Playful seesaw installation at Trump wall wins 2020 Beazley Designs award

The images are captivating. They show smiling children playing on pink seesaws installed across the crude brown steel slats that divides the US/Mexican border – the Trump wall. The interactive installation went up on 28 July 2019 and lasted just 40 minutes before border guards ordered its removal. Then the pictures went viral online. Now ‘Teeter-Totter Wall’ has been awarded the prestigious Beazley Designs of the Year 2020 in the London Design Museum’s annual competition.

‘Teeter-Totter Wall’, designed by architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello

The project is a collaboration between the Californian based architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello developed from a binational seesaw idea they conceived a decade ago. The duo chose to implement their concept on one of the most politicised border walls of recent times and in the summer of 2019 – at a moment of extreme tension when the world looked on in horror at the outgoing US president’s horrific war on immigration with innocent children at its centre.

With ‘Teeter-Totter Wall’, Rael and San Fratello want to demonstrate that actions taking place on one side of the border have direct consequences on the other – viewing the boundary as a site of severance. Not surprisingly it took a great deal of planning and preparation given the logistics of the projects. Working with Colectivo Chopeke from the other side of the border at Sunland Park, within 20 minutes the three seesaws were slotted into gaps in the steel boundary wall and screwed safely in place. Children on both sides soon jumped on the bicycle seats before the guards removed the installation.

‘Teeter-Totter Wall’, designed by architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello

Images strictly © Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello for the Beazley Designs of the Year

Radical design: Creatives at the frontline for change

Bertolt Brecht wrote: ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.’

I grew up surrounded by politics. Raised in Iran at the height of its turbulent years, it was impossible not to be. Later, as an adolescent cocooned in the sanctuary of Europe, I rejected it all for I saw my life in the creative world where politics, seemingly, had little relevance.

Now, as Europe peddles into the deep dark waters of dirty politics, as ultra-right populist movements raise their ugly fists, and as we set sail on another turbulent journey that is too close in spirit to one taken by the same Europeans in the 1930s, my world finds itself once again deeply immersed in politics.

For the younger naïve me didn’t quite want to acknowledge that creativity cannot flourish without freedom of expression. And tragically it is this freedom of expression that is under attack by a movement that has no respect for knowledge, fears intellectual thought, has no tolerance for true democratic debate, acts like bullies in the playground with no compassion for others, nor for the environment and therefore ultimately has no appreciation of beauty.

Artist Charlie Morrissey’s ‘Actions from the Encyclopaedia of Experience’ is a speculative taxonomy of actions as part of Siobhan Davies Dance at the Barbican

Artist Charlie Morrissey’s ‘Actions from the Encyclopaedia of Experience’ is a speculative taxonomy of actions as part of Siobhan Davies Dance at the Barbican

We are all feeling the pressure – families are feuding, friends are separating. At two recent gallery openings here in London – Tate Modern Switch House and Design Museum – the speeches were centred firmly around politics. This would certainly not have been the case a few years ago. The creative world feels under attack, marginalised by a system that sees the arts at its best ‘soft’ and at its worst the enemy.

Art has always had the potential to make strong visual political statements. Now, progressive design can be an even more powerful rebellion. We have urgent concerns – with the environment, movement of people, displaced populations, mass urbanisation – and it is the job of the creative community to rise-up and challenge politicians by being revolutionary, finding real solutions for real issues not just re-creating objects of desire. Whether traditionalists and nationalists like it or not, the world has evolved, and is about to even more.

Some of the most exciting design movements, including Bauhaus, appeared at a similar time in history when the world order was changing. Now too designers have the chance to be at the forefront of a dialogue for progress. Politics has re-entered my world and I am thoroughly enjoying its return.

Nargess Banks

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