LAS MANUELAS DESIGN BY TRUST
Creating collectives has been something we have enjoyed doing in our previous projects Las Manuelas & Los Manolos and Las Manuelas Art Series. Inviting artists and designers from all over the world to form a unity resulted in a very enriching experience and a new dimension in the design process. In this project we wanted to go one step further. Our aim was to bring together talented young artists and designers from diverse cultures and fields, such as visual arts, fashion, and textile design. And we wanted to create a space to connect, reflect and come out with a formal (universal) manifest, which would offer the guidance for the individual interpretation into a textile design to be realized by the skilled hands of the Las Manuelas collective. In 2019 we teamed up with University Stroganov from Moscow and IED Spain to develop this collaborative project. By connecting Russian textile design students with visual arts & fashion design students from Spain and the Peruvian artisan collective Las Manuelas, we built an exciting community.
The result of the design process between the Spanish and Russian creatives is a spontaneously constructed composition, a collage of different formal elements which gain s sense as a whole through the concept of random co-existence. There is no forced intention to seek formal integration. The appearance of a light and fluid dimension in the design expresses something very surprising new: the loss of ownership, as you don’t see which part belongs to each designer’s intervention. This has been possible thanks to our digital Co-Design Platform which enables collective design. In addition, the group decided to only use black, white and grey shades to realize the design and give the artisans freedom to interpret the pattern with the yarns they have available, natural colors or dyed yarns, left overs from previous productions.
This fundamental decision adds another significant topic: sustainable and circular design, using exclusively existing materials. And a second but no less important concept is brought up:
the loss of control over the final result by giving authority to the artisans throughout the design process.
The principal goal of this collaborative journey was to come out with a precise common formal program and what we received in return is much more exciting and relevant in these current times: a collaborative mindset and method that generates collective designs without control, ownership, based on respect, and trust. What could better define a (new) universal language than this process, that honors the uniqueness and disparities of the three cultures (the Spanish, Russian and Peruvian) and does not try to redirect or unify them into something common. The value of the common is in the space of respect and the willingness to accept diversity and differences and include others’ decisions without controlling them.
Isabel Berz / Project Leader “Design By Trust”
Artisans: Alicia Calisaya Castillo Herminia Perca Calizaya Hilaria Juliana Norma Vilca de Chávez Ruth Fany Flora Calisaya Castillo Gladys Sosa Condori Flora Hualpa Ventura Vilma Fresia
Artists: Jacobo Cobian Sanchez Polina Bychkova Andrea Carrera Gonzalez Daria Denzel Adoración Beltran Velasquez Sofia Makeeva Javier Lasarte Maria Mamaj Sofia Yurchenko Naia Escribano
Las Manuelas Project Leader: Isabel Berz Production Coordinator Peru: Nelida Cruz Choque Artisan Coordinator Peru: Herminia Perca Calizaya
Stroganov University of Arts Moscow Project Leader: Prof. Alexander Lavrentiev Project Coordinator: Olga Sukhomlinova Design Tutor: Ekaterina Poliakova Facilitator: Anastasia Keltsyna Consultor: Sofya Krasnaya
IED Spain Project coordinator & tutor: Carmen Collado Tutor Bilbao: Susana Záldivar Co-Design Platform Tutor: Margot Matesanz Theory: Pablo Jarauta Art Direction: Aitor Baigorri Textile Design: Federico Antelo
IED Network Communication Manager: Jacopo Mangianello Area Managers: Andrea Pozzi, Olga Myelkova