21st Century Mussels
Posted on October 11, 2011 | posted by:
So when the Spanish vessels arrived in America, they brought conquer, civilization, new ideas, cruelty, power, progress… and, new species. Mussels (and other little and microscopic ways of life) that were not originally from America, arrived sticked on the hulls of the ships. The fact that this living beings were attached to this crafts and travelled thousands of miles was an unperceived fact until some biologists and experts started studying the origins and development of some species. But isn´t it amazing how this little creatures got so strongly attached to the structure that not even years of travel and miles of distance made them let go?, Isn´t it amazing how strong their capacity of attachment and will is?
Well, It might seem very distant from what convene us, but it´s not. We´re being bombarded by these notions and ideas that the world we have created called “modern world” driven by this bold yet blurry concept of “artificiality” is trapping us, destroying our environment, creating distance between humans and ending with the kind of relationships we used to know. This has major impacts in every aspect of society wether they are economic, environmental, relational or healthy problems, they all affect our quality life and are bringing us to a perception that the world is nothing but getting worst and worst everyday. Now the question is: at what point did we forget that we created this world ourselves?. As far as I can remember from my history class, there was a time when we were all the same and then in an attempt to organize and create social structures, humanity started creating social systems that in their “evolution” process lead us to this point.
As Transdisciplinary Design practitioners, It´s very well said that our role exceeds the graphic or spacial realm, we are a generation that is willing to use the power of creativity to not only solve easy visual problems, even further, not only given problems but to look around us and find new more appealing and challenging problems and mostly to critique the systems that are not working as supossed.
So going back to the beginning, Obviously in these new social, economical and religious and political systems that we created to “improve” our lives somethings went wrong and we are not equal anymore, we are not connected anymore, not comfortable anymore and the question arises.. where were we in this process?, convinced that it was the right path?, sleeping?… holding on to something?… Are we little mussels attached to the hull of this system trying to get somewhere new but we can´t find the way to let go?, are we so sticked to the ideas implanted in our heads as we were sticked on the craft that we can´t just let go and see if maybe the middle of the sea is a better place that the final destination?
There are many ways to try to understand why the majority of the people just stands still complaining and not being happy and comfortable with their lives, I think behind feeling isolated from the rest of the social pattern when discovering that this is not what they want, there is a sense of “this is all we got, it´s taken years to build this system and we can´t let it go”, “it´s too complicated and laborious to build a new one”, but more important, we´ll we be able to accomplish and accumulate the same things?… it´s easy to comprehend that´s there´s something that is not going well, it is easy to understand that there are many things that could be changed and it´s maybe easy to understand how the big companies and powers in the world (those ships) could fall down and create a “change”… what if we ask ourselves, the little mussels attached to that ships (and attached to themselves in their shelves like not being able to just flow) some simple yet extremely revealing questions that could maybe help us understand why we keep trapped in this uncomfortable way of life…it´s a hard task, cause when you find the answer ou have to be responsible of taking the necessary shift, so ask yourself: What are you holding on to? what are you not letting go? …