Emergency Creativity for a Paradigm Shift
Federico Alcaro
Creativity is a means of expression for the deepest part of ourselves, of our true self. It is the foundation of the human condition, it pushes us to overcome our limits, moving on a common track and crossing barriers, walls, as well as physical and mental boundaries. Without it, survival as a concept would not exist: all the actions that were taken throughout history to solve a problem would not have been possible without creativity. The endogenous force of creativity lies in its dynamism, in its ability to innovate and to increase awareness in ourselves and in those around us.
Photo: Federico Alcaro
I am working in the field of social architecture, especially in emergency contexts where creativity is one of the basic tools to come up with the best and specific solution for each and every situation.
Emergency architecture does not mean rebuilding houses, hospitals, schools or other community places after a disaster. It means thinking of solutions in order to prevent, and only in the most extreme cases, to solve problems due to environmental disasters or social problems, which often create contact zones of people with different backgrounds. It is precisely at these interfaces where challenging barriers appear: I have often observed fear of needing help, which leads to a feeling of fragility, defenselessness, and being at the mercy
of others. It is often a lack of communication between people that prevents or hinders the achievement of a common goal. It might lead to the impression of arrogance on the helpers’ side who seem to be merely seizing an opportunity to impose certain systems on those in need. The extreme on the other side leads to the misjudgment that instead of help only support through listening is necessary.
For this reason, emergency architecture is made up of multidisciplinary work teams representing various professional fields of social, humanitarian, and scientific work (i.e. architects, engineers, urban planners, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, politicians, and others) but also of non-professional but affected people who understand the needs of those involved in the design process which needs to be communicated while interacting with and listening
to the affected people.
The more you enter into this field of work, of growing urgency and necessity, the greater the awareness that the biggest barriers are those between us, between people in everyday situations: in a historical moment in which information travels at incredible speed and the whole world is connected, people find themselves in a constant stream of data that radically changes their way of thinking day by day. The temporariness of thought stimulates creativity that finds new horizons, new ideas to grow exponentially. In this culture of dynamic and fast connections, creativity finds new strength to grow. At the same time, the society is exposed to an overwhelming amount of information which, if not properly managed, establishes mental regimes in the ideology of people that stratifies a thick barrier toward “the other”, to whom we attribute labels increasingly difficult to remove.
We are labels. Dear to a few close friends, fleeting figures to those who see us in passing, numbers for someone else, none for everyone else. Today, labels mark humanity, condition it, isolate it, condemn it.
And this is what we need to free ourselves from: fear of the so-called “other” which precludes the possibility of growth, limits our vision of the world, and denies the opportunity for creativity to grow and find innovative solutions to overcome today’s difficulties.
The AtWork workshop in Venice has not only been a challenge in experiencing something different, coming out of the canonical schemes of creativity applied in architecture, but it has been an alarm bell to me: we often hear that if you don’t experience something yourself you cannot understand it. Nothing could be more true in this case. The sheer fact of knowing people who have experienced a certain social condition makes you understand a lot, sometimes so much that it leaves you in the open, naked in front of the awareness that those images of people that we see on the screen of our TVs, computers or smartphones are not just random pixels broadcast on broadband but have a real, physical consistency which manifests themselves in a reality closely connected with ours.
Walking and walking. A chained freedom between infinite starts and infinite ends.
Indeed, we are nothing without the people around us, who live their everyday lives, who pass by, veiled by a fog of indifference and prejudice that isolates us from the mass. We are angry because nobody listens to us and we are becoming deafer and deafer to others. A paradigm shift is necessary.
Creativity is an instrument of social and spatial freedom: the labels, the prejudices, the walls are artifices of contemporary society. Creativity, on the other hand, is an innate capacity of each one of us, it takes shape as a stock of knowledge constantly growing, that we all share as human beings. This is why creativity is stronger than artifice, it allows to communicate on a deeper level and to provoke cracks, to tear up these labels, to make them disappear and rebuild bridges between people without distinction or discrimination of sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, personal and social conditions.
By increasing awareness in our abilities and in the abilities of the people around us, by freeing us from misleading external conditioning, we will be able to take our creativity to the next level so that we can fully express the potential of humanity, together.
Emergency creativity exists not because there is a lack of creativity, but rather because there is a need to use creativity to restore connections and fragile social justice. We are all creative.
Who by necessity? Who by desire? Who in hope of being heard?
Federico Alcaro is an architect working in the social field. He is interested in the role of architecture in emergency contexts and developing countries. Currently, he lives in Venice where he collaborates with Studio TAMassociati.
This article was originally published in August 2020 in Folios n.3 “Golden Sea”, the Moleskine Foundation cultural publication.
