“We set up an exhibition and a concurrent public workshop that have generated a series of functional objects through a set of clear, simple instructions. Of course, as Jumbo accurately remarks, simplicity often brings about complex ideas and construction issues. Therefore naivety, understood as a position of innocence, is adopted by the studio as a strategy that champions the unsophisticated, the irreducible and the uncool, the playful and cute, the stupid and the saccharine. On the other hand, improvisation and intuition accompany OoIC’ s instructions, allowing makers to actively get involved in the creative process and marking clear differences with previous modernist projects from the 20th century. All four, almost childlike-engineered works made out of basic, everyday materials operate both on syntactical and semantical fronts without ever resolving this fundamental, linguistic problem. Instead, they aim to establish affective, horizontal, evocative relationships with the humans that fabricate and interact with them. If Oulipian literature, for instance, had tried to mechanize writing in a non-creative way, eliminating the creative-I, the projects by Jumbo and OoCI, on the contrary, re-establish agency as a tool for participatory design where aesthetics empower people through experience. As we are well aware by now, all design has socio-economic implications and this new model proposes collective activity rather than one solely based on Anglo-Saxon individualism. The openness of the projects, through association and inclusion, proposes a world beyond the designers’ control and establishes an interdependency with those that directly interact with the objects. Both practices infuse the works with a political agenda around play allowing exploration and innovation by succumbing to an infantile attraction to the familiar and the unusual alike, anchoring and clinging to the known and the safe, while exploring the new and what has never been experienced. We hope this to be the beginning of a new dialogical approach that can reconsider past cultural relationships of North-South, South-North, into one global discourse that doesn’t efface, but instead, puts at the very center of discussion its material ramifications.”

Juan García Mosqueda
Milan, Italy
JUMBO
@jumbo.nyc

OBJECTS OF COMMON INTEREST
@objects_of_common_interest

Photos: Javier Agustín Rojas
All works available for purchase


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