maria gil ulldemolins

Please allow me to behave hysterically for a moment.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

He is back!

Thanks for your understanding.

(Mr. M.’s comment on the trailer was: “Hipster”. I think he said it with admiration.)

PS: I predict big stationary envy.

PPS: I really like the music in the trailer:

The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Part1 (by hkams)

Today I realized I’ve got 170 followers in Pinterest. Granted, some people out there have hundreds of thousands. But, still, for something I don’t nurture per se, it’s quite a lot. But I’m not here to pat myself on the back. No, ma’am.

I’ve known and used pinterest for a while (damn, I was a beta user, I’m that metal). And I keep on having two feelings:

1. it’s awesome 
2. something went wrong with it along the way

And here’s where I get into dangerous mud. Let’s begin the nice part, shall we? It works. As simple as that. It does what it does brilliantly. Also, it’s totally genius when it comes to keeping the sources of your pins (Tumblr, you suck at this). Asthetically it’s bang on and it’s super user and community friendly. Yay.

Now, how do I put this? When I started using it, I did not expect it to be the way it is now. And I do not know if their founders imagined it either. For some reason, it’s very, very… glittery? pinky? Most users are women, granted. Now, plenty of women out there are more than happy to avoid pink and glitter and unicorns and lingerie ads. But for some reason, lots of pinners focus precisely on all of these (with a few brilliant exceptions).

The internet is a free land, and I pin both sheer awesome inspiration (I’ve got a board for research on hair in art and another one for smells and art; one dedicated to how women are portrayed); and, at the same time, more WI-like boards (vegan cooking, stuff for the wedding, interiors). I do that because, as I’ve said, Pinterest works for keeping my virtual sh*t together and I happen to eat and like sofas. Guilty. But I’ve had problems with fellow pinners demanding my non-WI boards to be taken down.

Because, you see, some of the art I was researching was… offensive. Gasp! No way! Oh dear. I would have never got into Contemporary Art if I didn’t think it would be totally toddler friendly and politically correct (no, I have no children.

So here we have a community that has strongly anti-gay opinions, posts naked dudes and naked ladies as “thinspiration” or “eye candy” and cannot possibly take that I want to post images of a performance (which, for your information had no gore at all).

The worst part is that Pinterest does take down these images. I’ve been tempted to remove my membership many times but damn, the site works. But every now or then my pins get deleted.

Now, I do not know who the 170 people who follow my boards are. And probably they like my interiors better than my contemporary art researches. But hey, pin and let pin.

And if anybody know an alternative Pinterest-land where all pinners are Ok with the diversity of the internet, please do point it my way. Thanks.

It’s time for my weekly post over at ¿Y por qué no?

Mr. M. and I are watching The Wire (we’ve just started the 3rd season, so please! No spoilers! Thanks!). I am going to skip the whole “It’s the best TV series ever- It’s so overrated I want to cry” debate and go straight to what I wanted to say: I love seeing how the team works to solve the cases.

I have been going nuts all over Google trying to find an image of the boards where they explore the case and the suspects and their relationships. No such luck. The closest I’ve come to is the image here. The thing that strikes me the most is how very similar this picture is to the ones I take in my Design thinking and innovation workshops. I basically came to say that what McNulty and his mates are up to is precisely that, Design Thinking.

Let’s analyse the parallelisms:

• It’s Visual: in both cases, the priority is to make sense visually of what you are dealing with, and therefore walls become essential tools for expansion.
• It’s Physical: have you noticed the name tags they pin on their boards? They are big. They have a materiality. And then they use strings and tapes to physically link one piece of information to another. I think that is key to making a Design thinking workshop successful. You can touch what you think and prototype your ideas.
• It’s Collaborative: the work is done in teams with different professionals involved. Actually, in the series, they regularly team up with suspects to figure out more. Now, collaborating with consumers it’s not quite the same thing, but you get what I mean.
• Feedback is essential: Design Thinking is not a step-by-step process, but rather a space to navigate. In this way, you can always go back to something you’ve looked into and re-feed that information into what you are doing. And what you learn from your mates and the case gets processed right back.
• One needs to Research: People often imagine creative geniuses having a sort of inspirational fit that leads to them vomiting a fabulous piece of art or design. I am not a genius but I can tell you that it takes a lot more than that. One needs tor research and investigate again, and again and then some more. Like police people.

So there, what did you think of that? There are some more points I could add, like the fact that Design thinking is hard work and so is case resolving, but since I’ve never been shot during a workshop, I’ll leave that aside. Also, as a designer I can shower and sleep and it doesn’t lead to marital problems. There’s only so many McNulty’s in this world.

so true.

New article for ¿Y por qué no? ready!

On the 22nd of November i had the chance of attending a Visual Sense Making workshop by Elizabeth Pastor of Humantific (I’m the pseudo-hipster with a beanie in the video, I pop up every now and then).

During the workshop I thought it was all nicely planned and laid out, Elizabeth was engaging and entertaining. It was fine, but I wasn’t quite blown away. It seemed basic. Somehow, it made loads of sense, at least to me, given my design background. And I judged that to be a negative feeling rather than a positive one. But the more I think about it, the more it dawns on me what an amazing business model the team at Humantific have. To take something that we designers use daily (visual thinking), giving it a new name to represent a new focus (helping other make sense of their needs, aims and assets through it) and making it work. Yet again, I had been fooled by the apparent simplicity of an innovation.

In contemporary Art a common comment is “but I could do that” and it drives us MAD (I say “us” becaus at the end of the day, I am a postgraduate in contemporary Art History and Visual Culture). The answer to that comment is “yes, but you didn’t”. What counts is not so much the end result, but the process, the ignition, the idea and the very, very hard part of carrying it out. So I failed myself by applying that same basic thinking to the workshop. Yes, I could do that. Good for me. But I didn’t do that, did I?

I still find myself thinking about Humantific. It’s genius. And useful. So very well done, chapeau. It’s been really inspiring to see them at work. And, you know what? I do find myself using some of their symbols here and there.

Article for Lecturas magazine here.

Also available in the Texts section.

Remember the fabulousness of Sarah Key? If I recall correctly, she mentioned that an exercise she proposes to her poetry students is to list “10 things they know to be true”. Since she is now in my unlikely “list of women I’d like to have tea with and maybe pay them to become my friends” (Miranda July, Louise Bourgeois, Camilla Engman et. alt. are also in there), I thought doing such list would bring me closer to completing mine (one step at a time).

Nonetheless, working in innovation as I do (it’s true) I thought I’d shift the exercise slightly: what about 10 things I know to be true of 2011, and 10 things I’d like to be true in 2012? I thought you’d like that (there is not much point in making a top 10 posts of this blog because it has about 10 real posts). Before I go ahead, though, please let me explain that these are lists of small things. I found myself writing one for 2012 about cancer! and feminism! and animal testing! and I just reminded myself that a) we would all probably ask for the same kind of thing and b) I am not the Messiah and cannot make all of these things happen just by writing them down.

So, here:

10 THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE OF 2011

Who lives with his parents until he’s 30?
Intern Sponge Bob!

(a witty comment on the lowsyness of the job market for young people that translates poorly from Spanish)

1. We took the streets. Big time.
2. We grew aware of our own temporality, of the possibilities of writing a tiny bit of history and of the chance of growing old and having a tale to repeat over and over to the youger ones.
3. Lots of dictators died and Nando’s (a South African Chicken restaurant) made a rather brilliant ad about it. This kept Mr. M. busy.
4. I wrote a thesis for my MA on the feminine imagery of the contemporary Western sense of smell. And it was awesome, and it has been the first academic text of mine my parents have been able to read because it was in Spanish.
5. I went to Morocco and drank really sweet mint tea. I lived in Paris for three weeks and bought a perfume that smells like slightly burned baguette.
6. Mr. M. and I decided to get married after cohabiting for 7 years as a couple. Yay!
7. I started working with a sustainable brilliant enterprise despite the economic chaos.
8. I failed to start a co-working space but managed to star a monthly live forum of discussion called La Hora FeTÉn.
9. I decided to close Nosideup.
10. I stablished really beautiful friendships with really amazing ladies (I had male friends mostly for a really long time).

10 THINGS I’D LIKE TO BE TRUE IN 2012

1. The world will not end yet.
2. Mr. M. and I will defeat the so-bad-it-would-be-hilarious-if-it-wasn’t-happening-to-me paperwork and will successfully and happily get married in Madrid in Setember.
3. I’ll grow into a real professional. True story.
4. I’ll see my friends grow into real professionals. Paid positions and all.
5. I’ll make this site grow into a decent presentation of the real professional I’ll have become.
6. I will still fit in my tiny flat despite the ever-increasing collection of books and board-games.
7. I will be an action lady.
8. I will have read amazing, inspiring books (those that will fit perfectly in my Billy book shelves).
9. I will make a difference, somewhere, somehow (like the candid soul that started this page, and has made a difference in the cute to hysterical ratio in my life).
10. I will write poetic lists more gracefully than in 2011

I shall leave you with the audio-only video (these things exist, apparently) of “Focs artificials” by Antònia Font, a fantastic (quite in a literal sense) music group from Mallorca. The lyrics are on waiting for the loved one. Since we are waiting for 2012 today, I thought it was quite fitting:

M’he confitat ses mans
per si és vera que t’he d’esperar;
he cremat es alcohols
i m’he engatat de lletugues i líquens i flors.

He superat sa son
i he pogut arrebossar-me d’arròs;
t’he fet es berenar
amb campanes i molsa i focs artificials.

(I have candied my hands

just in case it’s true I’ve got to wait for you;

I’ve burnt the spirits

and I’ve soaked myself in lettuces, lichens and flowers

I’ve got over my sleep

and I’ve managed to batter myself with rice;

I’ve prepared the tea for you

with bells and moss and fire works)

Happy entry to 2012!