things are not the same anymore

The idea that creativity — rather than being something too crazy and different — is inseparably linked to suffering is as frightening as the amount of artists who have put an end to their lives by their own hands. While researching “creativity and suffering”, I bumped into this self-portrait of Frida Kahlo named The broken column. Painted in 1944, the artist depicted herself with her nude torso surrounded by a body jacket, while a cruel breach in her body allowed us to observe how a stone column, broken into several pieces, was replacing her spinal column, symbolizing the consequences of a bus accident she had suffered at age 17. I have always been intrigued by this subject because I have always believed in the potential of creativity to provide a way of structuring or re-framing a conflict (or pain, in Frida Kahlo’s example).

Since my graduation I feel I have been struggling to keep my creative spirit alive and concluded that traveling is an excellent way of making this “energy” move forward. The decision to let go when you leave everything behind and leap into the unknown makes me feel I am really doing something worthwhile. I just found out there is a term for all this mixture of feelings: “travel fever”. It may be observed when you are constantly searching for the boarding ticket or passport or in extreme cases, a fear of death just before you take off. In one sense, throwing oneself in search of a genuinely creative life (full of paradox and uncertainty) is very similar to taking off into an unknown destination on Earth.

Years ago, one of this leaps into the unknown happened when I visited Recife on the occasion of a Design Student’s Conference. At some point during the conference, we were asked to clean rooms and toilets because the place was a mess. Regardless of being my first time in northeast Brazil — which for someone born and bred in the extreme south of the country is already an event in itself! — and besides the talks and workshops you usually see at those conferences, the most valuable teaching for me was something yet unnamable that I thought went beyond design.

Just after I came back home, I defined the whole experience as being a glimpse of the excitement of seeing things through a child´s eyes again. No wonder this lack of perception of adults became a widespread belief that makes you think something should be brought back to us. As if my age group wasn’t, perhaps, one of most nostalgic generations of all times! But I wonder if there is a way of changing the perspective of one’s point of view without changing my age box.

Sitting at the table
About two weeks ago, I was so pleased to attend the first edition of a really cool project called Mesa & Cadeira (Table & Chair, literal translation). The person sitting at the head of the table was Andy Cameron who has been directing interactive departments at Wieden + Kennedy London and Fabrica. The whole workshop experience was full of insights and interesting ideas.

One thing he told us about had to do with playfulness (and how this is an experience shared even with non-human species) as a way of building engagement. When you are deeply involved in play, nothing but the activity (not even oneself or one’s emotions) is important. No wonder it was hard for my parents to make me join them for dinner while I was playing Super Mario Bros!

Eureka!
Although the combination of creativity, playfulness and engagement is powerful enough to save my creative spirit even so something was still missing. Ironically the enlightening moment of all this came after I remembered the TV series produced by BBC (that I used to watch on TVE Brazil in the mid-90’s) called Connections presented by science historian James Burke. I simply used to love the fact it traced the path of an event or innovation in the past through a series of seemingly unrelated connections, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g. profit, curiosity, religious) with no concept of the final result of what either their or their contemporaries’ actions finally led to. Although at that point I didn’t know the name, that was all that “creative process” was about.

And suddenly all this started to connect:

“The originality of genius, in art as in science consists of a reality of attention to aspects of reality previously ignored, discovering hidden connections, seeing familiar objects or events in a new light”
— Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1964.

Because if you are able to combine both rational and irrational sources during the creative process, as Arthur Koestler defends in his The Act of Creation (1964), the leap made by the mind gives rise to new and startling perceptions and glimpses of reality. I still have not read this book, but I can’t wait to!

Inspiration
It might be a common (and very naive) belief that, in order to be original and self-expressive, one should avoid being influenced by others. But unless you are God in the Old Testament, no one “creates” anything new from nothing. I’d rather stick with the idea that all the struggle needed to create is a form of discovery, whose findings should be genuinely attached to your story. As in Frida Kahlo’ self-portraits and many others you probably admire.

In times when one is exposed to zillions of images everyday, it might be a tricky situation if you don’t know the reasons why you add certain things to your map of references or to your process. If truth is to be found in movement, in the unknown of tomorrow and the unique moment of “now” as in the E.E.Cummings’ poem that entitles this post (my first attempt to write in this blog in English), I can’t wait for my mind to start moving. As in travel or in the realm of graphic design, living out on the edge of your control zone, increases the possibilities of finding new ways of coming up with something.