Ceci n'est pas une burka 2003
project presented at the 1st International Design Congress (Portugal), at Expo Urban Warriors, leaded by Miguel Rios
URBAN WARRIORS | Maximum Security
1 | Urban Warriors calls for Clara Brito!
The project “Urban Warriors – Maximum Security” is searching for proposals that look forward to find solutions for city problems. They call for works that can be operative, in which the functional components can help citizens to live better the pollution strain, the urban rhythm, the isolation dangers and the aggressions to their own security.
Specific concerns of this project:
Conceive a work that…
… touches everyone, with no distinction of gender, profession nor social status
… respects and uses industry as well as existing technologies for modulation and clothing manufacturing, overcoming the craft experimentalism
… draws a common root within in diversity
… dresses up citizens without identifying them with certain ways of living or being
… can be a urban equipment directly applied to the citizen and favors its mobility and motivations
… reflects the isolation of an enormous and anonymous collective, which are the city inhabitants
2 | Detection of urban problems
a | Who are the urban warriors?
All the citizens.
Better than we, authors like Franz Kafka or Peter Kuper have explained how the city can be a living being fulfilled with contradiction. So to solve them, the citizens behave like warriors. There are those who face problems solving them almost immediately and with no resentments.
But differently, others do not find a place, that face the available amount of information and several possibilities of choice – and get lost in anxiety and indecision.
How do people live in the city?
Conditioned and lacking autonomy, like an abstract and indifferent identity.
b | Who is the city?
The citizens, but also the streets, walls and windows. The streets are never like the tracks made by men in the open fields, they are rather territorial plans that already exist. The citizens grow up and develop themselves with it, feeding the roots of the communication code and a logic that is foreign to them. All of this is an embarrassment to the citizens’ freedom for time and space - limited by sidewalks, zebras and streets they move around as if part of a gear.
The city offers many possibilities but it is yet far from being a home, a true space for individual and collective living, in a dichotomies’ relation between public and private spheres, between familiarity and anonymousness.
The city does not belong to citizens - these live the city in the daylight and withdraw to the suburbs by nightfall. Unhappy with the city they go back to a far way shelter.
c | Metaphors and the symbolic in the city
The city is crossed by flows and transferences in space, an immense traffic of people, vehicles, that is, information.
The city is made of symbols and communication codes that all its users understand in order to share a common space. That highly developed symbology is more and more rooted in the people’s culture. Those are rules made language and discipline that serve all indifferently. It has therefore its own iconography and deals with various concepts. As Scott McCloud states, “icons have a fixed and hidden meaning (…) they are a form of amplification by means of simplification. They are a concept.”
What hides in the city?
The citizen’s identity.
What can be seen in the city?
The citizen’s bodies.
The city doesn’t show us everything. There’s something invisible besides the identity of its users. Its buildings hide realities and its appearance, form and stile diversity limits the citizen psychologically.
For example, when out for a walk in a clean area, with tidy modern buildings, like the Parque das Nações in Lisbon, it feels like artificial and falseness in that kind of architectural model, as if everything is not but a scenario in which people are but pedestrians. Although they try to recognize themselves in its identity, the city does not belong to them.
For the contrary, while moving around in a more organic part of the city, older and dirtier, like Alfama or Bairro Alto in Lisbon, we acknowledge its History, and that sense of familiar gives him the feeling of being an agent of popular culture.
The feeling of security can also be affected by the kind of architecture surrounding us. In the areas pretty much conserved and enlightened, cosmopolitan and visited, people walk around more peacefully. We tend to feel a kind of protection that comes out the windows, columns and big doors where we imagine offices and ministries to be. But it is possible to feel also the weight of numbers and bureaucracy, seizing people to a serial status.
While passing by the so-called ghettos, degraded areas where ethnic minorities live, one feels more the fright, although it is invisible. Danger is imagined as if it could be guessed the kind of inhabitants that hide behind the destructed façades and garbage bins. We walk faster and try not to call any attention on us (?).
We are now to ask: who is Machiavellian? Ourselves and our conscience or the “invisible”?
Taking into account these reflections, we can say that citizens:
… Confer identity to spaces by using their imagination
… Feel more or less secure depending on the environments’ characteristics
… May want to hide or show themselves according to the possible visibility/invisibility in cities
… Might feel anonymous and lonely in cosmopolitan environments
3 | “As much as we try to understand the world, a part of it will remain in shadow, concealed in mystery” Scott McCloud in “The Invisible Art”
In the present context of terrorism, insecurity, war and growing conflicts, what one may conclude is that different cultures have deep hiatus in the knowledge they have from each other and therefore enormous difficulties in understanding different mentalities.
When the attack of the Twin Towers on the 11th September occurred, the Western world, lead by Americans and British, has raised a global reaction against Islamic people, although an impartial cold discussion of the facts was never held. A kind of axis of good and evil has been created, as if everything could be diminished to antagonisms – thus accentuating dichotomy, pushing opinions to extremes with no acknowledgement and respect for neither ethnic nor religious differences.
At the same time forms of ostracism, racism and mistrust were accentuated in the midst of western societies.
At the time the USA decided to attack Afghanistan in search for a responsible on the hideous crime committed. It was also at that time that the western world found out its Islamic neighbors’ differences and got worried with tyrannical submission laws, such as the compulsory use of the “burka” by women and their short access to power.
In a metaphorical and poetical view of the meaning of this habit, one might interpret the “burka” as a cocoon for identity, a most specific standardization trough form. This fact is even more accurate when taking into account the well-known examples of journalists that looking forward to do the news cover in Afghanistan, infiltrated in the country disguised with “burkas” – showing us how equivocal can appearances be.
René Magritte painted an outstanding picture for the surrealist movement called “The Falseness of Images” in which a pipe appears underlined with the legend “This is not a pipe” (in the original “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”). It is not the true pipe but the drawing/picture of a pipe, though we do see a pipe and then face some difficulties in understanding that it is said not to be so.
This is an example of what the icons are and what they represent – concepts – that only materialize in our conscience and imaginary.
We should also for the matter pay attention to Scott McCloud’s words in which he establishes a relation between icon, caricature and symbology: “As many times a face is caricatured, larger is the number of persons it represents. When you see a realistic photography or drawing of a face, you see it as the face of some other person, while in caricature you see yourself. We become the caricature!”. And he concludes saying that “there is plenty more in caricature that one can see at first”.
4 | “Ceci n’est pas une burka”
We’ve conceived a unisex piece of clothing made to all citizens that should…
… mirror the dubious character of their feelings, allowing them to be faithful to themselves
… be simple, iconic, subjective and universal
… give autonomy, power of decision and civic responsibility
… work as a shout for life in the loneliness of anonymity
… allow visibility and security in moments of eminent danger
… confer a sense of freedom and individual responsibility as an essential right on the search for truth and for the vitality that stems from the society as a whole
… allows them not to feel constrained and obliged to ear the city noise, enabling them to be peacefully with their thoughts
… lets the user be invisible and truly anonymous, becoming precisely the image of what the city makes of them: a pedestrian
… offers a space for privacy and introspection - a home-cocoon
Only in this context will be possible to avoid the supremacy of who, in the dark, gets power over the citizen’s silence and passiveness.
The piece of clothing is a waterproof dark blue coat with a hood and it has a zip’s system allowing its transformation into a jump suit.
The hood can be closed with elastic strings and it’s provided with an “ears protecting system” that can be withdrew or stretched, depending on the user’s will to ear or not the sounds of the city.
We have created in this peace of clothing a lightning system that draws the human silhouette – operational by the users’ action. It is based on the urban signs’ language: on the front side, the light is white; on the back it is red. The intention is to turn this language the most universal possible, reinforcing the citizens’ physical and human dimension.
Inside the suit it is printed a deliberately juxtaposed sequence of images that propose the user ways of fruition of his “burka”. It is a comic sequence, or diagram, that uses simple icons to ease identification and inform immediately.
The suit has two positions: when the clothing has no light it reinforces the citizen’s estate of isolation, letting him truly anonymous; the second, when the clothing is enlightened, corresponds to an estate of alert, marking out and detaching him from whatever vehicles.
1.Estate of isolation – individual
It is possible to be invisible because the material is dark colored and the suit hasn’t the lights on. By placing the “ears protecting system”, the user can be isolated from the sounds of the city, free for a flow of his thoughts.
2.Estate of alert – collective
It is possible to be visible: though the material is dark, the suit can be enlightened. One can pay attention to the city dangers and be receptive to what’s happening around when the “ears protecting system” is not in use.
5 | Credits - Technical Details
a ) Production
Urban Warriors – Maximum Security Commissariat
Miguel Rios
Concept
Clara Brito e André Ruivo
Design and Conception
Clara Brito
Diagrams and text
André Ruivo
Manufacturing
Odete Duarte
Modelation
Olivera Cacic
Automation Systems
José Brito
Printing
Teófilo Dias { CITEX, Porto }
Fernando Novais { CITEX, Porto }
Presentation
Clara Brito e André Ruivo
b ) Materials
_ Outside
Colour
Dark blue
Production
Endutex
Reference
#CP-2848/A
_Inner side
Colour
light blue
Composition
100% polypropylene
Characteristics
Anti-UVA – added function my means of a specific fiber treatment, blocking the UV penetration (that could harm skin) offering protection rates up to 30
Thermo-regulation – property that regulates the cloth temperature so to conserve the warm microclimate between the clothing piece and the skin, therefore avoiding the body to chill.
Production
LMA – Leandro Manuel Araújo lda
Reference
#8087
_ Armpit
Colour
Grey
Composition
100% polyester
Characteristics
Hydrophilic – final treatment that confers to the cloth hydrophilic properties allowins the textile to absorb perspiration
Cloth in one of the sides, enabling anti-bacteria effect, a quimical treatment applicable to the cloth to disable bacteria’ development caused by perspiration.
Production
LMA – Leandro Manuel Araújo lda
Reference
#8087