I moved to Brazil when I was seven. My family decided to move for a fresh start to a small city across the border that compared to Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital city, there was never much to do there.

But there was our building; my father used to joke it was his temple.

The construction that took him several years to be done, was a two-floor building with a bakery production line on the ground floor and a party rental space on the top. My father, a construction foreman turned baker, designed the party salon with neoclassical canons borrowed from governmental buildings: white walls and angular arches framing the windows. Central columns, granite tabletops, and white marble skirting boards all around. The charm of a temple-like construction, with a high ceiling and noble materials, was his bittersweet ambition to build something to last and for further generations to carry on. However, the detailing and effort was so exhaustive that due to the aesthetic commitment of my father, for a while we didn't have another place to live, so we inhabited the party salon; when it was not occupied by weddings, birthdays, a cleaning supplies pyramid scheme, and a Pentecostal congregation every Thursday.

Growing up in a party salon was not as exciting as it may seem. Since one can easily feel misplaced when clients and guests are the ones to set the rules of how to use your living room meanwhile the sugar rush will quickly reveal people's authoritarian tone.  I’ve seen several times our very own “temple” became other people’s one defined by the stuff placed in. From party supplies and Styrofoam Arks of convenance, cheap props defined the use of the space, that later in the day when trashed and the space cleaned, what remained, rather than relief and freedom, was an awkward sense of emptiness. I must say that such a feeling of emptiness came into account as the changing ideology of our space was subjected to. But since I was always under such aesthetic regimes once defined to exclude, they forced me to behave as an observer. 

Besides witnessing the feral children’s birthdays through the party ruins, the church remains were the most exciting ones to watch. On an everyday basis, rather than an average religious gathering, the congregation behaved like a sophisticated lifestyle business. In order to engage their followers, an inventive arrangement of religious objects was sold by the pastor: Holy water in plastic bottles, miraculous soaps that wash the devil away, oil from the Moroccan caverns, incense to bring an old love back and replicas of drachmas used as tokens to buy miracles from the pastor.  Roughly a new product was presented every week with the promise to solve spiritual problems and claim a closer connection with god through its purchase. Where immediate results to financial or health issues are solved on stage with cinematic visual effects, miraculous plastic trinkets and tap water sold as medicine. Nonetheless, I do believe that In between staged miracles and exorcisms my eye for a certain camp sensibility was formed due the pageantry of this experience. Where to have a live action of magical performances in my own living room while being raised as Christian atheist, placed me in such events
as a spectator rather than a believer.

Every time after each congregation, what remained was the trash bins and the monobloc chairs that were used in the meetings.Those chairs kept arriving alongside the number of followers the congregation had every Thursday as the only consistent object in the space. I remember to stack them up high ‘til the ceiling and climb them slowly until my mother yelled that I should get off because "that was expensive stuff". But still eventually she would allow me to climb again, since at least I wasn’t playing with my cousin’s barbies.
In a short timespan the congregation that hired our salon started to get bigger, as well as our business, which led us to not rent them the party salon anymore. Since my mother, tired of having a pastor in her living room telling my father the demons enter the family through the woman; decided we will not host any other religious gathering, since she was fine with her inner demons and quinceañera parties were more profitable for the bakery. Still the impact of Pentecostal churches in Brazilian politics established a new wave of conservatism that lasted until today. Political issues became religious issues, replacing society’s complexities by God's will. I remember that suddenly most of our bakery employees were attending Christian gatherings while preaching to me in any opportunity given that my Pokémon toys were Satan’s work and pronounced homophobic claims in the name of God.

Now, more than twenty years after their start. Pentecostal churches grew as big as multinationals and their influence in Brazilian politics has been noticeable. Pastors-entrepreneurs became promising careers and religious organizations became profitable businesses supported by the state. Such as in a happy marriage between Protestantism and the entrepreneurial neoliberal lifestyle, Pentecostal churches grew alongside multinationals in a sort of contemporary crusade. Their temples now ostentatious and monumental, resembles neoclassical shopping malls in the poorest areas of the country, meanwhile their theatrical interpretations of Biblical precepts renewed conservative morals, inducing millions to support the current alt-right agendas.

But as my dad did, since their budget stays in the details, their interiors just remain as empty warehouses with those familiar towers of stacked chairs as a reminder on how the phenomenon of ideology occupies spaces, people and imaginaries while masking some unsupportable heaviness of the human experience without allowing us to object. But it also reminds that the ideology doesn't manifest only in knowing or believing, but rather doing, in social practices, and in the materiality of our everyday environment to establish social order. Where what dictates of material life shapes our effective social relations and our moral discourses. And under its practices, customs and beliefs, it shapes our innate relationship with the world and how we perceive its meaning.

I have always been attracted to this phenomena and how the pageantry of ideology structures our convictions, but I have neither been an insider or outsider. Rather in a unique position of an observer while unwilling host to these occupants and in the process I have seen first hand what it looks like before and after-- the calm empty physical space before the morning set up and the depressing clutter after the service with the facades and all the promises of spirituality swept up and dumped in big plastic bins.This vantage point, from a young age has taught me much about the theatrics that occupy our spaces and claim our hearts or minds. And that at the end of the day, what is left are its remains.   

Sometimes it’s easier to be an observer than a designer. And for this reason, my current work explores the design of new forms of bearing witness with novel combinations of observation and critique on how design plays its role materializing ideology, acting as the mystical covering that interpellates our identity and defines our place in the structures we inhabit.

For example, as a response one of my recent projects is the build up of an extension of this observation. I created a trash bin, part robot, part puppet, which is a performative witness to our ideologically infused pageantry, where through an illusion of autonomy it interacts with humans, in public spaces, galleries or design fairs. As an agent part insider, part outsider, its role will take into account what is unsaid of the structures we inhabit as a lively reminder of the terms and conditions behind a given context that dictates our modes of behaviour. Still, this character is an extension of myself, a shadowy hybrid that directly reflects the theatricality of ideology -- it is its own spectacle--while also reflecting upon it. I have sought to occupy this unique role of observer, making use of a perspective honed since childhood. In doing so, I explore the constructed nucleus of the systems that I inhabit.

This combination of theatrics and criticality can be found across my work. Despite being able to see through pageantry, the falseness of spectacle and often emptiness of theatrics I am still enthralled by it.
And so as a designer, my work is defined by the space in between the grandiose bold aesthetics that promises a whole new world and the need to research its constructed nucleus, where political and religious ideologies make use of design, to place us in certain functional roles in society. 

The spaces we inhabit, the roles we take and the positions forced upon us inevitably shape how we decide to interact with the material and ideological world. To have my own home as a performative space for parties and religious events as well as the site for my family’s own internally contested ideologies has left me with a deep sensitivity towards the relationship between the material realm and the ideological--how space and objects are so easily transformed, entangled and discarded through the application of imaginaries, desires, hopes or fears.

As a designer, it is for this reason that I tread carefully, trying both to understand the materialised phenomena of ideology and how design is used to reinforce or reproduce that. Where my practice then becomes an embodiment of myself, a history of watching from a corner of our old party salon where I intend to explore my observations and the internal struggles of the convictions that structure myself. And In a revenge of the utilitarian nature of my own constructions, I use design’s use against itself.

ABSTRACTION AND EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION

We live our lives made up of a great quantity of isolated instants. So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things. (From the Double Dream of Spring, 1970.)

1. Gavrilo Princip’s last grocery list written
   
2. The time that alligator ate that fish
   
3. When the Yongzheng Emperor found that weird dust bunny under his throne
   
4. The great earthquake of Alexandria