What can be found in the spaces in between the beautiful and the ugly, feminine and masculine? How can dragqueen culture inform and expand design thinking?

In a mini series Maren Bang of the Elementa crew presents the work of some of her fellow students graduating from the Master Degree at Design Academy Eindhoven in Netherlands the spring 2021. First out is the Uruguayan designer and artist Bruno Baietto.

#Maren: Tell us about yourself and how you came to study the discipline we are taught to call contextual design here at Eindhoven? 

Bruno: I Was born in Uruguay and was raised in the border between Uruguay and Brazil in a family of communist bakers. The contrast between a secular and European-like country such as Uruguay, and a religious and tropical one like Brazil - it’s always been part of my raise hood, and definitely has influenced my work. 

Later, I studied product design in Montevideo, Uruguay, and visual arts in Rio de Janeiro. So the intersection and even the conflicts between these practices is very much of my interest and it's where I usually perform my work. In my previous projects, I dealt with subjects such as the influence of religion on politics, and the materiality of architecture related to class division. This relates also to the current Brazilian issues and political environment. Design has been a powerful tool to understand certain mechanisms and moreover to unveil the frictions inside of these structures.

#Maren: Design can definitely be a filter through which to experiences and analyze reality. How do you perceive the present period in terms of your field and vision?

Bruno: I believe we are living in a very crucial time where we need to re-evaluate our current systems and our relationship with our tangible world. I feel there’s an urge to pay closer attention to possibilities besides the technological mediation of things. It feels like that the narrative of progress that the digital promises constructed so far is cracking due to the current crises.

Something the quarantine has imposed and made me reflect on, is the human needs that cannot be translated to the digital. Notions such as tactility and functionality are questioned when we interface the world almost exclusively from a screen, putting the spotlight on our deep human needs such as our urge to gather.

Since a lot of things have to be re-evaluated, I’m interested in the ideological frameworks of what shapes the perceptions of what is true, real or beautiful. And how to analyze and understand our material reality from those different world-views. More specifically how to give space for new narratives beyond the usual binaries, such as the beautiful and the ugly, the fake and the real, the fictional and the factual, etc. 

#Maren: Challenging the truthfulness of beauty seems to be at the heart of your latest works ?

Bruno: Yes, lately I've been trying to address such points from a material perspective with materials associated with class division and gender performativity. Where imitation supersedes representation and the object becomes such a loaded artifact that it can have the power to discuss such complex topics. Eventually through twisting them and putting them in states of conflict compared to their original use they can unveil the hegemonies on where they were created.

This way I believe that it's possible to address new relationships with materiality and subvert the order of what is considered beautiful. So this way, who knows - perhaps the objects could act as restorative agents towards the preconceptions and standards where they were originally created.

#Maren: Can you tell us more about the background of the “The Earliest flowers…” project?

#Bruno: Queer culture, and specifically drag queen culture has been a very important part of my raise hood and that’s present in all my production in a more or less explicit way. In this particular project, I addressed the performativity of objects and materials used in dragqueen culture as the main subject of research in between the binaries.

You can say between the fake and the real, the feminine and the masculine, and the beautiful and the ugly. This can be addressed from a restorative approach, through breaking, mimicking, exaggerating its referential and accepting the different shades of their own expression beyond what our societal structure imposes as right or wrong. So what happens when we address these beauty canons and exaggerate them to perform as something beyond and emancipate them to their referential? I guess this opens liberating possibilities.

Be sure to follow Bruno Baietto on Instagram to see his latest work: @bbaietto