maria gil ulldemolins

Dear everyone, we are about to launch a poster-mag called La...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:14:03 +0100

Dear everyone, we are about to launch a poster-mag called La Pandemonio that we totally believe is going to be utterly fantastic.

We are 20 votes away from being able to enter crowdfunding. Please be a darling and help us out by voting!

I’m halfway watching this, and so far it’s rather...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:31:48 +0100

I’m halfway watching this, and so far it’s rather compelling.

I really liked the thing about love being about helping each other evolve into the person they are meant to be.

How horrifying would it be to go through the test and finally know the answer to the ridiculous “I love YOU more” game?

Mirror, mirror. Who is the truest of them all?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:24:00 +0100

@MrPatatitaBrava told Mr @onafrica he should watch Black Mirror. So he did, and I joined him. We watched the first episode, ‘The National Anthem’ and I must say it’s just brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Charlie Brooker, you are one twisted genius bast*rd, sir:

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects? This area – between delight and discomfort – is where Black Mirror, my new drama series, is set. The “black mirror” of the title is the one you’ll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.

I see a lot of discussions around “media” and “social networks” and what can they possibly mean today. And nothing, nothing!, gets to the level of reflection of ‘The National Anthem’. The contrast between the virtual and the real (and the impossibility of their limits). It was so absurd, so horrifying, so crude, it was credible. My stomach wrenched: I cannot think of the last time a TV series made my stomach retract like that (and, as you know, I’ve watched the wire).

The premises of the story were pure meme-tastic and so drenched in Kate-ness. Perfect setting without actually copying anything. And let me just say, that the end was tied up beautifully, adding yet another dimension to the script.

And even more horrifying could be what the episode does not discuss. All the other possible narrative routes that remain unexplored, the most obvious one being whether all lives are worth the same.

Anyways. Stop reading this. Go watch it. Now.

Polly Pockets

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:21:27 +0100

Tuesday again… find me here at ¿ Y Por Qué No?

Sostenibilidad roja (Red sustainability)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:06:32 +0100

It was Tuesday and this is what I wrote for Y por que no?!

Enough is enough

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:23:52 +0100

Cheesy, I know. But it’s not about barbie-fying oneself, even if Lana del Rey is telling me that heaven is a place on earth with me on my Spotify. It’s about something simpler, something smaller. It’s about bras and tits.

I was talking to one of my witty lady friends the other day, and she was complaining about the difficulties of buying panties. Because, you see, she just doesn’t like what’s available. We came to the conclusion that underwear stores tend to classify women in 5 categories: wild man eater, virginal baby, romantic nut case (could be a sub-category of virginal baby), sporty lass, and plain jane. Almost like the Spice Girls. We were wondering where would we fit and couldn’t quite figure it out. And then we moved unto bras. And we realized we were both angry. Angry at the fact that there are only 5 types of bra-buyers, apparently, but also angry at the fact all of them have the very same need: having ginormous breasts.

Yup. You read it. At some point, someone with a job similar to mine decided that what we all wanted out there in breast land was to look plentiful. “Let’s innovate for the ladieeeeez” they said. And in they went those funny push up patches on something like 90% of all the bras on low-cost earth. You know what the really twisted thing about this is? The fact that a garment built for supporting the feminine anatomy has turned into a showcase of stereotyped aesthetics, very possibly for men. And that’s on the sick side, isn’t it?

Granted, you may actually want a push up. You go, girl. But assuming that a vast majority of us wants that is upsetting. That that might be true, it’s even more upsetting. Maybe it’s only my friend and I that think our boob ratio is enough for daily usage, but I suspect we are not alone. Sure, put your bras out there for $9 and girls will buy them. Padded or not. But maybe we’d be buying them if all they did was gently casing out attributes. I actually imagine that some girls don’t want to even hear about having larger tits.

So there, enough is enough. Enough with making us all look like we are breastfeeding. And what I carry with me is enough for me. We’ll fill up the emptier voids in our bras with a bit of self-esteem. Now that’s a push.

En los zapatos de la sostenibilidad (In Sustainability's shoes)

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:57:37 +0100

Hey! It’s Tuesday and I’m trying vegan, made in Spain, 100% biodegradable shoes by OneMoment for ¿Y Por Qué no?

PS: I owe this site a gazillion posts, but I’ve been insanely busy with workshops. I shall resume regular activity really soon. Thanks for bearing with me!

It’s Tuesday again! That means I’m at ¿Y por qué no?...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:43:30 +0100

It’s Tuesday again! That means I’m at ¿Y por qué no? once more.

La locura, la vejiga de cabra, los pedales y la regla (Madness, the goat bladder, pedals and the period)

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:44:00 +0100

Weekly post for ¿Y por qué no?, again!

We, Millenials

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:22:38 +0100

When I was a kid I used to hear about the Generation X and feel envious of them because they had such a defined identity, they had a name, they were a group (I guess this was before everything was called a community). Eventually, I grew up and so did everyone else around me, and someone decided we were not going anywhere and therefore we would need to get a name too, and Generation Y was proposed. Slowly, we turned into something rather more epic: the Millenials (officially those born from 1982 to 2000, although I feel, and I’m not alone, that those of us born in the 80s and the rest are different). And here we are, the Millenials, the year after we took to the streets.

I had the dubious luck to be the voice of Spanish youth unemployment (thanks goodness I am no more) in an article by The Economist. Predictabily, I was asked how did the 15-m change anything. And, to me, the most important effect of the 15-m movement was the confidence boost it gave us all. Yes, the 15-m was very plural, but from what I could tell, it was mostly 20-somethings. And we needed to know that we could own history. And, in a way, it made total sense that we would lead such revolution, because we are a historical Molotov cocktail.

We’ve witnessed two global collapses:

firstly, when we realized the world order was not immune to change and that the safety we had given for granted because of where we had been lucky enough to be born was finite: the fall of the twin towers and the consequent war on terror.
secondly, when we came of age and decided to take the future we thought we rightfully owned: we graduated bang on into the crisis, making us doubt of everything we ever thought we could do with our lives. We were about to get on our own two feet when the world collapsed underneath us.

But, on top of this we’ve also lived through two great obvious communication changes:

The internet! Those of us born in the 80s had the privilege to live both a analogical life and a digital life, being able to appreciate the change the second implied.
Low cost flights: what the internet did for us virtually, the cheap airlines did for us physically, at least in Europe.

Needless to say, if you add this to the fact that we are the most racially/culturally mixed generation up to now and, on top of this, the best educated one, you get quite a mix. And polls say that we are the most liberal minded people out there, too (which is totally logical).

It seems clear that we have inherited a world that was designed for a totally different bunch and attitude: we want flexible work times, we want to collaborate, we want to share information and culture, we work in jobs that did not even exist a few years ago. It is evident that we do not fit in the current system, but it’s less obvious that it might less of a matter of learning to adapt and more of a matter of building a new one that we agree with, perfectly suited to our expectations and possibilities.

The high we felt in the 2011 protests was greatly due to realizing we had some power, a possibility we had yet to acknowledge. And all that’s happened ever since it’s been based on a discourse that avoids mentioning this. It is said that we had no real alternatives to propose, but I think that’s due to a few factors:

It all happened rather suddenly and we tried to organize everything very horizontally, which did not work quickly enough.
I have the feeling that there was a lack of confidence in ourselves. We need to tell ourselves that not only we can change things but we must, and that there is not anyone else that can do this better than ourselves. Yes, we have been brought up to believe in ourselves as individuals, but not as a collective (for instance, we came close to witnessing the power of a crowd when we tried to protest against the Iraq war, but what we took from that is that no-one cared).

I keep on thinking that there is a time factor in what we might become. We are mourning. We are mourning the lives we never had. And we are going through the stages: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And then starting over. I find it difficult from here to decide where we are at wight now, but I know that the first concentration I attended was organized by a group called “Youth without a future”. That was April 2011. And we were all rather depressed: about to end the school year, no perspectives of even a summer job, national elections coming slowly at us in Spain (they were in November).

Maybe 2012 is the era of Aquarius, or maybe it’s our era. We only need to tell ourselves, as a collective, that not only we have to change and build a fresh new environment/system, but that we are lucky to be able to do so, and that it is a great responsibility we are ready to take and make ourselves proud.

pic: a bunch of millenials in La Hora Fetén

Please allow me to behave hysterically for a...

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:23:00 +0100

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)

Pinterest: the good, the bad and the ugly

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:25:29 +0100

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:

it’s awesome
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.

Con un poco de ayuda de mis amigos (With a little help from my friends)

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:49:23 +0100

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

Keeping the devil down in the hole (on Design Thinking and The Wire)

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:58:23 +0100

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.

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:26:43 +0100

so true.

Turquesa Jenna (Jenna Turquoise)

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:31:00 +0100

New article for ¿Y por qué no? ready!

"Awesome! You can now comment on each post!"

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:37:02 +0100

“Awesome! You can now comment on each post!”

On the 22nd of November i had the chance of attending a Visual...

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:24:04 +0100

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.

Tu mierda me ilumina (Your shit illuminates me)

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:36:00 +0100

Article for Lecturas magazine here.

Also available in the Texts section.

Somewhere between what you need and what you know

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:36:37 +0100

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)

We took the streets. Big time.
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.
Lots of dictators died and Nando’s (a South African Chicken restaurant) made a rather brilliant ad about it. This kept Mr. M. busy.
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.
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.
Mr. M. and I decided to get married after cohabiting for 7 years as a couple. Yay!
I started working with a sustainable brilliant enterprise despite the economic chaos.
I failed to start a co-working space but managed to star a monthly live forum of discussion called La Hora FeTÉn.
I decided to close Nosideup.
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

The world will not end yet.
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.
I’ll grow into a real professional. True story.
I’ll see my friends grow into real professionals. Paid positions and all.
I’ll make this site grow into a decent presentation of the real professional I’ll have become.
I will still fit in my tiny flat despite the ever-increasing collection of books and board-games.
I will be an action lady.
I will have read amazing, inspiring books (those that will fit perfectly in my Billy book shelves).
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).
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!