Inverting Pyramids

DAMN°: Guido Giglio is an architect from Brazil and Hannes Bernard is a graphic designer from South Africa. How did you two meet and how did SulSolSal emerge?

Hannes Bernard: We met while studying at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and started working together in 2012. We were both interested in the triangulation between Europe, Africa, and Latin America, so defined our practice around the idea of the movement of cultural capital across these three points. It’s about research into the relationship between the north and south but also the south and south, or Brazil and South Africa.

DAMN°: Where does food figure in this?

HB: The way we deal with food is as a ritual and gesture, in the sense of social cohesion, especially in Brazil and South Africa where it’s an inherent part of the exchange; in Europe, it is stifled by regulation. More broadly, we are interested in economics, politics, and cultural exchange. So food is not a subject, but rather a more universal medium than a poster. Everyone has a relationship with food that is cross-cultural and beyond language, and it’s also a highly manipulative form of communication.

DAMN°: What was the idea behind the Neo-Survival School that you installed at the Cure Park opening event in June?

HB: The event was about alternative approaches to care in the face of an increasingly privatised medical industry in Europe. Our interactive performance last year, New Food Pyramids (at Het Nieuwe Instituut), demonstrated our interest in what happens to the body in late-capitalism when, for instance, people have to work longer hours and labour is more precarious. At the same time, there are all these movements around biohacking and biotropics, which are mixing and blurring a lot of ideologies about health but are often based on the idea of a superhuman increase in endurance or performance. Not to mention the increase of wearables and the quantification and commodification of the body.

With the Neo-Survival School we wanted to look specifically at this in the context of the survival- ist cultures that have become mainstream. On TV at present there are 25 reality shows based on survivalism in one way or another, and it’s very schizophrenic. On the one hand there are the doomsday preppers, and on the other, the Tiny House Movement that is picking up on the utopian ideas of the 1960s, driven by economic scarcity. What is interesting, though, is that very diverse people in terms of class, race, national- ity, and so on, are meeting each other through activities linked to survivalism.