BORDERLESS: Design and Digital Platforms
Latin America has shown to be also a context where borders between disciplines, nations and language seem to have been over passed by the new architectural and design practices and modes of communication.
The role of the editor, the index of a more and more multidimensional society, the democratization of media, the use of media to create design and collaborative practices. How relevant is the curatorial space for design in Latin America, especially within a context where access and exposure to a global network has so far been limited?
Borderless is a 3-series event to address the emerging and more established means of communication that Latin America is using, reusing and introducing to create, curate and talk about design: digital, analog, performance.
Guest Speakers
DAVID ASSAEL / DAVID BASULTO
PLATAFORMA ARQUITECTURA /ARCH DAILY
David Assael is an architect, and holds a Master degree in Urban Planning at Catholic University of Chile. He is Professor at the School of Architecture of that same university. He has oriented his studies, work and teaching to activities related to the design of urban projects, as well as the study and spreading of urban and territorial projects and problems.
Founding partner and general manager of Plataforma Networks, company whose main objective is to influence the improvement of the quality of life inside the cities, as well as the quality of national and international architecture through the spreading, discussion and generation of urban and architectural projects by integrating 2.0 web tools.
David Basulto is an architect graduated from PUC (Chile) in 2007. He is co-founder of Plataforma Networks, and permanent editor of Plataforma Urbana and Plataforma de Arquitectura. He has participated in many private projects and those related to methodologies for education.
Currently, he works on potentiating the web as a means of discussion and information in both in Plataforma Urbana and Plataforma Arquitectura.
Among the main projects of Plataforma Networks are PlataformaUrbana.cl, PlataformaArquitectura.cl and Archdaily.com. The latter is the most visited architecture website of the world.
AZAMAT ABDYMOMUNOV / RAFAEL MARANON-ABREU
MIT SOCIAL MEDIA CLUB
Azamat Abdymomunov has over 12 years of experience in public policy, strategy, negotiation, education and political mobilization. Extensive experience in human capital development, strategic organizational design and complex policy issues. http://www.linkedin.com/in/abdimom Blog: KnowledgeMap
Rafael Marañon-Abreu has 9 years of experience in web design. Rafael, research at MIT includes system thinking and the management of seasonal labor migration flows. Early in his career, he served at the United Nations Headquarters in the Financing for Development Office, and also at the Spanish Consulate in Moscow. In addition to pursuing an S.M. in Engineering-and-Management from MIT’s System Design and Management Program, Rafael was also working as a teaching assistant for the system dynamics group at MIT Sloan School of Management.
For more information visit: http://www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/
or: http://socialmedia.mit.edu/
Co-sponsored by
GSDLatino https://gsdlatino.wordpress.com/
and
Arts @ The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University
The Block: An itinerant archive project
The block is an ongoing editorial collaborative project. The block is the analog version of this blog for documenting the work of the gsdLATINO collective.
Last fall, with the help of Lars Müller, we developed the concept and prototype for an object that could be:
Interactive: That invites the user to engage with the content of the booklets. This is the discovery part of the block. Consecutive: To establish a flexible and growing structure that allows this archive to increase over time. Voyante: With a size and form that could be practical to travel (and cheap of course!). The idea of collaboration about the content is not limited to the GSD community. The block should be able to travel and to feed from other Latin American experiences.
Individual volumes or booklets compose the block, which are color coded informing the nature of their content: talk, exhibit, social event, feedback (interview), and student work. The booklets are foldable and displayable. These could remain within the box as an archive, but also have the possibility to perform and become an exhibition by itself.
Because the components of the block (box and booklets) should have the possibility to be produced “in house”, the selected materials are generic, accessible and cheap (pine wood and Bristol paper). The booklets have a small size (6”x6”), and currently their content is only paper. Nevertheless, future booklets these could include other physical devices that feature sounds, videos, textures or any other interactive elements.
Some of these ideas have evolved after the first prototype, but we are planning to share this project with the GSD community in an exhibit very soon. Stay tuned.
Live webcast: Pedro Reyes at GSD
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, at 8pm on http://www.radioglobal.org/ and justin.tv
(and live somewhere at Harvard GSD)
Trained as an architect, the Mexico City–based artist Pedro Reyes is interested in the relation between architectural structures and their users. The emergence of transcendental individual and collective experience is always present in his work. He perceives buildings as skeletons in which we live and interact, as in the ideas of the Spanish philosophers Santa Teresa de Avila and San Juan de la Cruz, who addressed the notion of the house as the body and its inhabitant as the soul.
Reyes’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Harvard University, Cambridge; Galeria Massimo de Carlo, Milan; and Galeria Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City. His work has been included in the group shows PR’04, Parentesis en la ciudad, Puerto Rico (2004); The Structure of Survival at the 2003 Venice Biennale; and To Be Political It Has to Look Nice, apexart, New York (2004)
MACRONDO: a Mix from the South
UPCOMING: MACROndo
Round Table Discussion
Speakers: Ariadna Cantis, Felipe Correa, Belinda Tato, William Saunders & The GSDLatino Collective.
Moderator: Ana María Durán
Date: October 28th 2010
Place: Room 112 (Stubbins), Gund Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Design
It is signifcant that the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded this year to Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer, almost thirty years after Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian, was the recipient of such honor. Within the realm of a design school, it makes us wonder what has become of what García Márquez established as the archetypical Latin American settlement: Macondo, the incestuous town where families dwelt between magic and realism, amidst ghosts and the warm blood of living beings, trapped between the forces of the past and what seemed to be a lonely, hopeless future.
Toro-session 3: COMA
Torolab traced the physiological changes of a Mexican person in their everyday relation to food. The collective’s project culminated in a new food product, a type of bread containing all the absent nutritients in a typical Mexican diet, according to the Mexican national health census. For the project, Torolab collaborated with local gastronomy students , musicians and artists. Torolab and the chef Max La Riviere-Hedrick cooked this products here in Cambridge and brough it for tasting to a performance / social event, taking over the usual Beer and Dogs on fridays, with live music by Tijuana-based music producer Ejival.
Toro-session 2: HOMELAND
Graduate School of Design, October 21st 2010
Some pictures of the presentation of the HOMELAND Referential Landscapes Table at the Graduate School of Design. Raúl Cárdenas explained the project and asked for our collaboration to extend the number of modules of the table with new stories on home territories.
Many students and members of the faculty, such as the Dean of the GSD Mohsen Mostafavi, Bjarke Ingels and Gareth Doherty, stepped by this event.
Raúl Cárdenas
1 minute talk by Raúl Cárdenas for the ‘ Live from MIT‘ blog by our friend Azamat Abdymomunov .
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, October 20th 2010
Lecture by Raúl Cárdenas / Torolab
Founded in 1995 by Raul Cardenas Osuna in Tijuana B.C., Mexico, Torolab, is a collective workshop/laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research. The result of this investigation should, in some way, enhance the “quality of life” (starting with our own). The projects are developed according to our their own competences and in collaboration with other artists and experts in the fields that we being studied and investigated. The themes that Torolab has developed until now range from research on the identity of the border region, to housing and security to community building and survival-the areas of concern are as broad and varied as the lifestyles and environs they are studying. The traces left behind these investigations go from such things as Urban Interventions, Media Projects, Construction Systems, Survival Units to everyday things like furniture and clothing.
Special guests in the Q&A: Felipe Correa, Ana María Durán and Krysztof Wodiczko
Toro-sessions @ Graduate School of Design Series organized by GSD LATINO (Paola Aguirre, Laura Janka, Ángel Rodríguez and Victor M. Sanz) in collaboration with The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Harvard University Mexican Association, and Torolab.
Toro-sessions @ Graduate School of Design
A three-day event with Torolab
October 20th
Traditions-Transitions-Translations
Lecture by Raúl Cárdenas / Torolab
with special guests in the Q&A: Felipe Correa, Ana María Durán, Bjarke Ingels and Krysztof Wodiczko
6:30 pm, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall
October 21st
Homeland: The Iu Mien Farm Tapes Project
Exhibition opening + Gallery Talk with Raúl Cárdenas
6:30, Main Lobby, Gund Gall
October 22th
COMA
Molecular Urbanism + Gastronomy
Fast Food by Torolab. Music by Ejival
6:30 @ Beer’n’Dogs, Chauhaus, Gund hall
Organized by GSD LATINO (Paola Aguirre, Laura Janka, Ángel Rodríguez and Victor M. Sanz)
in collaboration with: The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Harvard University Mexican Association, and Torolab.
GSDLatino 