From Ulm to Acre in the Amazon and back to Weimar and Dessau

Early on the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI, School of Industrial Design) was planned to adjoin the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM, Museum of Modern Art) which, in 1967, was to move to a building designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy, facing Guanabara Bay in downtown Rio de Janeiro. As far back as the late 1950s, the MAM hosted several activities related to a proposal launched by Max Bill, later revised by Tomás Maldonado, to create the Escola Técnica de Criação (ETC, Technical School of Design) on the museum’s premises. The project was embraced by designers, artists, architects and scholars from Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and Switzerland, culminating in the inception of ESDI in 1962. Plans for ETC ultimately fell through, so the first-ever institution exclusively devoted to design education in Brazil came into being through an initiative of the Rio de Janeiro State government.

When I joined ESDI as a student, the school was turning 30. In March 1993, my first day there began with a design history class. The professor, a young man who looked fresh out of college, quietly wrote down a series of German names on the blackboard. Walking between the large drawing boards lined up on both sides of the classroom, he questioned each and every one of us about those people. But no one recognized any of the names, and with each evasive answer, the professor would yell: “How do you plan to attend this school if you don’t know the leading names in German design? I wonder where you’re from that you’ve never heard of these pioneers! I bet you no one in this room knows where Dessau or Ulm is, do you? No, you don’t! None of you know, do you? You bunch of ignoramuses! But how do you figure you’re getting a degree in industrial design like this?” Suddenly, several older students burst through the door laughing. It turned out that this was a faux design history class they had arranged as part of the activities to welcome freshmen.

The names on the blackboard, we were later told, were those of professors and alumni, all of whom we might rub elbows with. Ultimately, albeit jokingly, our older fellow students relayed a significant message to us with that first class: to be worthy of being there, in that place, we must acknowledge our ties to a certain Germanic heritage.

Those older students weren’t all wrong. Looking back, the plans for the design school at MAM and the ensuing developments that culminated in the creation of ESDI can be read in light of its affiliation to a subset of industrial design that comes from Germany. In a way, then, ESDI’s inception may be considered a consequence of the time Max Bill from Switzerland spent in Rio de Janeiro in 1953. Upon looking at plans for the new MAM venue, Bill suggested that the museum’s directors create a design school along the lines of the one established in 1951 in the German city of Ulm, the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG, Ulm School of Design).

During his visit to Rio, while expressing enthusiasm over Reidy’s design for the MAM, Bill fiercely criticized a certain strain of modern architecture in Brazil, thereby publicly antagonizing one of its chief exponents, Lúcio Costa. The contention which revolved around the debate on formalism vs. functionalism in the modern project,[1] points to how industrial design came about in Rio de Janeiro, marked by differentiation from the mainstream brand of modern architecture that enjoyed such huge success in the city. Looking to set itself apart from the excessive formalism called out by Max Bill in the architecture and urban design of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, ESDI pursued an approach more attuned to the Ulm School of Design, which the ESDI’s former professor and director Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza would define as technical formalism.[2]

However, ten years elapsed between Bill’s trip to Rio and the establishment of ESDI during which time the Rio-Ulm alliance became consolidated. The project to create a school of industrial design in the city fostered relationships between key figures of the HfG and the group in Rio de Janeiro that was working to create ETC and later ESDI. This involved several visits by Ulm representatives to the city, among them Otl Aicher, Max Bense, Gui Bonsiepe, and Tomás Maldonado, aside from Bill himself. During that time, Alexandre Wollner from São Paulo, who had attended the course in industrial design at Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (IAC/MASP), went to Germany, where he completed his training in design at the HfG in Ulm. Back in Brazil, he joined the efforts to create the school in Rio de Janeiro. Other former HfG alumni followed suit, like Paul Edgar Decurtins from Switzerland and Karl Heinz Bergmiller from Germany. Decurtins, however, left ESDI shortly thereafter, in 1966, to be replaced by Daisy Igel, a former student of Josef Albers’s in the USA. Wollner and Bergmiller, on the other hand, remained at the school for many years.

Having launched the first-ever degree-level course in industrial design in Brazil and in the Portuguese language, ESDI was responsible for putting out the first professionals accredited to do professional work in the field, in the country and in its language. It also provided a gauge for the creation of other courses, as in 1968 the Ministry of Education picked the ESDI curriculum as the national template. Since 1963, over 1,000 professionals have graduated from ESDI. But as much as the German approach to design has been a pillar of the Brazilian school from the start, the centrality of Germanic heritage has always been called into question, and this ultimately wrought a highly productive sense of instability there and kept things from staying still too long.

Although I was unaware of these stories as the young woman I was when I first joined ESDI, in a very intuitive way I sensed the tense threads that shape that place. From the time of my arrival in the early 1990s to the moment I am rounding up these memories, in the second decade of the 21st century, I witnessed lots of changes going on at the school. And they hark back to what I couldn’t even imagine by simply being there: after all, way before the establishment of an industrial design school, that place had been the setting for clashes between two Tupinambá indigenous groups, the Tamoios and the Temiminós, who were struggling for the territory in the 16th century as the first European invaders took over Guanabara Bay. So, when I look back on these stories, I realize that this place sits amid a dense plot of encounters and transformations, wreckages and regenerations. And so does this old, tumbling school of industrial design, at least for the time being.

In 2017, when Marcos Martins and I sat on the ESDI board,[3] I went to São Paulo for the conference Encontro de Antropologia da Ciência e da Tecnologia (Meeting on the antropology of science and technology). In between work sessions, I ran into Idjahure Kadiwéu, who had been attending some events at ESDI. He introduced me to Professor Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, a seminal figure in the contemporary indigenous art movement in Brazil. I told him about the extension project I was about to implement at the school, a knowledge-sharing program approaching our students and professors and indigenous artists, activists and researchers.[4] I took the occasion to invite him to visit the school. Ibã introduced me to Amilton Mattos, a professor at Universidade Federal do Acre, his supervisor in the inter-ethnic undergraduate course there and a key collaborator with the Movimento dos Artistas Independentes Huni Kuin (MAHKU, Movement of independent Huni Kuin artists), which Ibã had founded.

MAHKU stood out in the contemporary Brazilian Indigenous art movement for the innovation it wrought in connection with the figurative processes of its people, but also because it propelled the art of Huni Kuin youth from Jordão River, in the Amazon state of Acre, onto the international scene. Over the past few years, MAHKU had been hosting art and perception laboratories at museums and universities across Brazil and the world.

Traveling alongside MAHKU, Amilton had made two films documenting Ibã’s work with Huni Kuin youth. Once, when they were both in the city, we showed one of those films at ESDI. The session was followed by a debate featuring the anthropologist Elsje Lagrou, who specializes in Huni Kuin art. The film was shown outdoors, and the evening ended with Ibã inviting us to form a circle. Hand in hand, we danced together while he chanted some of the Huni Kuin songs, the Nixi Pae chants.

Animated with the possibility of engagement with Ibã’s work, we soon arranged for him to return to the school. Luckily, he returned not once, but twice. The first time around, in October 2017, he spent a week at ESDI, proposing a laboratory on art and perception that would unfold into two workshops, on singing and visual experimentation. A few months later, on his third visit, Ibã taught another workshop on visual experimentation.

On both occasions, the workshops proposed to approach the Huni Kuin ways of seeing. As such, they were laboratories on image experimentation, but above all a practical inquiry into sight. Like many of the peoples of the Amazon region, the Huni Kuin have developed rather sophisticated “vision machines,”[5] which can be defined as “devices created or used for altering perception. The notion of visual here is the same as in visionary, vision or miração.”[6] On the first two days of the workshop, Ibã introduced us to the visionary universe of the Nixi Pae, a Huni Kuin term for the beverage ayahuasca. However, in art and perception laboratories like the ones held at ESDI, Ibã removes the beverage from the equation and invites us to visit, in different ways, the visionary Huni Kuin “culture.” Thus, in the activities proposed, he dissociates ayahuasca ingestion from the visionary experience, encouraging us to activate our miração abilities through other means, like the telling of myths, music, dancing and visual experimentation.

In the first part of the workshop, we investigated ways of seeing sound. All the exercises were designed to spark the ability of envisioning and turning into images what was suggested by the chants, which focus on Huni Kuin myths. Thus, Ibã sang in his native language, and then he recounted, in Portuguese, the myth of the origin of Huni Kuin that those songs were about. Afterwards, he invited us to enact a passage from the myth in which a tapir invokes the boa woman by throwing three genipapo fruits into a lake. After the water play, we experienced the chant-dance associated with the ritual of fertility, the Katxa Naua. Dressed in clothes made of leaves, we recreated the ritual that the Huni Kuin perform to celebrate the arrival of the spirits of legumes, the yuxin, who are responsible for crop fertility. Stimulated by these experiences, we painted and drew the sounds of the chants performed by Ibã and what we had envisioned during the experience of meeting the yuxin. This whole first movement revolved around an immersion into the kinesthetic experience, a key feature of Huni Kuin culture and aesthetics.

In the second part of the workshop, the participants created flip book prototypes recreating the relationships between image, movement, and rhythm they had experienced during the workshop. As Amilton Mattos suggests, what we did in this workshop was, above all, to approach visual experimentation as a vision machine at the service not of representation, but of the kinesthetic experience itself. Thus, listening, singing, dancing, and painting were the constituent elements of an immersion whose biggest purpose was to cultivate attention to the perception-enhancing or broadening possibilities that can be activated through encounters and collective engagement.

While attending Ibã’s classes at the ESDI, I relived the classes in “visual perception studies,” “means and methods of representation” and “visual methodology” I had taken as a freshman in the ESDI design course, which at first, just like at Ulm and the Bauhaus, was labeled as a preliminary course. In completely distinct ways and means, those classes seemed very closely related. We were encouraged to make drawings mostly so we would learn to see. Now, as a professor and a design researcher, I ponder on the mysteries of the connection between the classes taught by Ibã Sales Huni Kuin and those taught by some ESDI professors, such as Silvia Steinberg and Roberto Eppinghaus.

Dealing with these mysteries helps me consider, from different perspectives, something that has intrigued me ever since I first joined the ESDI as a student: what takes place in a design school classroom marks a very powerful distinction between education in design and conventional education. In other words, in a design school we are invited to experience other ways of learning. Very seldom as an ESDI student did I attend lecture-type classes where students would sit still as a professor stood up and spoke away. For the most part, our classroom experiences would involve groups of people doing things together, large collective desks, lots of drawings, scale models, lots of conversations, and above all lots of movement. But going back to my initial ponderings on the history of the ESDI, I also think of those mysteries from another angle: if even today one can still sense, at all times, the ambivalent presence of the Ulm School of Design within our school, in Rio de Janeiro, why is it that the visit of a professor from the Amazon forest brought me back, not necessarily to Ulm, but to other even more remote places, such as Dessau and Weimar?

Mysteriously, Ibã’s classes led me to revisit the first moments I ever experienced as a design student, and they immediately transported me to the classes of the preliminary course at the Bauhaus, from where some possible distant relatives of mine may have laid the groundwork that bind our school to a certain heritage, the HfG Ulm being ESDI’s closest direct ancestor – its mother – and the Bauhaus, its grandmother. In Ibã’s chanting, I heard that grandmother call out to me. And this is what instigates me to keep looking for ways to retrieve the possible threads that enwrap the ESDI and Bauhaus pedagogies.

In 2019, however, I finally had the chance to visit the old Bauhaus premises in Dessau. As soon as I set my foot in that place, I immediately recalled the classes by Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, Silvia Steinberg, and Roberto Eppinghaus. No sooner than I had those classes and professors in mind, my thoughts turned to Johannes Itten. I tried to find something about him and the classes he taught at a shop in one of the rooms of the Walter Gropius-designed building, but came up with nothing. I kept walking around the building, thinking about Weimar, Dessau, Ulm, Rio de Janeiro and Acre, and the mysterious ties of kinship that perhaps, who knows, might bind us together.

is a Brazilian designer and anthropologist. Between 2016 and 2018, she was director of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ), where she is as an associate professor. At ESDI, she coordinates the Laboratório de Design e Antropologia (Laboratory of design and anthropology). Together with Marcos Martins, she is the author of a book on ESDI’s experimentations from 2016 to 2018 which was published in the Bloomsbury series “Design in Dark Times” under the title “Design Education and Democracy on the Edge of Collapse”. In her essay, she draws upon a selection of texts from this book.