NoMATERIA 2020 | Balance

Las 28 (The 28)
These 28 pieces are evidence of our existence; an existence translated into optimism.
They carry with them an enormous, fresh, and joyful load which, under the current
circumstances, hardly any other discourse is able to transmit. Indeed, this objectual
universe is a hopeful manifesto that, fortunately, shifted some of the paradigms that
kept designers both occupied and worried. Today, designers in Venezuela are not
claiming for major industries to support them, nor do they demand a government
that stimulates productive development, and are far from being seduced by slogans
such as “either we invent, or we fail.” As Nacho Urbina aptly puts it, tribute is not paid
to creativity or invention, but to a reality that is as factual as the objects designed: the
current designer is an entrepreneur, who knows that design must end up in a store and
is always addressed to a user. It has set aside the naive aspirations to re-found worlds
or change already-existing languages.
Designers know their field is everyday life. It is from their own physical and cultural
territories that they design and produce, using either CAD-CAM printers and routers,
or nails and hammers. Thus, the designer only aims at improving the quality of life
—to use Martin Jay’s own words— within the same scopic regime already installed
in Venezuela since the 1950s. Such task is solidly backed by our modern history, its
admirable continuity and tradition being admirable through and through. Indeed,
and without turning memory into a myth, the continuous thread unitin the designs of
Miguel Arroyo, Cornelis Zitman and Emil Vestuti —just to mention some pioneers— is
also found in the kind of contemporary design that maintains that same enthusiasm,
imitating, playing around the city, observing the cracks and holes where intervention
is possible. Such design is constantly asking the question why not?
Perhaps unintentionally, the products here shown travel the world as if they took
globalization very seriously. Such globalizing trend inadvertently creeps in the moment
the user looks for differences and finds them in this very specific corner of the planet,
which could as well be anywhere else —as it is, in fact. But the attributes found in these
products indicate that both taste and usability are universal, and it is here where identity
resides: this is what was chosen, and not that. NoMATERIA —whose extraordinary
organizing effort has managed to bring together a group of young Venezuelan designers
around the world, all of them endowed with a distinctive realistic spirit, obsessively
imbued in design and, thus, enmeshed within the crowds— contributes to the material
world by saying, softly and cheerfully, yes, Venezuela exists.
Alberto Sato Kotani, Arch. Dis. Ind. MSc, Dr.
UDP Professor