ART AND ACTIVISM:Vannesa Ahuactzin gets designers to think about the bigger picture to help people in the developing world, but just now she's focusing her energies on a group of Dublin artists
VANNESA AHUACTZIN IS an optimist. "If I had a newspaper," she says, "it would publish 80 per cent positive stories, and only 20 per cent negative."
Thinking about our current headlines, and the shocking stories from home and abroad, it's difficult, initially, to grasp her logic. It is also difficult to measure this statement with the knowledge that Ahuactzin, who is part Mexican, part Canadian and now lives in Denmark, is not a naive optimist. It makes sense, however, when one realises that she derives her confidence from her experiences of what people are actually doing to make the world a better place.
Ahuactzin, who is making regular visits to Dublin at the moment to work with a team of Irish researchers, gained these experiences from collaborating with designer Bruce Mau on an exhibition called Massive Change and its companion project, the Institute Without Boundaries (IWB). Ahuactzin describes Massive Change as "a communication project . . . that looks at the field of design".
"When you work in the design industry," she says, "you get frustrated with the narrowness of the term, of it really being about the object, just about: 'What does a plate look like? What does a bowl look like?' And you want to step away from that, because design is also being used as a word by scientists and engineers all over the world. We set out to see if there could be a shift from objects to idea, from 'what' to 'why' and 'how'."
Massive Change showcased the discoveries, while the IWB set about working with students on finding more creative solutions to that what, why, and how. "We divided the world into different economies: manufacturing, mobility, urbanisation, energy . . . And we wanted to research and find out if the world is getting better, or if it's getting worse. So the things we found are examples, not of the products of Massive Change, but of the massive change that is going on in the world."
These products include LifeStraws, drinking straws that purify water as it passes through them, and PlayPumps, where children's merry-go-rounds power the pumps that drive clean water up from underground. Set up across sub-Saharan Africa, the water towers and pumping systems are funded by the advertising billboards they carry. They may also carry health information posters, educating people about HIV and Aids.
Criticism of Massive Change has focused on the deeper problems that these innovations may mask; for example, why should something as fundamental as clean water have to be supported by revenue from commercial interests through those advertising hoardings? David Byrne (formerly of the band Talking Heads), who interviewed Mau at the exhibition's inauguration, writes: "I also found it disturbing, the whole project, for its optimism, and especially what I took to be its utopianism."
The idea is that Massive Change might try to imply that there are simple solutions to global problems, if only we listened to designers. Ahuactzin counters this with the reminder that the project isn't solely about solutions. "Like the LifeStraw," she says, "it definitely has two sides - it's addressing the issue of people having clean water, but there is also the issue of why is that water polluted? It's an ignition to the conversation about how we can provide a solution, and then how we can get on to the bigger questions."
The Dublin project Ahuactzin is working with, Mobilise, is the work of a group of artists, designers and researchers who have been brought together at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM), based at the National College of Art and Design, Thomas St, Dublin. The idea of GradCAM is that, while individuals pursue PhD projects, their expertise, different ways of thinking and fresh approaches can be applied to some of the larger problems facing Ireland today.
It's also a focus for artists, such as Rhona Byrne and Ralph Borland, who have joined with some of the GradCAM group (Claire Regan, Conor McGarrigle, Glenn Loughran, John Buckley and Thomas Lewis) to take part in the Mobilise project. As the name suggests, Mobilise is all about movement.
"It became obvious," says John Buckley, "that most people's concerns about the development of Dublin centred on the difficulty in navigating and moving through the city. This means more than just transport."
Ralph Borland points out that the name has further meanings, with its overtones of political movements and activism: "Most of us are interested in this dimension of the project, not just to design solutions, but to identify problems and draw attention to them through creative means."
Ahuactzin's role in this is to provoke, push, set targets and maintain the idea that this has the potential to be something dynamic and interesting. "It's about questioning what you think," she says, "about not being afraid to take on challenges. Most of the time when we do our work, we do it stupidly. I'm always critiquing myself and finding new ways to do things.
"I would like to go all over the world and look at what works, because it's dumb that we don't learn from other countries, take what we can, learn from them and apply it to our own cities. The intention here is for the students to work together, so that they can really criticise each other - you need that to push them. Crying is good, you need a little crying, a little tension, you also need happiness to get results - that's the way we are as humans."
A little crying, a little inspiration, exhaustive research, some creativity, all mixed up with a group of people intent on looking at how we might do things differently - we may yet get our massive change.
See www.massivechange.com and www.gradcam.ie
