10 DESIGN STRUGGLES

REDESIGNING DESIGN IN THE PLURIVERSE

Speculative Fabulations from a School in the Borderlands

Zoy Anastassakis

WARNING! Instead of an Introduction

Warning! If you expect to find neutrality, coherence, and impartiality in an academic text, cease reading right now! It seems to me that a situated perspective is a fundamental component of an academic engagement guided by an ethic of affects. ¹ In this paper, I intend to take this commitment seriously, bringing to the debate what has affected me during the last three decades in which I have participated in the academic community of a design school situated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

One should not expect to find here a report of successes or results. First and foremost, this paper is an effort to think through attempts and rehearsals on “education as a practice of freedom.”² Nor will my attention be restricted to a distinct group of specific people. What interests me is the quality of affects and relations in play in the situations described. Later, in dialogue with the anthropologists Arturo Escobar and Tim Ingold, I will characterize this as “pluriversal agencings.”

Confabulating with these affects, I return to some situations I came across in the Superior School of Industrial Design, at Rio de Janeiro State University (ESDI/UERJ) ³, to create a speculative fabulation⁴ from some encounters with “Amerindians, Blacks, and the Poor”⁵ which took place there. Telling these stories, I look for descriptive tools that allow me to both convey and be conveyed by the affects, thus protecting and caring for the “matters of concern”⁶ at play in the situations in which, together, redesigning design,⁷ we carve pathways toward the “pluriverse.”⁸

By “together” I refer to all of those with whom I shared experiences; that is, those with whom I experienced the stories I now tell. However, more than the facts, what interests me is the quality of the relations and affects. Written as a political act, this paper comes from a combination of these affects and the reflections on them developed with Professor Marcos Martins while preparing a book about our experiences as ESDI’s directors between 2016 and 2018.

Once upon a Time in a Brazilian Design School

Once upon a time there was a school where I was often annoyed. I had been annoyed in other schools before. So, nothing new. But in this one my annoyance was different, perhaps more dramatic, because everyone said that it was the best school for that subject in that place. I don’t know how, but I survived the course and my affliction, and seven years later, right there, graduated as an industrial designer.

Nine years after that, in 2008, I began a doctoral degree in anthropology, in which I questioned the origin myths of design in Brazil.⁹ During the degree, I returned to that school as an apprentice teacher under the same professor that, in 1999, had supervised my undergraduate project. In 2008, there was a different buzz on campus compared to my time as a student. This had to do with the presence of “Black” and “Poor” students there. As part of the UERJ, as of 2000 ESDI had to adhere to the policies of social and racial quotas, in which this university was a pioneer.¹⁰

Since its implementation, however, the quotas have been contested by certain segments within the university. Matters were not – and are not – any different at ESDI. Some professors never hid their discomfort with the presence of the beneficiaries of these policies at the school, and a variety of arguments have been evoked to disqualify them and their academic performance. However, much like the abuse hurled at Afro-Brazilian religions discussed by Goldman and Flaksman, I have noticed that, at ESDI, too, “as usually happens in the Brazilian case, this prejudice and this racism never self-styles itself and functions without reference to colors and races, which are always substituted by pseudo-universals.”¹¹

A former student who had benefited from the system of quotas mentioned an episode in which a professor, in class, confessed that she found it difficult to teach students who did not have art books at home, and who, despite being over eighteen, had never been to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The student felt that situations like this were evidence that, even now, more than ten years after the implementation of a system of quotas, some professors did not yet have the sensibility to deal with “Black and the Poor” students from the favelas, such as himself.

What this former student sees as a deficiency in the professor – that is, the lack of sensibility to deal with students like him – is the converse of the accusation that the professor aimed at the class, which, in her view, reflected a deficiency in students who benefited from social and racial quotas. What distinguishes them is that she feels authorized to speak, without constraint or discomfiture, and without any interest in the repertoire that the student bears. From the student, in contrast, the expected response is silence, a resigned recognition of his own deficiency, and the requisite effort to overcome it through study.

In many other situations like this one, it is noteworthy that the values of universality and equality, taken to be the ends and means of formal education, are called upon not to congregate, but to repel those who do not or will not conform to the elitist standards that inform the university. This applies to the very law¹² that empowered “Black and the Poor” young people to obtain places in the public universities of Rio de Janeiro, which were upheld by these principles. In many cases, instead of ensuring access, they ultimately serve as arguments for policies that, in practice, inhibit or even prevent quota students from accessing or remaining in university.

In 2011, after finishing my doctoral degree, I was hired as an associate professor at ESDI. The system of quotas at UERJ was already over ten years old. Without a doubt, at that time, the place was altogether different, much more interesting for being less homogenous in what pertains to the student body,¹³ most of whom had been white children from middle-class families with access to high-quality education, as was my case.

On coming back to that place, I did not see myself returning to the same school in a different role: previously a student, now a professor. Being myself someone else already, I also returned to somewhere else, a place now transformed. It was this feeling that compelled me to return. It was as if, collaborating in the transformation of the academic life of that place, I could transmute my own experience as a student resentful of the elitism that never ceased to be exalted by much of the academic staff, who seemed to believe that they were educating an intellectual elite that would redeem the nation, and would be responsible for making viable, through design, a pathway for development. Far from these developmentalist dreams, it was with joy¹⁴ and hope that I came back. After all, it seemed to me that things could no longer remain the same. Not just there, but in Brazil as a whole.

Living Together in Difference: Stories of Opposition and Reinvention

In 2002, a man who was born into poverty was elected president of the Republic. Hailing from the Northeast, migrating with his family from the backlands of Pernambuco to industrial São Paulo, lacking higher education, molded in the trade unions of the car industry, founder of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT). During his government, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva invested in a set of policies aimed at repairing the social inequality that is a constitutive characteristic of Brazil.

With Lula and later with Dilma Rousseff, the PT remained in power from 2002 to 2016, when President Rousseff was deposed in a coup. Two years later, on April 7, 2018, Lula was sentenced to prison, where he stayed for 580 days. Some days before his arrest, in an act in honor of Marielle Franco,¹⁵ a councilwoman assassinated on March 14, he declared:

It is important to remember that in only twelve years we put in universities almost the same number of students that they took over one hundred years to place, in this country… It is foolish that they think that, by taking me out of the game, their problem is solved. I’m not their problem. You’re their problem, you who don’t want to be treated like cattle anymore. You want to be treated like people, you don’t want to be beat down, you no longer want to play a supporting role, but rather be subjects of history.¹⁶

A while later, Lula admitted he was convinced that “the difference” would come from the generation of poor people who had access to university because of education policies put into effect during his government. It was this “difference” that I felt when I returned to ESDI in 2008.

In 2015, at UERJ, we had elections for deans and direction boards. In this university, the whole academic community has the right to vote, including professors, staff, and students. I was on maternity leave when I received an email from the outgoing director, calling on the teachers to organize a ticket for ESDI’s directorship. After all, the deadline for registering had already passed, and no one had put forward a candidacy.

We met during the following days to discuss our options. I proposed that we evaluate our chances for decentralizing administrative tasks and sharing responsibility for directing the school. Some colleagues offered to contribute toward this idea, but no one had, yet, proposed a candidacy.

Finally, I and Marcos Martins, who was coordinating a curricular revision that was about to be implemented, decided to run. Otherwise the implementation of the new pedagogical curriculum would be compromised. Not restricted to pedagogical aspects, the reformulation was also oriented by political issues directly related to the adequacy of the course to the diverse realities of the students who entered the university through the quota system.

The curricular revision was based on the understanding that the school could no longer ignore the diversity of perspectives for the professional practice of contemporary design, nor could it neglect the challenges faced by the students to conclude their degrees and to enter the job market. At last, we felt that the course needed to be updated, not in terms of ideals or universal values, but, on the contrary, in search of situated, possible, and viable alterations that could attend to the demands of that academic community, at that time, and in that place.

This was not a peaceful, consensual process, nor was it organized around ideas. It resulted from tense debates and plenty of negotiating with students, staff, and the university’s Department of Pedagogic Orientation and Supervision. By opening the process up to the participation of all, through a work dynamic involving small, alternating groups, as proposed by Marcos, we finally concluded the process, which had dragged on for more than ten years.

We took office as the new directorship on March 1, 2016, as a team sharing all responsibilities. A strike started on the same day and lasted for six months, after which we faced a year and a half of profound crisis that began when the state of Rio de Janeiro, UERJ’s sole benefactor, started to delay the funding necessary for paying wages and scholarships, and for the upkeep of installations and academic activities. The ensuing instability affected not only the university, but many other segments of the public sector, including the payment of retirees. Responding to the situation, at ESDI we began a series of experiments to avoid closing the school.¹⁷

Meanwhile, we invited students to work with us, sharing managerial activities. Responding to an open call, eight students offered to be part of what we called Esdilab. Organized into two groups, they acted on behalf of the school, drawing up proposals for occupying and using its facilities and equipment, and reformulating its institutional communication.

From this collaborative effort, which brought together directors and students, a series of initiatives emerged which transformed important aspects of life in the school, including the realization of large-scale projects developed with other students, alumni, professors, staff, and institutional partnerships. These projects – the building of a new entrance to the school, a renewed visual communication, and a website – called into question notions of hierarchy, authorship, and project, because they resulted from “pluriversal”¹⁸ “agencings,”¹⁹ open and negotiated by many, in which there was no definition of individuals and groups responsible for actions, but, rather, an increasing effort to assume the entangled character of achievements, widening the borderlands until it made little sense to try to identify who was who in the “meshwork of knotted and entangled lines.”²⁰

This is a fundamental character of the transformations we experienced at ESDI between 2016 and 2018: we were fully committed to breaking the barriers between the established roles that distinguish staff, professors, and students. What we went through with these initiatives did not transform the existing hierarchical structures. However, through them we reinstituted the school’s ecology of life, since our way of acting called for a change of attitude, inviting everyone to break free of the banking concept of education²¹ that puts teachers and staff as providers and students as consumers of an educational “service.”

Transgressing this logic, we were inviting everybody to act as inhabitants of the place – which made all of us co-responsible for what happened there. In dialogue with bell hooks, Grada Kilomba relates opposition and reinvention.²² At ESDI, we were not just opposing the government or the banking concept of education. We were also trying to reinvent the ecology of life in the school. As nobody wanted to assume the directorship, we were faced with the need to become collectively responsible.

Not everyone agreed or took part. Many times we were few; and some of our colleagues made a point of manifesting their discomfort at seeing the school being run cooperatively. In the meanwhile, we sought to be transparent and open, always in contact with the academic community and the university’s central administration.

To this end, we put out open calls, offering to collaborate with all who answered them. Not without difficulty, we invested in producing a common place where many worlds could coexist.²³ This place was not at all the result of an encounter between people who think and act in the same way. On the contrary, it was the difficult, but possible, and above all necessary, result of a collective production of spaces for living together in difference.²⁴

Let us return to the “difference” instituted by the policy of quotas at UERJ, which, from a broader perspective, was thematized by Lula in the aforementioned quote: if it widens the spectrum of “difference” in the university, my understanding is that, as part of academic communities, it is our responsibility to increasingly expand spaces for the coexistence of difference. The university thereby becomes a fruitful environment for experimenting with “commoning”²⁵ and freedom, constituted by way of “pluriversal agencings.”

Nothing is certain in processes such as these. Nor can we promote structural changes in universities and design schools overnight, for these are rigid institutions born of an ongoing modern and Eurocentric endeavor to disseminate a Western monoculture. But, as the Mangueira samba song goes: “Brasil, my nego, let me tell you the story that history won’t tell, the underside of the same place. It is in the struggle that we meet.”²⁶

It seems to me that this struggle concerns claims and experiments on “commoning”²⁷ and freedom in the pluriverse. Pluriverse not as a place where one wants to arrive, but as an entangled way of thinking and understanding,²⁸ resulting from processes of correspondence,²⁹ which thrusts us toward a world where many worlds coexist, living together in difference.³⁰

Redesigning Design in the Pluriverse

I now propose a detour to confabulate on some other encounters that deeply affected me. They once again widen the borderlands where diverse worlds coexist in difference, multiplying the pluriversity of knowledge in transit at ESDI. This time, I narrate some encounters between some students (many of them Black and Poor) and Black and Amerindian researchers and artists.

In early 2017, I was approached by two graduate students that used to work as designers at the Museum of the Indian:³¹ Simone Melo, responsible for many of the museum’s exhibitions and publications; and Priscilla Alves de Moura, who was then working as a graphic designer for a series of publications for Amerindian schools.

From our conversations, we organized a series of seminars at the Laboratório de Design e Antropologia³² that aimed to explore alternative approaches for collaborations between students and Amerindian researchers, designers, artists, and activists. This resulted in a university extension project that seeks to foster these collaborations.

Alongside the “Correspondences” project, with Professor Ricardo Artur Carvalho, we reached out to the museum, which was interested in expanding its collaborations with designers. It led us to propose a design course there. Lasting for two academic semesters, it involved forty-six undergraduate and graduate students.

The first stage of this course took place during fifteen weeks between August and December 2017, with two weekly meetings of four hours each. Initially, we aimed to bring together ESDI students and the museum’s team, but also to familiarize students with issues concerning Native Brazilians. We thus spoke not only to the museum staff, but also with some Amerindian researchers, designers, artists, and activists who were not necessarily linked to it.

The students also came into contact with publications and researches made by anthropologists, and explored the archives of the museum. As a result, they produced drawings, infographics, papers, and research reports speculating on design processes that could be developed in the next academic semester.

With these proposals, we did not aim to satisfy the demands of the museum (which always remained a possibility), but to design alternatives, or even to contest, thus pointing to other possible paths for communicating with, in, and through the institution. So, we set ourselves the challenge of acting in, with, beyond, and even, if needed, against the museum.

In this paper, I will not present the results or the processes developed at that time. Instead, starting from our encounters with Amerindian pluriverses³³ during that period, I want to confabulate on the possible paths of escape from the traps of design,³⁴ making way for a debate on a “transition design.”³⁵

Design is here taken to be a medium in which relations are produced and affects shared. It is thus the quality of the affects and the relations that we should discuss. To this end, I return to Escobar’s debate: “how to design without instrumentalizing relations (especially without pushing these relations further into an objectifying and individualized mode of hierarchy and control)?”³⁶

Confabulating with “Amerindians, Blacks, and the Poor” in the Pluriversity

From these confabulations, the following questions emerge:

1

Like many of us, the students who took part in the course at the Museum of the Indian were not fully aware of the existence of Native people in contemporaneity. After all, official “history” insists on erasing the (hi)stories of these peoples who, ever since the start of European colonization in the Americas, have been constantly massacred, rendered invisible, and silenced.

When we noticed that our students were “astonished” to realize the contemporaneity of the Amerindian presence in Brazil, we decided to invest our time presenting material that would support their approximation to the museum and to our Amerindian interlocutors. This led us to spend more time discussing texts and talking than thinking specifically in terms of design.

After each of our meetings and readings, we invited the students to provide visual yields, such as drawings, collages, diagrams, and infographics, from their appreciations of the themes we addressed. It was hence by promoting debate around images that, together, we came closer not only to the Amerindian pluriverses, but also to anthropological ways of knowing.

2

On becoming aware of the existence of Native Brazilians and the violence that affects them, the students came to question their own realities, perceiving themselves as diverse and distinctly situated within the student body. On some occasions, this process assumed a cathartic quality: by discussing the impasses and violations of rights that target “Amerindians, Blacks, and the Poor” people in our country, we allow ourselves to become emotional, ultimately bringing to the debates our own life stories.

On one of these days, gathered around the large table upon which the students placed self-portraits produced after reading a paper by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,³⁷ some students shared stories of times when they felt themselves to be victims of discrimination and socio-racial prejudice. On telling and listening to those stories, many of us cried copiously. I tried to bring the session to a close, and, even though I was profoundly moved, I did my best to support the students that had opened up in a way that I had never before witnessed in a classroom.

At that precise moment, in a classroom in front of ours, a professor was morally harassing quota students, questioning their academic capacity, claiming that they did not apply themselves, did not make an effort, and were unable to hand in high-quality work. That week, two student representatives sought out the professor, asking that such episodes not occur again.

Consulting with the university’s Department of Pedagogic Orientation and Supervision we were informed that, to make a case against the professor, the students who felt they had been harassed had to make a formal complaint. Student representatives gathered various statements on discrimination and moral harassment against quota students, but also against women and LGBTQIA+ students, involving that professor and others. However, no student entered a formal complaint, which prevented the case from moving forward.

To expand the debate on this clash, we invited the historian Ynaê Lopes dos Santos, a specialist on the history of slavery in the Americas who also researches African history and ethno-racial relations in Brazil, to give a lecture in the inaugural class of the academic year. She taught us other ways of perceiving Rio de Janeiro through the asymmetric ethno-racial relations forged in the economy of the slave market, which defined a segregationist way of producing spaces and sociabilities in the city, which until 1960 was the nation’s capital.

At the end of her lecture, after a sustained ovation, students asked questions on the most varied themes, such as racism and prejudice, the silencings and invisibilities that they produce, whether in relation to fundamental figures in the history of the arts and architecture in Brazil, or in more contemporary aspects, which led us to talk about Barack Obama and the film Black Panther. At that moment, Marielle Franco had not yet been murdered.

3

Realizing that they differed from each other, and, above all, that they diverge from the ideal design student historically fashioned in that school, these students came to debate the need to find other ways of acting professionally, as designers that correspond³⁸ to the issues that affect³⁹ them and those for whom and with whom they interact.

In this interim, in the aftermath of the coup d’etat that deposed President Dilma Rousseff, the Museum of the Indian, much like UERJ, found itself in a state of heightened vulnerability. With the end of a series of social policies in the country, and the political strengthening of groups tied to agribusiness and predatory extraction of natural resources – a phenomenon which was already occurring long before the coup – the protection of Native Brazilians and their cultures came increasingly under threat. The same was true for the public institutions related to indigenous issues, such as this museum.

Thus, at that time, working in the museum with the ESDI students also implied an alliance with the resistance movement of these two institutions. But I must stress that, as we were aware, working in the museum is not the same thing as working with or for Amerindians. Any design project considered in that situation also elicits critical evaluations of the conditions, limits, and possibilities of working with design in an engaged and committed way, not only with and to institutions, but, above all, with “matters of concern”⁴⁰ that affect those for or with whom projects are devised.

By not seeking to respond to demands, or to practice design in commercial terms, we approximate the notion of “ontological design” formulated by Escobar,⁴¹ who understands design as a means for thinking of the transition from the hegemony of the modern, universalist ontology to a pluriverse of socionatural configurations. In this way, a tool for reimagining and reconstructing other possible worlds.

Considering the design possibilities in the museum, we realized that there was no escaping from the debate on the ethical and political implications of the practice of design. To whom and to what do designers answer with the alternatives that they raise? To whom and to what is each of them corresponding when they opt for a particular project? Should we still think in terms of design when it comes to facing the “struggles for autonomy by communities and collectives”? ⁴²

4

By setting aside space and time to debate these questions, we sort of suspended the expectations of the museum, which had hoped to receive more design solutions, not demands. By allowing ourselves to suspend the need for answers in the form of design projects, raising new questions at every encounter with the museum staff, we carved a space for the possibility of transforming our ways of acting as designers and, complementarily, for an alteration in the perception of design in that institution.

For the museum staff, who were used to the presence of designers in their midst, we extended other invitations; not so much to act as providers of material and orientation for our design work, but above all for us, together, to speculate on what a group of designers can do in a museum such as that. By forcing this displacement, we were all experimenting with design at the borders,⁴³ at the limits, transgressing barriers and norms that keep apart research, engagement, affect, and project. Seeking to dodge the traps set by design, we questioned the modern and Eurocentric belief in design as a redeemer, to assume a pluriversal approach in which “design does not transform the world, it is rather part of the world transforming itself.”⁴⁴

In the midst of this process of so many transformations, we established relations with some Amerindian filmmakers, designers, anthropologists, architects, artists, and teachers, such as Alberto Álvares, Daiara Tukano, Denilson Baniwa, Francy Fontes, Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, Inê Kuikuro, Jaider Esbell, Sandra Benites, and Wally Kamayurá.

Also during 2018, we welcomed at ESDI Maria Eni Moreira, Makota Arrungindala, and her partner, Luiz Ângelo da Silva, Ogã Bangbala, with whom the doctoral student Ilana Paterman Brasil made several movies. At that time, Ilana presented her latest collaboration,⁴⁵ an animated film using video recordings of the dance of Orixás performed by Arrungindala, who not only danced to the sound of the atabaque drums played by Bangbala, but also narrated her difficult life story. In an unprecedented occurrence in ESDI’s history, the auditorium was packed with an audience that included students, teachers and the Candomblé’s practitioners, who had come to honor these two important figures of the religion in Rio. At the end of the session, the atabaques filled the hall with music, before going out into the open and joining in procession with the percussion collective Baque Mulher.

A few months earlier, it was Professor Ibã Sales Huni Kuin who invited us to sing and dance in the school’s grounds. On three different occasions between 2016 and 2017 the founder of the Movement of Huni Kuin Artists (MAHKU) was responsible for workshops on song, drawing, and painting, leading us into the depths of Huni Kuin cosmology, in which the production of images through song is an ancestral knowledge transmitted by the Anaconda (yube). Carried by Ibã’s songs, many of the participants entered a state of miração, as the Huni Kuin say, glimpsing, through the music, the pathways that lead to the pluriverse.

Dreaming in the Borderland

If I must end here, I will set out my own dream. Confabulating by means of affects and alliances with “Amerindians, Blacks, and the Poor”⁴⁶ students, teachers, artists, and researchers that happened at ESDI, I reclaim “education as a practice of freedom.”⁴⁷ Digging pathways to the pluriverse, we can transform the university into a pluriversity, and design into a tool for transitioning from the hegemony of Western universalist ontology to the pluriverse of the socionatural configurations. Entangled in the pluriverse, together in difference, we can design other worlds that, as Mangueira’s samba tells us, do not fit into the portrait.

Acknowledgments

This text is dedicated to Jonathan Nunes de Souza, who, ever since I returned to ESDI, opened my eyes and grabbed me by the hand; and to Bruna Fernandes Farias Pereira, who, with tenderness and courage, manages to open pathways in the densest forests. I thank Marcos Martins for the partnership; Alberto Álvares, Daiara Tukano, Denilson Baniwa, Francy Fontes, Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, Inê Kuikuro, Jaider Esbell, Sandra Benites, and Wally Kamayurá, with whom I learned so much; Idjahure Kadiwel, who blew in my ears: “Native people, not anthropologists, has to be invited to be here, to interchange with the students;” Simone Melo and Priscilla Alves de Moura, for approaching ESDI and the Museum of the Indian; Carlos Levinho, Ione Couto, and Elena Guimarães, for opening the Museum to ESDI’s students; Ricardo Artur Carvalho, partner of many adventures in the school and in the museum; Els Lagrou, for the conversations about design, art, anthropology, and the Huni Kuin people; Amilton Matos, for the effort that enabled the collaboration with Professor Ibã Sales Huni Kuin; the researchers of the Laboratory of Design and Anthropology (LaDA), especially Giulia Cezini, Ilana Paterman Brasil, Juliá Sá Earp, Marina Sirito, and Samia Batista, who made the “Correspondences” project happen; the organizers of the seminar “Indigenous Struggles, Good Living, and the Crisis of the Notion of Development” for the exchanges and for giving us the opportunity to receive, at ESDI, the leaders of the Nasa people, from Colombia, who presented us with their gigantic force! Encounters like these are worth a life! Finally, I would like to thank Tim Ingold, who invited me as a visiting researcher in the project “Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture, and Design,” coordinated by him in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was during this time that I prepared a preliminary version of this text, which resulted in a paper presented at the “Art, Materiality and Representation” conference, organized by the Royal Anthropological Institute in the British Museum, London, in May 2018. Some months later, I presented a second version of this work in the international seminar “Indigenous Struggles, Good Living, and the Crisis of the Notion of Development,” held at ESDI. These presentations were unfolded in a paper published by the journal Lugar Comum, in June 2019, and as part of the book Refazendo Tudo: Confabulações em meio aos cupins na universidade, published by Zazie Edições in 2020.

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Paolucci, Juliana. Esdi Aberta: Design e (r)existência na Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial. Master’s thesis. Design Post-Graduation Program, Superior School of Industrial Design, State University of Rio de Janeiro. Bio de Janeiro. 2017.

Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula da. Fala no no ato em homenagem a Marielle Franco no Circo Voador. Rio de Janeiro, April 2, 2018. Vídeo publicado pela Rádio Rio West FM. www. youtube.com/watch?v=KMC7Luy5HUI. Visited at 11/04/2019.

Stengers, Isabelle. “Reclaiming Animism.” E-flux no. 36, 2012. www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/ (accessed March 27, 2019).

— Au temps des catastrophes: Résister à la barbarie qui vient. Paris: La Découverte, 2013.

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. “Sistema de cotas.” www.uerj.br/a-uerj/auniversidade/sistema-de-cotas/ (accessed on April 12, 2019).

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Os Involuntários da Pátria.” Chão da Feira 65 (2017). chaodafeira.com/cadernos/os-involuntarios-da-patria/.

Footnotes

1. According to the notion of “affect” proposed by Jeanne Favret-Saada and discussed by Márcio Goldman, to be affected by the situations one comes across has nothing to do with belief or emotions that elude reason, but with affect as the result of a process of allowing oneself to be affected by the same forces that affect others, thus enabling a certain type of relation to establish itself. These are affects that are aroused or revealed within a lived experience of alterity. This is not an automatic identification with the perspectives of others, but, rather, the result of gambling on the possibility that, by taking part and allowing oneself to be affected, one’s own knowledge project is put to the test. See Jeanne Favret-Saada, “Ser afetado,” Cadernos de Campo no. 13 (2005), 154-61; and Márcio Goldman, “Jeanne Favret-Saada, os afetos e a etnografia.” ibid., 149-53. ↩

2. Paulo Freire, Pedagogia do oprimido (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra), 2005. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994). ↩

3. ESDI was founded in 1962 as an independent design school run by the state of Rio de Janeiro. In 1975 it was incorporated into the Rio de Janeiro State University (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, UERJ). It was the first design school in Brazil to offer a bachelor’s degree in industrial design. Currently, it provides undergraduate degrees in design and architecture/urbanism, and masters and doctorate degrees in design. It has approximately 400 undergraduate and 100 graduate students. Since 2003 35 percent of undergraduate students are admitted based on social and racial quotas. ↩

4. Speculative fabulations can be defined as the making of anthropological fictions sufficiently vivid and intense to open space to the imagination of transformative futures, as to be capable of intervening in and reshaping reality. It can be cultivated by means of experimentations on correspondence and participant observation, where the one who observes acts with response-ability and engagement. Cultivating the signs of a change in a situation, speculative fabulations maximize the friction with experience in order to imagine poissible futures. In this sense, these are experiments in anthropological imagination that aim to intervene in and modify reality, challenging the existing order to transform the future. A form of activist storytelling that deals with real stories where multiple players are enmeshed in partial translations and liminal transformations across difference. ↩

5. Here, I adopt the expression used by the samba school Estação Primeira de Mangueira, winner of the 2019 Rio Carnival, in place of the dictum “Order and Progress” which is written at the center of the Brazilian flag. It is important to note that the adoption of the terms “Índios, Negros e Pobres,” or, in English, “Amerindians, Blacks, and the Poor,” is not casual but rather politically oriented. Identified with the Native and People of Color movements, the samba school mobilizes these categories to discuss the violence imposed by “progressive” policies in the lives of these populations. Thus, with this motto, the Mangueira denounces the racism still in force in Brazil. ↩

6. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004), 25–248. ↩

7. The Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar proposes “redesigning design from within and from without.” Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). To this proposal he links the expression “designs for the pluriverse,” which is the title of the book in which he puts forward the notion of ontological design. “In this context, designs for the pluriverse becomes a tool for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds” (ibid., 4). Promoting an “autonomous design” that distances itself from commercial and lucrative ends towards more collaborative and situated approaches, Escobar reclaims the decolonial debate and the notion of the pluriverse, with its relation to the Zapatista idea of a world in which many worlds would coexist. ↩

8. Walter Mignolo, an Argentinian semiologist and one of the exponents of Latin American decolonial thought, proposes “pluriverse” not as a world of independent units, but as a way of thinking and understanding that dwells in the entanglements, in the borders. It is thus not concerned with studying borders by dwelling within a fixed territorial epistemology, which would mean that we accept a pluriverse that exists somewhere out there, and which can be observed from the outside. According to Mignolo, to access such a mode of thought we must, on the contrary, dwell within the border. Not to cross it, so as to observe or describe it, but to remain within it. See Walter Mignolo, “On Pluriversality,” posted on October 20, 2013 waltermignolo.com/onpluriversality/ (accessed on April 16, 2019). For Escobar, “the borderlands are strategically important spaces for the reconstruction of an ethics and praxis of care in relation to what ought to be designed, and how” (Designs for the Pluriverse, 207). Quoting Tony Fry, Escobar proposes that “this would be an ontology of repair of the broken beings and broken worlds that have resulted from centuries of defuturing designing and their alleged accumulated outcome, the anthropocene.” In his view, “herein lies the possibility of, and ground for, the reconstitution of design in, for, and from the South, not as a total rejection of design but as ‘critical selection and local innovation’ involving the creation of structures of care toward the Sustainment” (ibid.). ↩

9. Zoy Anastassakis, Triunfos e Impasses: Lina Bo Bardi, Aloisio Magalhães e o design no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina Editora, 2014). ↩

10. In 2000, the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro passed a law that reserves half of all places at state-run universities to students from public schools. In the following year, a new law was passed, stipulating that 40 percent of all available places should be reserved for Black people, based on a principle of self-designation. Two years later, the selection process was modified: 20 percent of the available places were reserved for Black students, 20 percent for students from public schools, and 5 percent for ethnic minorities and people with physical disabilities. Data on the family income was also required of these candidates, and those whose families had an income of over R$300 per capita were excluded from the process. In 2007, the law was changed yet again, incorporating, alongside the 5 percent of places reserved for ethnic minorities, places for people with disabilities, the children of police officers, firemen, and penitentiary agents killed or incapacitated during work. Two years later, the ceiling for per capita family income was raised to one and a half times minimum wage. UERJ had no say in the formulation of these measures, having only to put them into practice. ↩

11. In the original: “como costuma acontecer com frequência no caso brasileiro, esse preconceito e esse racismo não se autonomeiam e funcionam sem mencionar cores e raças, sempre substituídas por pseudo universais.” Marcio Goldman and Clara Flaksman, “Tentativa de criminalizar práticas de sacrifício religioso é preconceituosa,” Época, April 17, 2019, epoca. globo.com/tentativa-decriminalizar-praticas-desacrificio-religiosopreconceituosaartigo-23606318/. ↩

12. To view the current law of quotas in the state of Rio de Janeiro, see alerjln1.alerj. rj.gov.br/contlei.nsf/ c8aa0900025feef6032564 ec0060dfff/ 1b96527e90c0548 083257520005c15df? OpenDocument (accessed April 18, 2019). ↩

13. Regarding the faculty, until 2019 ESDI had just one Black teacher. Therefore, while among the students we found much more diversity than before the quotas, among the faculty the situation was almost the same. ↩

14. Isabelle Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes: Résister à la barbarie qui vient (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). ↩

15. Marielle Franco (1979–2018) was like many of our students at ESDI and UERJ. A generation of Black and Poor young people who, for the first time, had access to higher education and who, in parallel with their academic background, engaged in political struggles and social movements. From another place, these Poor and Black youth now combined political militancy with higher education, graduating as masters and doctors, and thus becoming able to compete in a number of places of speech and performance that were, hitherto, restricted to a mostly white elite. Marielle was born and raised in one of the favelas of Complexo da Maré, in the northern suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. In 2016, she was elected city councilor of the city, with more than 46,000 votes, and was then the fifth most voted candidate in Rio and the second most voted woman for the position of city councilor in the country. As a councilwoman, she worked on collecting data on violence against women, ensuring abortion, and increasing female participation in politics. In her first year in office, she organized and presented sixteen bills, two of which were approved: the first dealt with the regulation of mototaxi services, and the second pointed to the construction of spaces for natural childbirths. In August 2017, the House rejected, by nineteen votes to seventeen, her proposal to include Lesbian Visibility Day in the city’s calendar. Her murder took place at the beginning of her second year as a councilwoman. On the night of March 14, 2018, in the central region of the city, the criminals matched their car with hers and fired several shots, which also killed the driver. Even after the arrest of two suspects for these murders, the investigation points to political motivations. In 2018, Marielle was preparing to run for the post of Senator of the Republic for the State of Rio de Janeiro, a position that was filled by Flávio Bolsonaro, one of the sons of Jair Bolsonaro, elected president of the country in the same year. ↩

16. “É importante lembrar que em apenas doze anos nós colocamos na universidade a mesma quantidade de alunos que eles levaram quase cem anos para colocar, nesse país. … É uma bobagem eles acharem que, me tirando do jogo, está resolvido o problema deles. O problema deles não sou eu. O problema deles são vocês, que não querem mais ser tratados como gado. Vocês querem ser tratados como gente, vocês não querem mais permanecer apanhando, não querem mais ser coadjuvantes, mas, sim, sujeitos da história.” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, “Fala no no ato em homenagem a Marielle Franco no Circo Voador,” Rio de Janeiro, April 2, 2018, video published by Rádio Rio West FM, Zoy Anastassakis www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMC7Luy5HUI (accessed on April 11, 2019). ↩

17. On the experiences at ESDI between 2016 and 2018, see my articles “Remaking Everything: The Clash between Bigfoot, the Termites and Other Strange Miasmic Emanations in an Old Industrial Design School,” Vibrant 16 (2019); “É na luta que a gente se encontra: o encontro de estudantes de design com os pluriversos indígenas na Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial e no Museu do Índio,” Lugar Comum no. 54 (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2019); “How Can We Correspond to a Time of Ruins, from within the University? Openings, Occupations and Resurgences on a Brazilian Design School,” Society and Space, August 7, 2018, www. articles how-can-we-correspond-toa-time-of-ruins-from-withinthe-university-openingsoccupations-and-resurgenceson-a-brazilian-design-school; with Marcos Martins, “Smoke signals from Brazil,” Eye Magazine 24, no. 95 (Winter 2018), www.eyemagazine. article smoke-signals-from-brazil; and with Jilly Traganou et al., “Temporarily Open: A Brazilian Design School’s Experimental Approaches Against the Dismantling of Public Education,” Design and Culture 11, no. 2 (2019), 157–72. To consult the chronology of the movements in the school during this period, see ESDIaberta2017.wixsite.com/ linhadotempo, which publishes the results of the master research developed by Juliana Paolucci, supervised by Marcos Martins and myself in the Graduate Programme in Design at ESDI (Juliana Paolucci, “Esdi Aberta: Design e (r)existência na Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial,” 2017). ↩

18. I take the notion of the “pluriverse” from Walter Mignolo, as “a way of thinking and understanding that dwells in the entanglement” (Mignolo, “On Pluriversality”). I call “pluriversal agencings” the processes of interstitial differentiation put into effect not by individuals or hermetic groups, but by entanglements formed at the borderlands, what could be characterized, in Ingold’s terms, as “the meshwork of knotted and entangled lines.” Tim Ingold, “On Human Correspondence,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23, no. 1 (2016), 9, 18. ↩

19. Along with habit and attentionality, agencing is one of the principles that informs the notion of “correspondence,” formulated by the British anthropologist Tim Ingold. While correspondence “is the process by which beings or things literally answer to one another over time,” “habit” (rather than volition), “agencing” (rather than agency), and “attentionality” (rather than intentionality) are defined as follows: “habit as ‘doing undergoing,’ agencing as a process in which the ‘I’ emerges as a question, and attention as a resonant coupling of concurrent movements.” And, Ingold proceeds: “In the correspondence of agencing, then, there are no volitional subjects, no ’I’s or ’you’s to place before any action. … The agent is inside the process of his or her action, inside the verb, not separate from it… A becoming [that] is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two, it is the in-between.” He calls this experience of the interval “interstitial differentiation.” Ingold, “On Human Correspondence,” 9, 17, 18. ↩

20. Ingold. ↩

21. Freire, Pedagogia do oprimido. ↩

22. Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2018). ↩

23. Mignolo, “On Pluriversality.” ↩

24. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ↩

25. Tim Ingold, Anthropology and/as Education (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018). ↩

26. G.R.E.S. Estação Primeira de Mangueira, 2019. “Brasil, meu nego/ Deixa eu te contar/ A história que a história não conta/ O avesso do mesmo lugar/ Na luta é que a gente se encontra/ Brasil, meu dengo/ A Mangueira chegou/ Com versos que o livro apagou/ Desde 1500/ Tem mais invasão do que descobrimento/ Tem sangue retinto pisado/ Atrás do herói emoldurado/ Mulheres, tamoios, mulatos/ Eu quero um país que não tá no retrato/ Brasil, o teu nome é Dandara/ Tua cara é de cariri/ Não veio do céu/ Nem das mãos de Isabel/ A liberdade é um dragão no mar de Aracati/ Salve os caboclos de julho/ Quem foi de aço nos anos de chumbo/ Brasil, chegou a vez/ De ouvir as Marias, Mahins, Marielles, malês/ Mangueira, tira a poeira dos porões/ Ô, abre alas pros teus heróis de barracões/ Dos brasis que se faz um país de Lecis, Jamelões/ São verde e rosa as multidões.” ↩

27. Ingold, Anthropology and/ as Education. ↩

28. Mignolo, “On Pluriversality.” ↩

29. Ingold, “On Human Correspondence.” ↩

30. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. ↩

31. The Museum of the Indian (Museu do Índio) is the only official institution in Brazil exclusively dedicated to Amerindian cultures. Until 2018, it was linked to the National Indian Agency (FUNAI) and the Ministry of Justice. It carries out research and public projects geared towards the documentation and exhibition of the diversity of the hundreds of Native Brazilians. Created in 1953 by the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, it contains an extensive ethnographic and documentary archive. As well as organizing exhibitions, the museum publishes teaching material, documents Native Brazilian languages, and promotes Native Brazilian cultures among school students and teachers. These tasks led the museum to work with designers, including, among them, ESDI’s students and alumni. ↩

32. ladaesdi.com.br/. ↩

33. With this expression, I refer to ways of thinking and understanding of Amerindian peoples, which, according to Mignolo’s formulation, can be defined as the “entanglement of several cosmologies connected today in a power differential.” Mignolo, “On Pluriversality.” ↩

34. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), in reference to Vilém Flusser. ↩

35. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. ↩

36. Escobar, 214, 215. ↩

37. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Os Involuntários da Pátria,” Chão da Feira 65 (2017), chaodafeira. com/cadernos/ os-involuntarios-da-patria/ ↩

38. Ingold, “On Human Correspondence.” ↩

39. Favret-Saada, “Ser afetado.” ↩

40. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” ↩

41. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. ↩

42. Escobar, 213. ↩

43. Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou, Design in the Borderlands (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2015). ↩

44. Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold, “From Description to Correspondence: Anthropology in Real Time,” in Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, ed. Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 146. ↩

45. Ilana Paterman Brasil and Zoy Anastassakis, “Il faut danser, en dansant: Essai de fabulation speculative,” Multitudes 70 (Spring 2018), 202–9. ↩

46. G.R.E.S. Estação Primeira de Mangueira, Samba enredo 2019: Histórias para ninar gente grande, www.mangueira.com. br/carnaval-2019/enredo. ↩

47. hooks, Teaching to Transgress (accessed April 15, 2019). ↩