Aesthetics of Impermanence
an ongoing research on design and nomadism
Life is a bridge. Cross it, but build no house on it.
[Indian proverb]
Our nature consists of movement. Absolute stillness is death.
[B. Pascal, Pensées]
Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants, they keep assuring us that nomadic life is abnormal behaviour; a neurosis; a disease that, for the sake of
civilisation, must be eradicated.
[B. Chatwin, The Songlines]
Without constriction no settlement could be founded.
[Sumerian text]
(left) Camel litter, right side up, in use. (right) Handicrafts of the Somali nomadic women: storage vessels. via Labelle Prussin, African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place and Gender, 1995
On design's ontological turn
notes on how we design objects, and they design us back
I started conducting this research after my first visit to Saudi Arabia -land of Bedouin heritage- which happened to take place during a volatile period of my personal life, when I was constantly traveling without a stable home. In that same period, I happened to read Chatwin's Songlines, in which the author hypothesizes that humanity's original condition of grace was transhumance.
This conjunction of inspirations, variously related to the theme of nomadism, left a deep impression on me. As I was temporarily giving up on possessions -due to my always-on-the-move lifestyle- I looked at pictures of nomadic people from different regions and realized the relativity of the modern way of being-in-the-world, centered on individualism, accumulation, relations of dominance, and hierarchical dualisms. From the more peripheral bangs of modernity, from the interstate interstices, a possibility was filtering of thinking not only about an alternative worldview but also about objects that would convey this vision, and ultimately support and mediate more sustainable ontologies, rooted in care and stewardship.
Essential Bibliography:
Abdulla, D., et al. (2019). A Manifesto for Decolonising Design. Journal of Futures Studies
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse. Duke University Press
Prussin, L. (1995). African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place and Gender. Smith-sonian Institution Press and the National Museum of African Art, Washing-ton and London.
Walker, S. (2012). The narrow door to sustainability - from practically useful to spiritually useful artefacts. International Journal of Sustainable Design
Willis, A. (2006). Ontological Designing. Design Philosophy Papers
Aesthetics of Impermanence / Aesthetics of Iper-permanence
The concept of "ontological design" was introduced in 1986 by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in their book Understanding Computers and Cognition, and later popularized by Anthropologist Arturo Escobar in Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.
Design is always ontological, as it always affects the basic structure of how people exist in the world.
What do modern objects tell about the ontological structure of our modernities?
When looking at the material culture of different nomadic groups, the structurally unsustainable character of modern material culture, rooted in permanence, emerges by contrast. Such a material culture is informed by the sedentary and modern conception of life as pro-gress (from Latin pro-gressus, meaning "going forward" - implying a perpetual hyperbolic path towards the future unfolding along a linear conception of time) as a gradual transformation marked by an incremental accumulation of skills and potentialities. Such an ontological paradigm is challenged today by a constant state of instability in which being and being-in-place become perpetually insecure.
Nomadic objects and practices speak of a different paradigm, where objects are contracted in their material expression but expanded in the relational network, which includes not only the community of the human and the non-human, but also and ultimately, the cosmos.
Proxemics of Impermanence
Image credits, left to right, top to bottom:
1.The Oroqens: China’s nomadic hunters, via The Oroquens: China's Nomadic Hunters, Pu Qiu, 1983
2. Floating home of a beggar family at Nanking, via The Secret Museum of Mankind
3. Bakhtiari woman near Godar-Landar, 1985, Churning of the whole-milk yoghurt with a churn made of goat skin container suspended from a tripod, via The Nomadic Peoples of Iran, Richard Tapper and Jon Thompson (Eds.), 2002
4. A living room in the city of Fachi, Niger, via African Nomadic Architecture: Space, place and gender, Labelle Prussin, 1995
5. Camels of the Laraki group, via The Nomadic Peoples of Iran, Richard Tapper and Jon Thompson (Eds.), 2002
6. Sanjabi family east of Kernanshah, via The Nomadic Peoples of Iran, Richard Tapper and Jon Thompson (Eds.), 2002
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