“Bizarre, yet quite common and familiar to all of us, is the relief we feel, and the sudden influx of energy, and courage, when after a long time of uneasiness, anxiety, dark premonitions, days full of apprehension and sleepless nights, we finally confront the real danger: a menace we can see and touch” Zigmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear
For our third prompt we had to choose a reading and then interpret it as something that embodies the ideas behind the text. I started looking for something that generates interest in me. Although the readings that we have done throughout the term, in the design research and contemporary dialogues classes, has brought me a lot of interest, and actually they became the starting point of many reflections, I wanted to took a different route for this project. I wanted to do both a review of an academic-formal reading, but also a very personal exploration. That’s why I chose a book named Liquid Fear written by Zigmunt Bauman, a sociologist and philosopher that broadly explores the live in modern and post-modern societies. In one of his most famous books: Liquid modernity he describes the modern society (and probably more the pos-modernity) as an age of constant change. This is reflected in vast range of aspects including relationships, identities, economies, mobilities, entertainment, etc. This also touches topics as fears, which he explores deeply in a subsequence book: Liquid Fear.
This book opens with a statement, which became the basis of my prompt, that says that the “fear is at is fearsome when it is diffuse”. This unshaped form is the essence of the uncertainty, a feeling where we don’t know what to do or how to face the thread. I initially worked with this idea, the aim of the project was to “shape” in some way your own fears so these were more “physical” and less blurry. The more shaped the less terrifying. This could be understood as an strategy to manage those fears: if we know what they are, we probably know what to do, and if not at least we know where to explore.














