2. Action(s):
Making // 0f Monsters and plants
While we were gathering stuff and playing around with them, we encountered a tree truck which had cuts on it. Unfortunately in Iran some people tend to damage natural or even historical properties by engraving on them with knives. We wanted to take that cut as a metaphor for a damage, a problem and something that needed help to heal. So we used 3 different materials that we had on our hands.
Plastic was the easiest option, it fit right in the hole by pushing it in but obviously it looked disturbing. Leaving plastic in nature is the last thing we wanted to to. The flower took more time to work, it kept falling. But we loved the result; simply because it looked pretty. Then we found some tree bark laying around under the tree and used that to fix the cut. It was the hardest, took the longest time, but after seeing the result we loved the seamless look. As in the healing process that we were looking for finally happened. Compared to this, the flower seemed like a pretty fix which wouldn’t last long. But when the solution came within the context of the tree itself, the result seemed appropriate.
We brought some of the stuff back to our studio. This time we wanted to make objects with combining artificial and natural material together. We wanted them to look weird and strange, but surprisingly we liked most of them. (Some part of it has to do with us learning to beautify EVERYTHING in art school for the past 4 years)
During making, we talked about colonial impacts and how the imposed and enforced politics and hierarchies of Eurocentrism and Colonialism made “Monsters” (Bowker, G. and Star, S.L. 2000) in almost all the societies. Monsters as in patriarchy, dismissing indigenous knowledge and non-Western world views, and even monsters in design. Using “universal” systems and tools to solve local problems without having their geopolitical context in mind.
Looking at our beautiful non-monster looking objects, we figured that maybe monsters are not supposed to be scary looking. They could easily blend in our surroundings and we wouldn’t even notice them.
Final notes on Action 3:
As I was contemplating about our actions in the following days, I was reminded again about how we weren’t bothered by our “vintage world maps”, taking them as “pretty” or “decorative” and somehow the color coding of colonial possessions that later we found disturbing looked pleasant. The transition of seeing these maps as a shameless proof of colonialism! happened only because we went through a decolonial thought process, even before starting our actions. In fact, decolonial thinking (through reading various articles) sparked all of these actions, made us sensitive to the pretty looking monster, and it is perhaps the prior step to decolonial design.