description of the world, we find ways to think with anthropology as a commitment to what is experienced as a continuous process of transformation. So, we adhere to these anthropological approaches because they help us take seriously the dimensions of uncertainty26 and metamorphoses27 of what we tell in this book.

NEITHER NORTH NOR SOUTH If we turn to the field of design research, it will perhaps be difficult to find any kind of kinship with the theorizing operations carried out in the specialized literature even when they approach the themes of interest in our work. After all, here, we chose not to formulate answers, nor to build synthesis or models, but to invest in some open-ended minor speculations about what it means to make design education in troubled times. Here, we have in mind the idea of “minor design activism,” as proposed by Lenskjold, Olander e Halse: according to Marcelo Svirsky, a Deleuzian-inspired activism thus involves three interconnected qualities: “a confrontation with a stratifying organisation, a situational engagement,” and finally, “an inquiring attitude towards the actual”

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Tim Ingold, Anthropology. Why it Matters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). “Uncertainty might be considered to be a site for intervention, an element of processes of emergence, and as such an essential part of change-making processes, rather than something that change needs to be made to mitigate against” (Akama, Pink, Sumartojo, Uncertainty and Possibility, 31). 27 Metamorphoses as “a superposition of states rather than a linearly unfolding process of change from one clearly delineated state to another” (McLean, Fictionalizing Anthropology, 84). 26

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(Svirsky, 2010, p. 165). Translated into a design context, a becoming minor in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy alludes to actions that cannot be classified by predetermined programs and fixed categories within the project landscape. Becoming minor shuns attempts to co-opt dissenting interests or to control alternative future directions of the project. As for Svirsky’s emphasis on the double articulation of “engagement” and “an inquiring attitude,” incorporating both qualities into the socio-material engagements becomes the task of the design-researcher.28

We thus inevitably move away from the debate with major design theories formulated as generalizing and non-situated mental exercises. We feel, therefore, distant from those who would seemingly be our peers in the specialized literature in design studies, which is mostly produced outside of Brazil, and, as Dori Tunstall points out, in the English language, in the “Global North.”29 In distancing ourselves from the debate about design drawn from the so-called “Global North,” however, we also do not approach that which has been characterized by Tony Fry and Arturo Escobar as design for/by [and from] the “Global South.” Even so, with Escobar, we recognize that to the same extent as the North, the South is made up of multiple worlds, or as a pluriverse, as he puts it. And, following Fry, we cannot forget that the 28

Lenskjold, Tau Ulv; Olander, Sissel; Halse, Joachim. “Minor Design Activism: Prompting Change from Within,” Design Issues , v. 31, n. 4, Autumn 2015, 67–78. 29 “Surprisingly, in the major academic journals on design (for example Design Issues and Design Studies), there is limited discussion by Asian, African, Middle Eastern, or Latin American schol ars of design and imper i al ism or colonialism. Main critiques of imperialism and colonialism are written by Caucasian scholars in ex-colonial peripheries of Australia (Fry 1989) and South Africa (Van Eaden 2004). Exceptions are found in the 1989 Design Issues special issue on “Design in Asia and Australia,” with the contributions of Shou Zhi Wang (1989) on modern Chinese design and Rajeshwari Ghose (1989) on design and development in Asia, with a focus on India, Elizabeth Tunstall, “Decolonizing Design Innovation,” Design Anthropology, edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Charlotte Smith, (2013): 234.

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“South” is itself a designation of the “North.”30 So, like him, we are more comfortable in “the borderlands.”31 As Escobar puts it, “as a locus of ‘reconstituted designing,’ the borderlands are the space par excellence for the reconstitution of an ontology, ethics, and praxis of care in relation to what ought to be designed, and how.”32 According to Fry, these spaces of in-betweenness33 materialize as intercultural zones of encounter and discussion, and, in this sense, they can also be articulated through Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of contact zones.34 For us, however, it does not seem appropriate to establish some kind of equivalence between the borderlands, or the contact zones, and the rubric of the “Global South.” Therefore, even though we agree with Escobar and Fry when they point out that we have to devise “another way of thinking about design,” a “new method and language of engagement able to redefine design problems, and a new kind of practice of designing,” we

30

Tony Fry, “Design for/by ‘The Global South,”’ Design Philosophy Papers, 15:1, (2017); Arturo Escobar, “Response,” Design Philosophy Papers, 15:1 (2017). 31 “Borderlands are strategically occupied spaces (geographic and/or conceptual) of divi sion between a colo nial power able to exer cise economic, milit ary, polit ical, cultural, and epistem o lo gical power; and neoco lo nial people outside or inside the colonizing power’s border/sphere of influence. As such, these spaces constitute a particular place and perspective of observa tion, mode of being-in-the-world, and specific onto logy (. . .) From the perspect ive of design, the border land can be viewed as an inter me di ate space of thought and action based upon polit ical and prag matic acts of appro pri ation and bric ol age. The border land consti tutes condi tions of exchange in a dispositional space of betweenness wherein alienation and hypercritical reflection meet. It may also be materialized as an intercultural zone of encounter and discus sion where inform a tion is exchanged, lifeworlds are translated, solidarity is built, and friendships forged,” Tony Fry, “Design for/by ‘The Global South,”’ 11. 32 Escobar, “Response,” 40. 33 Tim Ingold, “On Human Correspondence.” 34 The contact zones can be defined as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. [. . .] A term to recon sider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under challenge today (Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 1991).

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do not identify ourselves with a program or agenda “of design in, by, and for the South,” which they call the D/S project. Instead of defining our thought as coming from the South, we took on more concrete and situated perspectives, reformulating Fry’s question of what in the end needs to be learned from design education. Not “in the context of design for/by the South,” we would say, but from our concrete experiences at ESDI between 2016 and 2018, which cannot be generalized as “from the South.” The same goes for works with which we found concrete affinities, such as those by Dori Tunstall and Sara Ahmed, which directly resonate with the challenges we are committed to facing, whether in our daily work at ESDI, or in this very book. After all, these works take shape out of the concrete engagements of these researchers, as members of their specific academic communities. Consequently, they reflect commitments to the production of knowledge that is anchored in educational practice. Similarly, we also feel direct affinities with works by several educators and researchers engaged in struggles to imagine design otherwise, such as, for example, those collected by Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim in the book Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives.35 So, if we are to locate ourselves in the literature on design and education, and if we can even relate to the notion of fraternity purported by Fry, it is, above all, as unfaithful heirs36 that we feel more at ease. We take Escobar’s words seriously when he states that “albeit in unpredictable directions, the modern/colonial dream of fitting all worlds into one has finally to be put on hold.”37 So, neither rejecting Western (eurocentric) thinking outright, nor underlining our possible approaches as design thinkers of this generalizing abstraction that is called “the South,” we prefer to establish a position in between, in the borderlands, or in the contact zones. In Tsing’s terms, we could say that we inhabit the “unruly edges and seams.”38 And that, as pointed out by Ingold, 35

Claudia Mareis; Nina Paim, Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, And Perspectives. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020. 36 Despret, Stengers, Women Who Make a Fuss. 37 Escobar, “Response,” 47. 38 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

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can also be characterized as a midstream,39 that is, as an interval between the specificities and differences that arise as a space for the circulation or ventilation of thought as a pluriversality.40 So, with Escobar, we think that indeed “there cannot be a unified subject for the D/S project.”41 We understand that the notion of a synthesis for the reorientation of design based on the term “Global South,” as well as the proposal to name some agenda under the heading “design for/by the Global South,” are inconsistent with the debate that, very keenly, Fry and Escobar raise. This is why we prefer to place ourselves in the debate not as peers, but as odd kin.42 After all, in strange moments like the ones that cross us today, uncomfortable presences can shed a light on issues that would otherwise be difficult to envision and address. And it is only with the forceful presence of our bodies that we can best engage in living and thinking. If both life and knowledge making are fabrics woven between bodies in a situation of encounter with other bodies in specific times and spaces, we choose to always stay close to what touches and affects our (two) bodies, so different from one another as they are, but which both stand on the same ground. As we rid ourselves of our tight shoes, we put our feet on the ground, and, in a movement of theoretical reterritorialization that implies taking on a “dwelling perspective,”43 we clear the ground for moving forward, walking and thinking barefoot. In order for this to happen, however, it is necessary to “know how to step on the ground,”44 as Guarani anthropologist Sandra Benites reminds us. 39

Ingold, “On Human Correspondence.” Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. 41 Escobar, “Response,” 40. 42 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 43 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000). 44 “These concepts—path, walking, forward—are building up at each step of the moments that we must follow and it is only with them that we can really embrace the world. Actually, when I say embrace the world, I literally mean the ground and the people, embracing the way in which they must face something unpredictable. So I’m talking about knowing how to step on the ground” (Sandra Benites, “Educação Guarani e interculturalidade: a(s) História(s) Nhandeva e o Teko,” Caracol, n. 20 (São Paulo, Jul./Dez. 2020), 188–200). 40

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DESIGNING . . . BUT NOT PROJECTING It is in this way that, in this chapter, we now evoke some threads that run throughout the book, so as to propose that designing can exist, and indeed thrive, without projecting, as more weaving and metamorphoses, and less coherence and projection. We thus approach, without actually arriving at a precise definition, a proposal for designing in dark times: perhaps the path to survival is not in an adequate, cohesive, structured, rational project, but in the acceptance of the incompleteness of any project (education, design, new worlds) that, like our limping survival as a school, could reveal openings for continuity as transformation. Not of a project, but of the possibility of moving forward, weaving worlds beyond projecting acts. Between 2016 and 2018, as we tried to keep the design school open, we promptly noticed some possible correspondences between our attempts to survive and a problematization of this founding element of the design field: the project. In order to take these questions even further, it is worth noticing one more time that, as Ingold reminds us, design is a verb. Conventionally, acts of designing relate with the future and with the prospective idea of problem solving. Differently from that which the argument from design attributes to the designer, which presupposes a preconception (the cogitation that comes before sight), ponders Ingold, “the design of everyday life” is produced according to an attitude he calls foresight: “To foresee, in this sense, is to see into the future, not to project a future state of affairs in the present; it is to look where you are going, not to fix an end point. Such foresight is about prophecy, not prediction. And it is precisely what enables practitioners to carry on.”45 The hegemonic conception of design is characterized by the exact opposite of this understanding of design activities as foreseeing: the acts of design are taken as preconceived projections intended as anticipations of desirable futures, in which the work would consist in determining the resurgence or the emergence

45

Ingold, Making, 69.

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of new conformations, aimed at improving or replacing a given experience with others that have not yet been carried out. Designing would imply a strong commitment to the determination, in the present, of a future that would be characterized by a difference in relation to what already existed. In other words, it would be the anticipation of futures by means of operations of replacement, improvement, reconfiguration, or innovation. According to this conception, it is as if the supposedly linear passage between past, present, and future could correspond to a progression, also linear, in which one should always replace and add to the lived and existing, new, or, more precisely, innovative elements distinguished exactly by a new materiality, arising from a design action. Along this progressive path towards the future, past and present would not present themselves as desirable places; they would seem to serve only as referents from which, by contrast, designers would be responsible for forwarding processes of conformation informed by an ideal of innovation. The features of the future would then be anticipated, in the present, by a differential conformation, produced by professionals who identify as project makers, or designers. However, the processes narrated in this book seem very different to us, as they are aimed at sustaining and maintaining life understood as action, work, daily struggle, and engagement in collectively imagining continuity and opening up to re-existences. In the acts of surviving, everything is continuously updated along the way, amid an infinite mesh of experiences, in which the game between what already is and what can become is configured not in the form of a single line that follows in a single direction, but, rather, like a texture, made from intersecting threads, in several continuous movements and, therefore, is always unfolding and growing.46 The present becomes desirable, and the urge for innovation, disposable. Throughout the encounters and disagreements in which life persists as a happening, what arises, then, is not so much the anticipation of a future that differs from the present, but rather

46

Ingold, The Life of Lines.

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the persistence of our dwelling amid the density and uncertainties of a time lived and experienced as present. Thus the strength to survive is updated in the daily movement, in the midst of the journey in which, precariously, people try together to invent ways to keep on living. Surviving has to do with foresight, with imagining possible ways out of life, negotiating, in the face of life itself, possibilities of escaping from the threats that emerge along the journey. In Ingold’s terms, “far from seeking finality and closure,” this attitude towards designing practices “would be open-ended, dealing in hopes and dreams rather than plans and predictions.”47 The critique of the links between the field of design and a conception of the future always associated with planning, was already anticipated, in the 1970s, by John Chris Jones. Denouncing, already at that time, an exaggerated emphasis on design methodologies, in which the field was defined by a commitment to objectives, results, and planning, he suggested that: design-as-process, design at the scale of being, does not have a goal. It’s non-instrumental. It’s a question of living, not planning life-not-yet-lived. Design without a product. The idea seems nonsense if applied to designing by professionals. But, seen as part of an historic shift from product-thinking to process-thinking, isn’t it what we overlooked? Designing disappears: becomes a way of using, an enlivening of how we live. There is no outcome. It’s a question of being, without stop.48

The final sentence of the quotation, “it’s a question of being, without stop” does echo what we have experienced at ESDI. When Jones points to “design at the scale of being,” he approaches Ingold and our debates on what it means to design in everyday life without a previous plan or project. However, Jones places

47 48

Ingold, Making, 71. John Chris Jones, Designing Designing (London; New York; Oxford; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020, 158).

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this discussion within the scope of design thinking, unlike Ingold, who insists on recovering the meaning of design as a verb, which necessarily links it to processes of knowing-in-being, which, therefore, are related to the realm of making. Our experiences at ESDI ended up working as experiments which, even though not altogether devoid of some kind of planning or projecting, were detached, by imposition of unstable times, from efforts to anticipate futures. Therefore, anything that could be likened to acts of projecting was limited to the immediate search for possibilities of carrying on, of going on existing. But is surviving really a matter of design? We think so! And ever more. Traditionally focused on the production of “solutions,” professional design practice is continually captured by the neoliberal looping guided by the logic of generating value and profit, often expressed in problematic terms such as “innovation” and “entrepreneurship,” among others. If we take Fry’s indictment of design’s role in creating the structural logic of constitutive unsustainability of today’s world49 into account, we can speculate that, during that time, at ESDI, our engagement with the commitment to keep identifying ourselves as a community of designers, even though we had renounced projecting, meant, first of all, a disengagement with the defuturiz ing tradi tion of design. Abandoning, albeit tempor ar ily, a project-oriented approach, or a design project education to which, one could say, we should remain faithful to, we ended up preventing defuturization. It was like this, resituating ourselves in the “unruly edges”50 that, perhaps paradoxically, we managed to survive. An important theme that emerged amid the experiments we lived at the school while academic activities could not be resumed, was that, unlike versions of ESDI’s history that had been written previously, these were marked by ambivalent relationships with a certain modern European heritage, which is often overemphasized (both when it is criticized and when it is valued), either in the school environment or in the analysis of its trajectory. There 49 50

Tony Fry, Defuturing (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

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was a hesitation regarding the role of German heritage in the school, and of a loyalty that the school should presumably maintain in relation to this heritage, seen as a determinant for the recognition of ESDI as an iconic and exemplary institution in the history of design education in Brazil. The reasons for our hesitation are many. Among them, one was clear from the moment we decided to run for directors: if there was any tradition to be preserved, it was one that refused to appease controversies through allegedly consensual decisions. After all, an appreciation for dissent and divergence was a striking feature of both the HfG Ulm and the Bauhaus, and this (and not any pedagogical program or conceptualization of design) was what drew our attachment to that tradition the most. Trying to continue doing design education when there were no minimum conditions for resuming regular academic activities was not only what we were left with, but also what most linked us, through tortuous paths, to a tradition of rupture so characteristic of modern design, as the one formulated from the Bauhaus and then from HfG Ulm. Debates around this issue marked all of our endeavors at ESDI between 2016 and 2018, and, consequently, the theoretical approach that we propose in this book. During that period, in order to keep the school open, we had to give up any guarantee of coherence with an intelligibility matrix that would direct our design practices and design education to propositions formulated elsewhere, a long time ago—say, at the Bauhaus, or, after that, at HfG Ulm. We can think of ESDI as an unfaithful daughter51 of the design education philosophy, which spread around the world from Germany. Among the various deviations from this heritage, it is worth pointing out how difficult it is to unconditionally adhere to the kind utopian modernist thought that historically marked both the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm. More precisely, the Brazilian school has not fully embraced the ulmian postulates around technical formalism and the idea of a design practice supported by 51

Vinciane Despret and Isabelle Stengers, Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014).

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science—a difficulty explained, in part, by the novelty of design as a professional domain in a country that was just beginning to industrialize. There was also a predominance of self-taught professors with an empiricist52 approach that, in a way, created obstacles to the “radical methodological deepening” idealized in Ulm. It is possible to perceive several lines joining our school to this heritage, and, in most cases, they are contradictory and antagonistic. Considering that we were moving in between those forces, we may speculate on whether ESDI’s longevity has something to do with its ability to transform itself, at the same time sustaining this heritage, but always reconstituting itself based on a certain lack of pretentiousness, or even infidelity vis-à-vis what came before. Could this swinging between heritage and infidelity, rather than an impasse, be the true force of continuity and transformation? We do not promise here a comprehensive examination of this hypothesis, but rather an appreciation of the intertwining between dominant structures (tradition) and minority forces (infidelity), without losing sight of the differences between these two apparently antagonistic worlds, but also without the ambition to merge them or to replace one with the other. Instead, we suggest an inversion. When, as we face troubling times, a given consolidated field of knowledge (say, design) presents itself as

52

Regarding the constitution of an alternative way of doing design propagated from the school, one has to mind that designer Aloisio Magalhães was one of its founders. Since the creation of the school, Magalhães endeavored to consider issues and ways in design distinct from those more directly aligned with the Ulmian approach. On this topic, see Zoy Anastassakis, Triunfos e Impasses: Lina Bo Bardi, Aloisio Magalhães e o design no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina Editora, 2014). Regarding the reading that ESDI would have been only a “carbon paper” of Ulm, it should be noted, in addition to the inaccuracy of this interpretation of the school as an uncrit ical import, that the very wide spread “Ulm model,” was itself full of contradictions and conflicts of divergent forces, and far removed from the simpli fy ing histor ical myth i fic a tion of which it has been the object. On this topic, see Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza, ESDI: Biografia de uma ideia (Rio de Janeiro: EDUERJ, 1996), 44, 51, 152.

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a privileged locus for an urgent debate in the search for new paths, the small infidelities—the smallest movements of daily life, the apparently minor forces, free from the demand for definitive solutions and from pre-demarcated fields of knowledge—will perhaps be the ones that will offer the best alternative experiences as we move forward. After all, given the crisis we experienced at ESDI from 2016 onwards, both the past to which we were heirs and those promises of the future that came with such a legacy, dissolved in front of a present that imposed itself with density. When we realized that the school’s existence was imperilled, instead of resigning ourselves to closing it or indulging in projecting a way out through a new institutional project, we bet on staying a little longer there, together, removing our shoes, planting our feet in the ground, cultivating maintenance and care in relation to what was still possible. What remains from it? Ongoingness.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Zoy Anastassakis is a designer and anthropologist. She is an associate professor at Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), where she coordinates the research group Laboratório de Design e Antropologia (Design and Anthropology Laboratory). From 2016 to 2018, she was ESDl’s Director. In 2018, she was invited as a guest researcher at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Since 2019, she is an associate researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), in Lisbon, Portugal. Marcos Martins is a designer and associate professor at Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), where he was Deputy Director from 2016 to 2018. His work as a designer ranges across several fields, and his research seeks to open design to intersections with other domains such as art, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and education. Since his post-doctoral research at Princeton University in 2018, he investigates social media interfaces through a historical and critical perspective.

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INDEX Page numbers: Figures are given in italics and notes as [page number] n. [note number]. absence from class 185–91, 199 academic units, directing 66 administrative forces 115 administrative posts 66, 81 admission processes, exam tests 60, 200 Advisory Board, ESDI 51 affirmative action policies 76–7, 178, 180–1, 185–7, 195 African religions 179 afro-indigenous relations 15–16, 172–3 Ahmed, Sara 7–8, 215 algorithms, website layout 91–2 Almeida, Maria Regina Celestino de 34–5 Almendra, Vilma 164–5 Álvares, Alberto 158, 166, 171 animation techniques 94, 163, 179 Anthropocene 205 anthropological approach 170–1, 211–12 anti-poverty programs 185n.1 architectural symbiosis 148–9, 151 architectural training 42–3 architecture department, ESDI 100 Arendt, Hannah, The Freedom to Be Free 79 Arrungindala, Makota 178–9 Asian design 213n.29 assassinations 70–2, 74, 75, 77 atabaques 179 attendance records 191 attentionality 204 Australian design 213n.29 authoritarianism 58, 68, 71, 79 Baniwa, Denilson 158, 166, 168, 171 Baniwa, Francy 155, 156, 166 Bardi, Lina Bo 43

Bauhaus 46, 57, 152, 163–4, 221 Bauhaus Dessau 152, 164 Benites, Sandra 155, 156, 158, 166, 171, 216 Bense, Max 43 Bergmiller, Karl Heinz 43, 46, 122, 123 Bill, Max 2, 42–3 Bispo dos Santos, Antonio 172n.8 Black cotista students 59, 87, 197 Black students admission processes 200 affirmative action 76, 77, 178, 180–1 human rights 172 Indigenous relations 16 living conditions 187–8 private schools 184 silencing of 197 use of term 8n.11 work, necessity of 198 bodies, occupying same space 198, 208, 216 Bolsa Família program 185 bolsonarismo ideals 77 Bolsonaro, Flávio 77 Bolsonaro, Jair 14, 70–1, 74–5, 77–9, 81, 110 book production 148 borderlands 214–15 Brazil colonization 14, 27, 30–6, 90, 181 design history 96–7 failure for low attendance 190n.5 quota policy 186, 195 research funding criteria 192 social inequality 110 timeline of events 13 Britto, Antônio Carlos de (Cacaso) 52–3, 130

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INDEX

Brown students (pardos), affirmative action 76 buildings, collapse of 72 bureaucratic structures 192 ‘cabeça de porco’ 40 Cacaso (Britto, Antônio Carlos de) 52–3, 130 Campos, Haroldo de 52 candomblé 179 CAPO see Centro Acadêmico Carmen Portinho carente see needy students carioca 27 Carlinhos (Santos, Carlos Ferreira dos) 138 Carmen, Dona 178 Carvalho, Ricardo Artur 167 Casa 247 project 144 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 172–3 Centro Acadêmico Carmen Portinho (CAPO) 127, 184, 194 change-making processes 212n.26 Ciclo Orgânico (organic cycle) 142 class backgrounds 76 class-consciousness 74 classroom as debate setting 51 classroom dynamics 49, 52, 53, 64, 67 classroom protocols 47n.1 cleaning funding cuts 113 cleaning staff 105–6 Colaboratório 129–30, 143–7 collaborative activities 86–92, 146 collective acts 9, 69, 113, 124 collective awareness 176, 177 collective commitments 12 collective engagement 8 colonization 14, 27, 30–6, 90, 181, 213n.29 Indigenous experiences 172–3 “quality” and 90 community garden project 138–9, 139–40 community movement, ESDI 175–6

community outreach activities 148 commuting difficulties 133, 175, 188, 198 composting project 138–9, 141–2 “confluence” concept 172n.8 Conselho Consultivo (Advisory Board, ESDI) 51 conservatism 76n.1 contact zones 214–15 “correspondence” 155n.1, 204–5 Costa, Lucio 42 cotista scholarships 115, 128–9, 131, 155, 174 cotistas admission chances 57 adoption of term 14n.16 affirmative action policies 77, 181 elitism and 197, 201 ESDI Aberta movement 148 human rights 172 Indigenous relations 16 “nonbelonging” 194 occupation of ESDI 130–1 racial/social discrimination 178 suspension of classes 133 “unpreparedness” 58–61, 63 work, necessity of 198–9 counter-colonial movement 79 coup d’état 47 Covid-19 pandemic 190n.4 credit system, UERJ 59n.6 crisis, conceptualization of 11 “cultural broth” 56 curriculum reform 2, 54–5, 60–4, 68 Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera 31 D/S project 215–16 debate in classroom setting 51 “quality” standards 89 defensive response, “quality” as 90 defuturization 205–6, 220 delayed arrival at class 185 Deleuze, Gilles 210, 213

INDEX democratization 54, 74–5, 79–80, 81 deputy director appointment 68–9, 80, 83 design, definitions 206–7, 217 design education 6–7, 163 history of 152 knowledge exchange 9, 16, 208 storytelling 207 as territorialized education 209 design history 96–7, 152 design research 15, 137–53, 192, 212–13 design schools closure, threat of 10 collective acts 8, 12 reflection on future of 153 design theory axes of 56, 63 formulating 213 Despret, Vinciane 207 “detours”, use of term 121 developmentalism 10, 76n.1 dictatorship 47, 74, 80, 103 director appointments 65–70, 80, 83 Directors’ Forum 116–17, 125n.13 director’s office, use of space 84, 85–6, 176, 177 Diretório Acadêmico (student’s union) da ESDI 48, 53, 127n.16 “dismantling laboratory” concept 110 distance learning 186 “Dja Guata Porâ” exhibit 171 Duarte, Frederico 149–51 Dugnoille, Julien 148–9 “dwelling perspective” 216 education analysis of 6 broadening meaning of 8 crisis in 111 debates on 7 design education contrast 163 knowledge exchange 9

239

elections for ESDI management 65–70 presidential 70–82 elitism 59–60, 110, 198 affirmative action against 76, 187 cotistas’ views 197, 201 free education and 111 quota policy and 131, 178 empiricist approach 222 entrepreneurship 38 Eppinghaus, Roberto 163–4 equality, freedom for 79 Escobar, Arturo 205–6, 213–16 Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI) 1, 13 access construction 113 architecture 21–30 the boulevard 22, 23, 125 closure, threat of 120 community movement 175–6 curriculum 45–54, 68 as elitist school 201 entrance 39, 97–9, 120, 193, 195 entrepreneurship project 38 failing classes 191n.5 gates 99, 101, 102, 134, 195–6 as hegemonic unit 61 history of 2, 42–3, 164, 220–2 landslide damage 73 location 19, 22, 31, 39–40 logo 92–6 management of 12, 80–1, 83, 135 model design course 44 non-institutional practices 193–4 occupation of 27, 30–1, 44, 119, 124–32 “ongoingness” 223 outdoor classes 84 patio 138 pavilion 102 postgraduate program 3 project classes 10 rationality/functionality standards 85 renovations 53–4, 73, 100

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school grounds 98 student recreation 70 survival 219–20 termite damage 29, 148–9 undergraduate program 3, 68, 130 website 87–92, 88 Escola Técnica de Criação (ETC) 2, 40 ESDI see Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial ESDI Aberta movement (Open ESDI) 4, 15, 64, 120, 150, 151 documenting activities 149, 153 knowledge sharing 132 multiplicity 208 outreach activities 148 party 121, 122–4, 134 “Esdião” 132 ESDILab 86–7, 96–7 Espaços Verdes (green spaces) 140, 142–3, 147, 155 ETC see Escola Técnica de Criação ethnic identity, creation of 35 ethnography 210–12 Eurocentric monoculture 205 exam preparation 60 exam tests, admission 60, 200 exhibition spaces 101, 151, 171 “experience design” 58 experimental approach collective work 4 futurisms 206 interruption of 81 research 15, 137–53 storytelling 21 survival 10 visual 160–3, 170–1 face-to-face meetings 187, 190n.4 failing classes 191n.5, 192, 199 family income, supplementing 185–6 favelas 37, 139, 141, 189 Feitler, Bea 96 Figueroa, Daiara 158

film presentations 50, 179 floods 72 Flusser, Vilém 52 food table system 132–3 foreseeing 217, 219 formalism 42–3, 57, 89, 94, 221 Forum de Diretores (Directors’ Forum) 116–17, 125n.13 Franco, Marielle 14, 37, 70–2, 74, 75–80 free education, objection to 111, 117 freedom–knowledge relationship 137 freshmen welcoming parties 194 Fry, Tony 205, 213–16, 220 futurisms 205–6, 218–19 garden project 138–9, 140, 143, 155, 156 Gatt, Caroline 206 gay students 196–7 General Assembly, ESDI 51, 54 glass materials 101, 103 “Global North”, use of term 213–14 “Global South”, use of term 213–14, 216 Goldman, Marcio 172n.8, 179n.11, 210–12 Gomes, Anderson 74, 75 grading criteria, ESDI 47–8 graphic design 2n.2, 89, 90, 166 graphic workshop, ESDI 143–7, 146, 163 Guanabara Bay 26–7, 32, 34, 36 Guattari, Félix 210, 213 Haraway, Donna 205 Staying with the Trouble 112, 203 HfG see Hochshcule für Gestaltung hiring staff 113, 115 historical reconstruction 21n.7 history, narrative approach 21 see also design history

INDEX Hochshcule für Gestaltung (HfG) 10, 42–4 curriculum 46, 49, 51, 56, 57 dissent/divergence 221 preliminary courses 164 see also Ulm School homophobia 196–7 human rights violations 172 Huni Kuin culture 160–3 Huni Kuin, Ibã Sales 159–61, 162, 163–5, 166, 170, 171 immersion 163 imperialism, critique of 213n.29 Indigenous artists 155–82 Indigenous graphic art 166 Indigenous metamorphoses 35–6, 44 Indigenous relations 15–16, 33 Indigenous researchers 155–82 Indigenous students, affirmative action 76, 180–1 industrial design 1, 25–6, 42, 43, 45–6 industrialization and progress 1 inequality, elitism and 198 Ingold, Tim 148–9, 151, 155n.1, 204–6, 209–12, 215–17, 219–20 “innovation” 93 installations 150, 151 Institute of Arts 65, 77 Institutional Act No. 5 54 institutional approach process 157 institutional instability 112 Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia 142 interaction design 58 internships 105, 198 Itten, Johannes 46, 164 job contracts, cotistas 198–9 Jobim, Antônio Carlos 83 Jones, John Chris 219–20 joy, experience of 204 Kadiwel, Idjahure 158 Kalantidou, Eleni 205

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Kamayurá, Wally 158–9 Katxa Naua (Huni Kuin fertility ritual) 162 knowledge exchange/sharing 7, 9, 53, 132, 208 knowledge making 137, 216, 222–3 Krenak, Ailton 205 Kuikuro, Takumã 167 Kuikuro, Ynê 158–9 Laboratório de Design e Antropologia (LaDA) 142, 156, 163 Lacerda, Carlos 25 LaDA see Laboratório de Design e Antropologia Lagoa do Boqueirão area 26–7 Lagrou, Elsje 160 land ownership 173 landscape 19, 20 landslides, Rio de Janeiro 71–2, 73 late arrival at class 183–5 Latin American developmental project 10 Latour, Bruno 205, 207 legal department 78, 99–100, 114 Lenskjold, Tau Ulv 212 Lessa, Carlos 52 “leveling” concept 56 Levinho, Carlos 166 LGBTQIA+ movement 77 Lisbon university 151–2 logo design 92–6 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva xxi, 71n.1, 185, 232 Lula xxi, 71n.1, 185, 232 Magalhães, Aloisio 50, 96, 222n.52 MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin) 160 maintenance services 106–7, 113, 115, 130–1 Maldonado, Tomás 2, 43 MAM see Museu de Arte Moderna

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management elections, ESDI 65–70, 80–1, 83, 135 Mareis, Claudia, Design Struggles 215 mathematics subjects 56–7 Mattern, Shannon 204 Mattos, Amilton 160, 163, 170 metamorphoses 212n.27 midstream 216 military dictatorship 47, 74, 80 “minor design activism” 212–13 miração (looking) 161–2 money circulation system 132–4, 175 Moreira, Maria Eni 178–9 Motta, Nelson 120 movable types 145 Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (MAHKU) 160 multiplicity 208 Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) 2, 25, 40, 42 Museu do Índio 157–8, 160, 166–71 mutirão 118–19, 144, 147 mutual trust 133–4 mycelial design 143 Ñandeva, Guarani 156 narrative 21, 210 see also storytelling Nasa people, Colombia 164, 165 needy students absence from class 188 admission processes 200 affirmative action policies 178, 180–1 quota policy 195 use of term 8n.11 negros see Black students news media 111, 116–17, 174–5 Niemeyer, Oscar 42 Nixi Pae 161 “North”, “South” as designation of 214 occupation of ESDI space 15, 119, 124–32, 163

Ogã Bangbala 179–80 Oiticica, Hélio 52 Oliveira, Thiago 168 Olympic Games 36 openness, survival through 103 orixá dances 179 outreach activities 148 pacification policy 37–8 Paim, Nina, Design Struggles 215 pardos, affirmative action 76 partial connections, storytelling 6 Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) xxi Partido Social Liberal (PSL) 74 Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL) 74 parties, ESDI 121, 122–4, 134, 194 Passareli, Matheusa 77, 78–80 Paz, Maria Valderez Sarmento Coelho da 54 pedagogical principles 47, 50–1, 58, 192 perception workshops 162–3 PhD degrees, professors with 66 photographs 91–2, 97 policing 37, 188–9 political authoritarianism 71 political awareness, students’ 47 political unrest 71, 75–6 Portinho, Carmen 28, 40, 48, 51, 178 Portuguese colonization 27, 32–5 poverty, affirmative action 76 Pratt, Mary Louise 214 presidential elections 70–82 printed materials 129–30, 144–5 private schools 184, 195 procrastination 190 product design 2, 26, 141 professors absence from class 191 delayed payment 115 qualifications 25, 66 resilience in crisis 116 retirement 113 salary cuts 107

INDEX professors’ strike 112, 115 programação visual 2 progress 1, 9–10, 90 project as foundation of design 11, 217 pedagogical principles 58 in practice 10 Pronzato, Carlos 125–6 PSL (Partido Social Liberal) 74 PT and Workers party xxi public education government campaigns against 117 news media, attacks by 110–11 universal access 181 public tenders 113, 114 punctuality 183 “quality” 89–90, 103 Quilombolas 76, 180–1 quota policy 14n.16, 76n.1, 90, 131, 178, 180 criticism of 200–1 needy students 195 opposition 186 see also cotista students racial affirmative action 76n.1 racial discrimination 178 racism 173, 178 rationalist paradigm 9–10, 85, 89 Reidy, Affonso Eduardo 2, 40 remote teaching 190n.4 “representation” 91 research funding 192 research projects 15, 137–53 response-abilities 204–5 rhetoric 89 Ribeiro, Darcy 111 Rio de Janeiro colonial settlements 34 deaths, numbers of 188–9 economic/fiscal crisis 4 ESDI’s location 23, 26, 41 landslides 71–2

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pacification policy 37 resurgence of 36 slave trade 178 slum communities 142 tenements 40n.29 territorial disputes 19, 32, 36 Rio school of modernist architecture 42–3 Rousseff, Dilma 71, 109 salary bonuses 124 salary cuts 107–8 salary deposits, late payment 106–9, 115 salary negotiations 112 Santos, Carlos Ferreira dos (Carlinhos) 138 Santos, Ynaê Lopes dos 178 São Paulo design school 25, 43, 159 scholarships 59, 77, 115, 128–30, 133, 195 failing classes and 192 full reinstatement of 131 as household income 175, 185 income, amount of 185 suspension reasons 191 security sector 127 self-portraits class 172 series system, cotista students 59 service design 58, 141 silk-screening technique 159 Silva, Luiz Ângelo da 178 Simas, Luiz Antonio 31 sistema seriado (series system) 59 situated knowledge 5, 16 slave economy 178 slum communities 142, 185, 189 social discrimination 178 social exclusion 79 social inclusion policies 75 social inequality 110 sound, seeing 161–3 “South” D/S project 215–16 as designation of “North” 214

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Souza, Pedro Luiz Pereira de 40, 122 ESDI Biografia de Uma Ideia 47n.1 Spinoza, Baruch 204 State University of Rio de Janeiro” (UERJ) conservatism, resurgence of 77 Consun 78n.2 course distribution systems 59n.6 decay, signs of 107 ESDI location 22 funding cuts 113 legal bureaucracy 78 management elections 65, 67, 81 political fragility 75 professors’ resilience 116 Steinberg, Silvia 163–4 Stengers, Isabelle 205, 207 In Catastrophic Times 204 storytelling 3–13, 207 dark perspectives 16–17 hidden force in 20 historical reconstruction 21n.7 response-abilities 205 situated knowledge 5, 16 strikes 112, 115–17, 124, 130 student meetings 84, 85–6, 118, 187 student occupation, ESDI 15, 119, 124–32, 163 student representation 87–92, 193–4 student’s union, ESDI 48, 53, 127n.16 studio-residence, ESDI 144 survival 10–11, 103, 217–20 Svirsky, Marcelo 212–13 Szaniecki, Barbara 142n.6 table system 132–4 Tamoio–Temiminó rivalry 32–4 teaching methods, ESDI 50–1 technical formalism 43, 57, 221 technicians delayed payment 115

salary cuts 107 strike 124, 130 Temiminó 32–4, 35–6 temporality 135 tenements, Rio de Janeiro 40n.29 termitology specialism 148–9 territorial disputes 19, 32, 36 territorialized education 209 theory pedagogy 50–1 theory–practice divide 51, 56 Thomas, Gerald 111–12 transparency 101, 103 tree planting project 28, 138 Tsing, Anna 19n.1, 20n.3, 21n.7, 215 The Mushroom at the End of the World 204 Tucum company 158 Tunstall, Dori 213, 215 Tupinambá 26–7, 32–3, 36 typography 93–5 UERJ see State University of Rio de Janeiro” UERJ Resiste 4n.3, 116 Ulm School 42–4, 46, 49, 51, 56–7 dissent/divergence 221 presence in ESDI 164 typographical exercises 95 visual experimentation 163 Ulmian formalism 89, 94 uncertainty 212n.26 “unconferences” 122 Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs) 37–8 unintentional design 20, 207 universal access, public education 181 university academic excellence 192 measurement systems 192–3 university environment, complaints about 7 UPPs (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora) 37–8 urbanism 43

INDEX vegetable garden project 138–9, 141, 143, 155, 156 violence 19, 21, 37, 172–3, 178, 189 “vision machines” 161, 163 visual communication 2n.2, 26, 45–6, 87, 166 visual experimentation 160–3, 170–1 visual programming 2

war as social organization 33 “weariness” 190 website development 87–92, 88 Weintraub, Abraham 110 Wollner, Alexandre 43 working conditions, cotistas 198–9 writing experiences 12–17, 207

wage payments, disruption to 106–7, 130–1, 174

Xakriabá, Célia 209 Xingu houses 158–9

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