Te Marama / The Moon - Designers Speak (Up)

essay / Elle Loui August

After Lina Bo Bardi

This is the year of space exploration. Man has quit the earth and wants to go to the Moon. But we’re not going to sing the praises of this century of science, or proclaim that a new age has dawned, that we are in awe of recent discoveries.
— Lina Bo Bardi, ‘The Moon’ (1958)¹

The moon is superior to the sun insofar as she has had the night to know he is not the only god in the universe.
— Ariana Reines, The Sand Book (2019)²

When the Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi wrote ‘The Moon’ in 1958, her words were addressed to arrogance. She perceived hubris in the conquest narratives fuelling dreams of human expansion into space, reinforcing a dangerously inflated confidence in the technological accomplishments of the 20th century. For Bo Bardi, such resolute faith in the rational position assumed by technological knowledge did not account for a more ancient continuum of human self-knowledge and experience. What of poetry, vulnerability, and the inevitability of human failings, where was the evidence of advancement when force, coercion and domination were still running the script? The spectre of the H-bomb stirs in the background of her sentences. “And the fruit?— the prospect of self-destruction,” writes Bo Bardi, “the yawning chasm that has opened up between technical and scientific progress and the human capacity to think.”

Turning to this conundrum more recently in are we human?: notes on an archaeology of design, the companion publication to the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (2016), architectural scholars Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley address technology and design as a unified historical enterprise, centring a view of these interconnected disciplines as a perennial mirror of the human species. “Tool and human produce each other,” they write. “Brain, body, and artifact cannot be separated. Thinking only occurs in the intermingling between them.”[3] Their position is informed by wide-ranging multidisciplinary research—traversing the fields of both arts and sciences—from which the authors seek to highlight progressive intersections between contemporary thought and the fields of design and architecture. Colomina and Wigley place emphasis on the critical currents that they see as best able to respond to the complex challenges of our historical moment, insofar as they might articulate an understanding of the human species as diverse, plastic, and deeply interwoven with all aspects of the world, while also pointing to the contours of design’s less benevolent aspects. In their ‘mirror’, the industry of ‘design thinking’ is not only a creative effect or set of generative actions with a positive capacity to shape our brains, but is also implicated in shadowy entanglements, reflecting, as it does, a wider state of worldly affairs. They write:

The empire of design reinforces the idea that good design is good business that makes good people. This concept has been so successfully promoted that all design is thought to be good design. The word good no longer even needs to be said. The very word design already means “good” — as if we don’t need to think about the fact that the same concept is active in weapons, surveillance, invasions, policing, nationalism, incarceration, and terrorism. Good design might not be such a good thing.[4]

The arguments of Colomina, Wigley and Bo Bardi appear to converge here, around questions of what we are to do with the image we are now able to see of ourselves. By their reckoning, this requires that we not only grasp what we have become via that which we have created, but call the knowledge of our past to sit with us in our present, and to really think—as Bo Bardi asserts— through what we are capable of doing, and thus, who we might become. For all of its simplicity—and forgiving the shorthand with which it appears here—the analogy of the mirror might indeed have useful resonance if we can locate in their metaphor an emphasis on relation and agency. If, for example, we are mirrored by what we make, which makes us in return, might we not have the capacity to awaken to our own reflection and err to make otherwise? Might we gather the wherewithal to regenerate our relations and patterns of connection with the many beings, substances and machines of our world? Seasoned nihilists and cynics might turn their faces; poets, philosophers and the determined might act otherwise.

Bo Bardi writes,

The Moon has lost her countenance. Her gentle, irrational, poetic aspect has hardened into scientific reality, suggesting that man needs to seek his poetry elsewhere. Not in narcissitic meditations or in an endless revisiting of petty personal problems, but by taking stock of his work and his responsibilities, by giving up “politics” in favour of studying human problems, by replacing philanthropy with a recognition of human rights, by acquiring a grounding in technology that will enable him to tame the mechanism which he himself has created and which now threatens to destroy him.[5]

All of this ‘we’, ‘him’ and ‘he’, however, is an intrinsic part of what is at issue. As philosopher Yuk Hui asserts in his writing on technological diversity writ as cosmotechnics:

The misconception that technics can be considered some kind of universal remains a huge obstacle to understanding the global technological condition in general, and in particular the challenge it poses to non-European cultures. Without an understanding of this question, we will all remain at a loss, overwhelmed by the homogenous becoming of modern technology.[6]

In 2019 we witness the confrontation at Mauna Kea. If Bo Bardi were writing today, with contemporary thinking partners such as Colomina, Wigley and Yuk Hui, it is likely she again would read arrogance in the forceful manoeuvres at play in this most recent iteration of the space–knowledge–technology narrative of (largely) Western European science. For one cosmology to seek to exert its destructive force over another, following in pursuit of its own ‘noble’ truth, says much about the world we have inherited.

These are important conversations to continue as Present Tense : Wāhine Toi Aotearoa opens at Britomart this week. Taking place on the edges of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, in the year that commemorates 250 years since the transit of Venus lured Captain James Cook and his crew into the Pacific and to these shores, this exhibition opens in Tāmaki Makaurau only metres from where the Rainbow Warrior was fatefully bombed in an act of French espionage in 1985. Our own beingness, our bodies, are not separate from these histories.

While this exhibition may have been initiated under the auspices of interrogating prize culture, by asking what we mean when we say ‘best’ in a cultural setting in which power tends to accumulate around those who seek to win, rule or dominate, or that simply do so by default, its focus as a vehicle for design discourse has shifted. Principles of regenerative exchange have now moved to the centre. As Desna Whaanga-Schollum writes in the previous essay, Mauri—an opportunity to connect, “I’m interested in conversations that open up a diversity of thought regarding the way we live, ways-of-doing, ways-of-being, systems of value… How might we (re) locate, and (re)connect in this (being-present) tense?”[7]

To situate a recent and tangible example in relation to this question, late last year local media platform The Spinoff published its first in a series of articles celebrating the resurgence of the Maramataka. Authored by Qiane Matata-Sipu, this brief, informative piece of writing includes a printable pdf from which a locally attuned Maramataka calendar dial can be assembled. Accessible to anyone with a printer or a library card, what situates this relatively simple design object close to Whaanga-Schollum’s kaupapa, as cited above, is not only mātauranga Māori, but process. Rather than an object of knowledge, the Maramataka calendar is a tool of inquiry, an invitation to listening, understanding, connection and collective engagement with rhythms and patterns older than our own. It does not rebuke the wealth of other forms of astronomical knowledge. To the contrary, it invites us to observe and imagine from the point of view of a different framework. In this widely accessible, simple form, the Maramataka presents a path by which to study the pull of tides, climate and seasons. It also suggests that, should we do so, we might find the moon reflected in who we are.

Elle Loui August / independent writer, researcher and curator

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1 Lina Bo Bardi, ‘The Moon,’ in Stones Against Diamonds (London: Architectural Association, 2013), 64
2 Ariana Reines, The Sand Book (Portland: Tin House Books, 2019), 373
3 Beatrice Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human: Notes on an Archeology of Design (Zurich: Lars Mueller Publishers, 2016), 52
4 Ibid, 58–59
5 Bo Bardi, ‘The Moon,’ 65
6 Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016), 12
7 ‘Mauri—an opportunity to connect,’ Designers Speak (Up), https://designersspeakup.nz/present-tense-gallery/mauri-an-opportunity-toconnect/