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The peasant must adapt to a defined topography, to the possibilities of subsistence by building his own work tools, utensils, furniture, being forced to contribute to the creative work, for materials that his own region lavishes on him.
Patricia Córdoba and José Ignacio Vélez, 1983
Patricia Córdoba and José Ignacio Vélez met at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín where they were both studying design. Beyond the career and the environment, they had in common a rural outlook and a sensibility for manual crafts. In the 1980s, when Patricia and José Ignacio were studying, obtaining a degree as a graphic designer or industrial designer was only mediated by the type of thesis they presented after 10 semesters of subjects that dealt with both trades. They wanted to be craftsmen, they wanted to work with their hands where nature was always there, and the closest thing to that was to be an industrial designer; so together they presented a thesis that brought them closer to this. The story of this thesis began in 1983, when they presented it, and ended forty years later.
When they were still students, Patricia introduced José Ignacio to the priest Gabriel Díaz, who was a reference in the city for what was called Liberation Theology. In short, a group of priests who believed in collective action and territory to defend the rights of social victims. Being close to Gabriel was for the two students - and this continued during all the years of the priest's life - to be in front of a dear friend, a teacher and a reference, and it meant spending weekends away from the discos where their friends were usually and close to the countryside, inside it. The desire that kept them there was to relate to a world in which they believed more.
On those trips they made with Father Gabriel and others they made on their own, most of which took place between November 1982 and June 1983, they began a project that later became their graduate thesis entitled Utensils and furniture in rural Colombia. They went to rural houses and looked for common objects: pots, chairs, tools, beds, spoons, ladders; they drew them, asked for the maker, took measurements, recorded the materials and wrote down the name of the object, in many cases unknown to them. “At a time when we were asked to design lamps for the Paris subway or a bus for another city, we decided to look at our own environment,” says José Ignacio.
In total they made 280 infographic drawings of 32 communities on white paper and in pencil, presented them as a thesis, approved it and then archived these drawings. It was not in their plans to do anything with these drawings because they were anxious. They asked for permission to graduate before, eight days later they got married and eight days later they went to study at the Porta Romana academy in Florence, Italy. She did graphic arts and he did ceramics. The drawings were during the time of their studies and some decades more in some still drawer and also in the houses of other people to whom they gave a copy of the thesis. One of those people was Dora Ramirez, an artist who painted with color and danced profusely and who had a deep friendship with the couple.
One of Dora Ramirez's daughters is Dora Luz Echeverria, an architect and professor at the National University of Colombia who shared her life with the writer Manuel Mejia Vallejo. Patricia and José Ignacio's thesis ended up in the house they shared with their four children, and it was because of this that their youngest daughter, Valeria Mejía Echeverría, grew up seeing those images of peasant objects that had been so meticulously drawn. Valeria knew that in those pages there was something valuable that should be shared and that is why when she arrived at the Narratives and Culture Department of EAFIT University she proposed to mount an exhibition and create a book -which will be launched soon- to give a place of conversation and visibility to these drawings that had been kept for forty years.
The first result of this idea is the exhibition that is on display until August 2023 on the second floor of the EAFIT library and was entitled 'Sovereignty and Design in Rurality 1983- 2023'. The curatorship was done by Olga Elena Acosta and Germán Ferro of Puente, a cultural consulting firm that has worked in rural Colombia creating communication and outreach projects. They systematized the drawings and ended up understanding that what they had in front of them was a symbol of the Colombian materiality, of the knowledge of the peasants about their place, their needs and their possibilities, and they worked in that harmony.
The exhibition presents 184 of the 280 drawings and little more. Everything that accompanies them is handmade in a consistent way with the main material. It is an analogous exhibition. The letters of the curatorial texts are hand-drawn, the museum props are printed on paper and cast, and there is fabric or wood where there could have been plastic. They were looking for as little waste as possible. It is also an exhibition with very little three-dimensionality because they did not want to fight with the drawing in terms of harmony, they wanted it to be dignified and outstanding. That is why they only put a few elements that help to understand the categories of the exhibition, which are simple: materials, work, kitchen, rest and domesticity.
In the materials part, titled 'The children of the forest', which is also the one that opens the exhibition, a discursive fabric is created. “Five species that inhabit different thermal floors are named, in ascending order: mangrove, totumo, guadua, coffee and oak,” says Olga. A large part of the objects in the exhibition are made with these materials, and their arrangement and use allow us to say that materiality can also contain a country.
Between wood and leather, paper and charcoal, the rimax or monobloc chair appears as an intruder in the middle of the room. This version is red and has traces of time and marker. It is used. The decision to put this chair in conversation with the rest of the objects, which are mainly made of wood, is that it creates a tension. Its appearance in the field led to the original peasant designs having to coexist with plastic and on many occasions to stop building chairs that were previously common. It emerges then to ask questions about democratic design and to affirm that this exhibition, despite the years that distance it from the creation of the first input, is current and responds to a field that still exists.
The exhibition, being hosted by a university, brings with it pedagogical projects where students appropriate the narrative proposed by Patricia and José Ignacio forty years ago and dialogue with it in different ways. There is a room where they can go to think about the object, the Communication and Journalism students have expanded the exhibition to the university level and the New Products Engineering students participated in the creation of these three-dimensional objects that accompany the drawings. This project was born as a thesis and continues its path with relevance in the same environment where it is presented as a place of possibilities for both creation and reflection on the current object, on the constructive processes and techniques that are in rural areas and on what we may or may not call Colombian design.
After the thesis and the random sequence of degrees, weddings and studies, Patricia and José Ignacio followed the path of the trades. She is a weaver, she has a workshop in her house -which is also a natural reserve in Guatapé, Antioquia- where she dedicates herself to the looms and sewing machines with the judgment of a hermit monk and José Ignacio writes, makes ceramics, draws, paints, manages ceramic projects in Carmen de Viboral and does things, many things. None of them has moved away from the countryside and the work with their hands; perhaps that is why, despite the fact that the exhibition of his thesis came four decades later, it does not suffer from anachronisms. Who they were on the trips where they drew these objects and who they are now are not too far apart.
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A Spanish version of this article was published in Bacánika in 2023.
