Tony Fry is Professor of Design Futures at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane Australia. He is also an award-winning designer, a theorist, a farmer, and director of a project developing an academy of indigenous-based creative practices in East Timor. The author of nine books, Tony is regarded as one of the most progressive thinkers on design in the world today. On his acclaimed book, Design as Politics, a reviewer commented: “To say it’s ‘timely’ is an understatement. Fry offers us one of the most prescient theses for the design of a different possible future.” With support from the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. This lecture took place on January 19, 2012 as part of the University of Michigan School of Art & Design's Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. Established with the generous support of alumna Penny W. Stamps, the Speaker Series brings respected emerging and established artists/designers from a broad spectrum of media to the School to conduct a public lecture and engage with students, faculty, and the larger University and Ann Arbor communities. All programs take place on Thursdays at 5:10 pm at the historic Michigan Theater, located at 603 E. Liberty Street in downtown Ann Arbor, and are free of charge and open to the public. For more information, please visit: art-design.umich.edu/stamps

• published: 03 Feb 2012
• views: 1995

How many labyrinthine passages must we wend our way through in search of our own identity? How important is it for you to know the place where you were born? The history of the place, the light, the climate, the food, the family you came from, your childhood in that place and in that family, the friends, the teachers, the lovers, the nuances of speech, of behaviour. And the hopes that go before you and became your own? Once, in India, somebody showed me a map of England so that I could show him where Italy was. For him all white people were English. And yet, I know that I’m Italian and that this, with all the enthusiasm for Europe that one may have, is something different from being French or Portuguese, let alone Swedish or Polish. I also know that being Sicilian is a special way of being Italian, and certainly different from being Piedmontese, for example. Moreover, from their own point of view, the people of Bagheria do not feel at all equal to those from Ragusa, and within the village they identify themselves by districts, a street, a social group, a generation. Each of these subdivisions, which can be divided again to infinity, is one of the inexorable, labyrinthine ways that, is one way or another, answer the question that we all ask ourselves: who am I? Why am I here? And supposing you were a boy citizen of the smallest state in the world? That you are from San Marino? One of the ways to find oneself while living the adventure of live is to escape. And this is what Leonardo Casali did. He says his father was a watchmaker. So was his grandfather, and he himself was supposed to became a watchmaker. But he did not. “One day I walked out of the shop and went to Milan”. He was 26 years old. Not exactly a young lad. But he was restless. In fact, this restlessness pursued him for many years after that flight. And then he thought that Milan was too close to home. After nine months, he says, he had the idea of “putting more distance between myself and the place where I was born. So I went to New York.” From the smallest country of the world to the capital of the empire. But you don’t have to keep going further away to realize who you are. You also have to, if you are lucky enough to find it, have a language, a project through which you can express youself, through which you can look at the world. Leonardo found photography. Every flight, every voyage, from Ulysses until the present day, is an experience, an education through which you can express yourself. It is a long journey, and the sense of it is perhaps in the return, provided that returns are ever possible. It is also the discovery of one’s point of departure in this vast and varied world, and the reason for the voyage. After years between New York and Milan, with photography as the means of mental and spiritual travel, Casali met his project and found it, where else but in San Marino. He left San Marino and from San Marino he started off again to retrace his own journey, covering what thousands of San Marinesi had covered before him, forced by necessity, by sorrow, by the unquenchable need that every man has to “follow virtue and knowledge”, by adventure. It was an endless project, a limitless journey, to search all over the world for all the San Marinesi he had news of. They were mostly children or grandchildren of those who, from the smallest country in the world, had emigrated to look for their place in the world, in which to be able to recognize themselves, a sense of dignity. The journey lasted two years, with photography as the instrument and language of discovery and encounters, of meditation on the multiplicities and the complexities of their destinies. Planes, ships, trains, buses, boats, all the means of transportation that had taken them to the four corners of the world, from freezing lands to tropical forests, in America, Argentina, Australia, Jordan, Venezuela, France, Germany, South Africa, England, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Chile, Switzerland, East Timor, Belgium, Costa Rica, Sweden, Morocco, India, Egypt, Greece, Uruguay, Mexico, Santo Domingo, Peru and even Italy. Like a child turns a globe of the world in an imaginary room and then puts his finger on a place and takes off to go there. All this only because in that specific place, in each of those countries and in dozens of cities and places in those countries there was a San Marinese or the son or the grandchild of a San Marinese. There are people who didn’t even know where their parents or their grandparents had come from, and would not even have been able to find San Marino, small as it is, on a map. Leonardo Casali went to find them, meet them and photograph them. He would send his photographic material to his laboratory in New York. A few rolls at a time, of images, places, faces, stories of these encounters, the diary of a great journey around the world and inside himself. What an adventure, and how emotional it must have been. It was a real journey a

• published: 28 Feb 2012
• views: 271

Tony Fry is Professor of Design Futures at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane Australia. He is also an award-winning designer, a theorist, a farmer, and director of a project developing an academy of indigenous-based creative practices in East Timor. The author of nine books, Tony is regarded as one of the most progressive thinkers on design in the world today. On his acclaimed book, Design as Politics, a reviewer commented: “To say it’s ‘timely’ is an understatement. Fry offers us one of the most prescient theses for the design of a different possible future.” With support from the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. This lecture took place on January 19, 2012 as part of the University of Michigan School of Art & Design's Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. Established with the generous support of alumna Penny W. Stamps, the Speaker Series brings respected emerging and established artists/designers from a broad spectrum of media to the School to conduct a public lecture and engage with students, faculty, and the larger University and Ann Arbor communities. All programs take place on Thursdays at 5:10 pm at the historic Michigan Theater, located at 603 E. Liberty Street in downtown Ann Arbor, and are free of charge and open to the public. For more information, please visit: art-design.umich.edu/stamps

• published: 03 Feb 2012
• views: 1995

How many labyrinthine passages must we wend our way through in search of our own identity? How important is it for you to know the place where you were born? The history of the place, the light, the climate, the food, the family you came from, your childhood in that place and in that family, the friends, the teachers, the lovers, the nuances of speech, of behaviour. And the hopes that go before you and became your own? Once, in India, somebody showed me a map of England so that I could show him where Italy was. For him all white people were English. And yet, I know that I’m Italian and that this, with all the enthusiasm for Europe that one may have, is something different from being French or Portuguese, let alone Swedish or Polish. I also know that being Sicilian is a special way of being Italian, and certainly different from being Piedmontese, for example. Moreover, from their own point of view, the people of Bagheria do not feel at all equal to those from Ragusa, and within the village they identify themselves by districts, a street, a social group, a generation. Each of these subdivisions, which can be divided again to infinity, is one of the inexorable, labyrinthine ways that, is one way or another, answer the question that we all ask ourselves: who am I? Why am I here? And supposing you were a boy citizen of the smallest state in the world? That you are from San Marino? One of the ways to find oneself while living the adventure of live is to escape. And this is what Leonardo Casali did. He says his father was a watchmaker. So was his grandfather, and he himself was supposed to became a watchmaker. But he did not. “One day I walked out of the shop and went to Milan”. He was 26 years old. Not exactly a young lad. But he was restless. In fact, this restlessness pursued him for many years after that flight. And then he thought that Milan was too close to home. After nine months, he says, he had the idea of “putting more distance between myself and the place where I was born. So I went to New York.” From the smallest country of the world to the capital of the empire. But you don’t have to keep going further away to realize who you are. You also have to, if you are lucky enough to find it, have a language, a project through which you can express youself, through which you can look at the world. Leonardo found photography. Every flight, every voyage, from Ulysses until the present day, is an experience, an education through which you can express yourself. It is a long journey, and the sense of it is perhaps in the return, provided that returns are ever possible. It is also the discovery of one’s point of departure in this vast and varied world, and the reason for the voyage. After years between New York and Milan, with photography as the means of mental and spiritual travel, Casali met his project and found it, where else but in San Marino. He left San Marino and from San Marino he started off again to retrace his own journey, covering what thousands of San Marinesi had covered before him, forced by necessity, by sorrow, by the unquenchable need that every man has to “follow virtue and knowledge”, by adventure. It was an endless project, a limitless journey, to search all over the world for all the San Marinesi he had news of. They were mostly children or grandchildren of those who, from the smallest country in the world, had emigrated to look for their place in the world, in which to be able to recognize themselves, a sense of dignity. The journey lasted two years, with photography as the instrument and language of discovery and encounters, of meditation on the multiplicities and the complexities of their destinies. Planes, ships, trains, buses, boats, all the means of transportation that had taken them to the four corners of the world, from freezing lands to tropical forests, in America, Argentina, Australia, Jordan, Venezuela, France, Germany, South Africa, England, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Chile, Switzerland, East Timor, Belgium, Costa Rica, Sweden, Morocco, India, Egypt, Greece, Uruguay, Mexico, Santo Domingo, Peru and even Italy. Like a child turns a globe of the world in an imaginary room and then puts his finger on a place and takes off to go there. All this only because in that specific place, in each of those countries and in dozens of cities and places in those countries there was a San Marinese or the son or the grandchild of a San Marinese. There are people who didn’t even know where their parents or their grandparents had come from, and would not even have been able to find San Marino, small as it is, on a map. Leonardo Casali went to find them, meet them and photograph them. He would send his photographic material to his laboratory in New York. A few rolls at a time, of images, places, faces, stories of these encounters, the diary of a great journey around the world and inside himself. What an adventure, and how emotional it must have been. It was a real journey a

• published: 28 Feb 2012
• views: 271