Threads of Hope weaving ideas for a different world

Because I have a hope, a hope of a nearly day the idea of separate the world putting tags and labels to it, developed-developing, Black-White, Straight-Gay… North-Global South will be abolished. The idea to break boundaries and inequity through creativity, through handcrafts, and finally being amended and stitched by threads of hope, the hope in a different and more "planthropocene, more "naturaltrhopocene" world.

Threads of Hope proposal, initial visualization. GDID final project Chelsea college of Arts

Takes me many years and cross the Atlantic Ocean to realize that we-Countries above United States in the map are called “The Global South”, the world that is developing, “poor”, low-tech… and PRIMITIVE. In what sense we are taking de word developed? What kind of develop we are talking about? How can we be called PRIMITIVE and POOR having the world’s lung and the most biodiversity countries on earth?

Maybe what we need is begin to change the way we are seeing and evaluating the world, maybe that is why we are facing the worst environmental catastrophe ever, because we are not interested anymore in what is really important for us, as a human beings, the others. Urge see “the others”-live apart of mankind-as a living beings that share the planet with us rather as resources and begin to brake the colonization like idea of extraction slaving people along side the process. Reconnect with them, with mother nature, recover the few humanity that left, care about others-microorganisms included- question ourselves about our role in this world .

Maybe what we need is reflect about “what work is required for us to be able to register the being-ness of these creatures with whom we co-create our worlds?” (Natasha Myers, Disegno Magazine, The Quarterly Journal of Design #31 Winter 2021/2022). Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Antrophology at Canada´s York University and also director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory. She works with the planthropocene, a notion that suggests new ways of conspiring with plants and developing new reverence relationships with them. In contrast to the anthropocene's human-centric viewpoint.

I found myself with an interesting article in the quarterly journal of design #31 of Disegno Magazine that talk about conspiring with vegetal life to change design in order to break how we see plants as objects rather as living beings and how “design can help us reframe how we see the natural world, how we see the plants, and how we see other organisms” (Ioana Man). These questions come from a research that became Plant Fever, a book and exhibition produced and presented by the Belgium museum CLD au Grand-Hornu in 2020, and which is currently on display in the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.

Plant Fever Exhibition. Museum für Gestaltung,, Zürich.

There were two components of the project that they. -Laura Druoet and Oliver Lacrouts, Studio d-o-t-s- wanted to focus on. The first is to refute the notion that plants are only a backdrop to our lives and exist solely to be exploited, which is ingrained in our Western understanding of the dichotomy between humans and what we refer to as "nature." Studio d-o-t-s would like to see whether we can bridge that divide and bring the two closer together through design. The second issue is to consider "plant blindness," a phrase coined by American botanists J.H. Wandersee and E.E. Shussler in the late 1990s to describe a systemic bias against plants and our failure to account for their value as living organisms.

images created by overwind and commissioned by Studio d-o-t-s for Plant fever

This could be a great starting point to begin to analyse how we are seeing the world, because…

...a have a hope… a hope of some nearly day the world let to see us as the deposit of raw materials, the supply place of natural resources, ¨The Global South” (Watson, Abukhodair, Ali, Robertson, Issaoui and Sun) this part of the world conformed by all the countries under an imaginary line parallel to equator line drown by the developed countries.