Anthea Garman
At the heart of design (in all its facets) is an essential tension: the drive to create freely versus the need to make that creativity pay by generating jobs and markets, never mind prestige for its owner.
This tension too lies at the heart of the International Design Indaba, which had its fifth incarnation in Cape Town at the Artscape complex last month. This year the indaba had an impressive array of speakers (19 internationals packed into three days plus eight South Africans). Many were artists rather than pure designers and they covered the spectrum from obscure food art (Marti Guixe) and unwearable garments (Lucy Orta) to channelling people through airports and designing car manufacturing factories (Erik Spiekermann).
The tension is especially evident in the new media component of the indaba, where edgy youngsters who’ve grown up on shareware and the promise of the Internet to provide unfettered freedom of expression, bring that ethos into what can be a rather uptight environment where commerce is high priority.
This year the New Media Underground Forum, which follows design conferences around the world, came to town with a cheaper space for new media aficionados to meet and thus created another layer of tension for organiser Ravi Naidoo and his Cape Town Major Events Company by piggybacking on his world-class speakers.
The other intrusion into recent indabas is the anti-globalisation debate. Many of the speakers place themselves quite squarely on the side of the people (versus the multinationals) and many of the talks had an edge of strong protest against the very patrons designers are desperate to woo. The other shadowy presence was George Bush’s War on Terrorism with many of the exhibited works having an uncanny feeling of prescience and double entendre.
Naidoo, as organiser and inspiration (not an indaba goes by without verbal encouragement from him about shaking off the South African inferiority complex), walks a narrow line. He cajoles corporates into sponsorship of various aspects of the indaba (and where necessary lets a particularly important one have its five minutes at the mike to punt its stuff) and he also engages with the woeful situation around us joblessness and street children and the context of Cape Town city.
So that’s what lies beneath. What came on the surface for those of us sitting on our bums hour after hour and eating far too much rich food was a real feast.
Just stunning was the simple, clean architecture of Shigeru Ban. Highly innovative, this Japanese architect pushes the envelope of what’s physically possible with a deep concern for how humans live in their cities. He has pioneered the use of paper tubes as a building material, and persuaded Japanese authorities to recognise his tests of the durability and strength of his buildings. Recently he designed and built the Japanese building for the Hanover Expo 2000 in Germany, which is an organic dome-shaped latticework of wood and paper. He is also testing paper tube homes for Rwandan refugees in Africa and in India with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Another amazing engagement with urban spaces is the work of Andrew Shoben of Greyworld who works entirely with sound to wake people up to the living city around them. He says public art is usually “a lot of shit. It represents nothing the public connects with”. Likewise, the way inner cities are laid out are a town planner’s “wet dream”, zones of grey you pass through to get to somewhere you actually live. Greyworld changes all that by collecting the unique sounds of the grey spaces and giving them “sound awards”. Visit www.soundawards.org for “the sonic history of a city”.
Another original was Spaniard Marti Guixe. Although he has a background in industrial design he spends a lot of time messing around with food. He says: “Food in Europe is no longer a necessity, it’s a commodity, therefore I can design it.” He has created the perfect Catalan snack for eating over computers. Spamt (a play on e-mail spam and the stuff the soldiers ate in World War II) is a tomato of perfect mouth size stuffed with bread soaked in olive oil and salt. He also designed nutritional particles you can inhale instead of chew. Everything he does is playful, unusual and inspired by living in exactly this kind of world and not another ideal one.
Lucy Orta is an artist preoccupied with the violence of being homeless. She has created a series of body suits that double as clothing and shelter not for any use but as a protest against the comfortableness we have with the millions of dispossessed on our planet. “To be homeless in a media culture such as ours is to be rendered invisible,” she says. Her Nexus Architecture is a series of padded suits with umbilical cords tying multiple people together. Covered in graffiti and symbols, the nexus suits appeared at the G8 protests in Genoa.
Hans Bernard, a German “media terrorist” and creator of etoys.com, shot to infamy in November 2000 when he took over an American site allowing people to buy and sell votes during the presidential election. “If the United States wants to be the lone superpower ruling the world, then all of us should be able to vote for your president,” he said. A human rights lawyer pointed out on the same programme that the US legal system could clamp down on individuals’ trading votes, but was completely powerless in the face of corporations buying presidents.
Perhaps the parting thought for me came from Li Edelkoort, a trends forecaster who describes her work as the marriage of intuition and intellect. She runs a very successful business advising others about what will become major on the social scene. “Use intuition like a muscle,” she said, “teach it to work.”
Her message was “engage”. “Good times are over, but bad times may never come.” The secret, apparently, is to work with the world and never underestimate what lies beneath the surface.
Underlying the event this year was a dynamic tension, the entity that keeps us alive, arguing and fighting. The indaba definitely had it this year. For more information go to www.designindaba.com.