LOVE VS POWER?

INFRACÇÕES: LUISA CODER + JOSÉ RUSSEL

The Infracções collective, created in 1987 bringing together the designers Luisa Coder and José Russell, has adopted a unique position, even at international level, with a practice of Product Design (or should we call it Anti Product Design?) with mature content that is consistently political and philosophical, demanding and utopian.

A clear humanistic anti-liberal political stance, an experimental and critical leaning, an ethical posture, irony and humour, and a refusal of any kind of orthodoxy result in a work that denounce the primacy of consumerism, commodity fetishism and the political and economic ‘New Order’.

Infracções drew from the conceptual legacy of the Fluxus movement, merging Art - including performative art, high- and low-brow culture - with Design, rejecting nationalism, exalting the mythification of everyday, the comic-grotesque and the fundamentally democratic Art – Life binomial.

The retrieval, recycling and redesigning “lost” objects from industrial society and post-industrial society betrays echoes of Duchamp’s ready-made, allied to a certain aesthetic dimension that reacts against usually totalitarian orthodoxy of modernism.

Simultaneously, the viewer is asked to adopt a contemplative and decrypting attitude towards these works, inscribing a memorial and temporal aspect in the accumulation of everyday paraphernalia, which takes on new meanings.

The syncopated films explaining the meanings of these works can be dissociated from them, ultimately diluting the borders between Art and Design.