During the first year of architecture studies, El Entusiasmo by Remedios Zafra (Editorial ANAGRAMA, 2017) should be recommended at architecture universities. From the beginning of their professional journey, students would understand that architecture is a profession, a means of making a living. There is no better author than Zafra to talk about the recent drift in creative practice. Remedios holds a Ph.D. in Art and a Bachelor’s in Social and Cultural Anthropology. She has pursued doctoral studies in Political Philosophy and holds an international master’s degree in Creativity. For years, she has analyzed creative practices and professions where precariousness is abundant, making it challenging to earn a living. Her extensive experience allows her to speak from firsthand experience about how capitalism feeds off the enthusiasm of those seeking to make a living from creativity:
Illustration by equipo .exe
«At some point in our history, talking about money when one writes, creates a painting, or composes a song became in bad taste. As if creation inhabited a dimension where the payment was already assumed sufficient in the creative process».
It isn’t easy, though necessary, to embrace these statements as our own since creativity is the backbone of our practice. In architecture, creativity involves skillfully combining knowledge and available resources to propose feasible solutions to contextual and social problems through the built environment. Knowing whether an idea is appropriate requires a profound reflection on the particular situation and the development of remarkable intuition through the classic combination of technical and humanistic knowledge: design, construction, art, history, sociology, physics, economics, and more. Despite all, it is essential to demystify the concept of the primitive idea. It is not (or should not be) the result of spontaneous illumination but the consequence of careful criteria construction. And this intuition can only be acquired through accumulated experience.
However, the practice has recently emerged in the creative world that involves giving potential clients that initial idea, that precious outcome of experience, as an essential prerequisite to demonstrating professional capacity. This positioning has been aggravated by the digital culture, which has, on the one hand, transversalized the normative figure of the designer while, on the other hand, giving anyone the illusion of becoming a potential creator, thereby trivializing its difficulty.
«In a connected life, we soon discover the power of having knowledge and resources to create and communicate as a customary practice in our days. However, as the desire to turn a vocational practice into a practice that allows for an emancipated life and a paid job grows, the global scenario incredibly changes how we experience frustration, employment, failure, and expectation».
For Remedios Zafra, enthusiasm is a hallmark of our time, nourished by the market culture. According to her, being unpaid for what we do leads to canceling the present. In other words, unpaid practices lead us to postpone those plans and desires until we find ourselves in a hypothetical position that allows them. Moreover, through the visibility and extreme circulation of digital media, the «subject as a brand» emerges. A brand that may not be able to sustain us economically but emotionally. It turns us into individuals who construct their portfolio based on economic effort, personal sacrifice, and the cancellation of the present… with the hope of using it as bait to capture the next client—hopefully, this time, willing to pay.
«Subjects immersed in precarity, dressed in feigned enthusiasm, used to increase their productivity in exchange for symbolic payments or the hope of a postponed life».
There is the self-conviction that we can always get something out of everything we do, allowing us to deny present needs to dream of a better future. Without sacrifice, there can be no successful career. However, often, expectation turns into frustration.
Samuel Becket’s famous phrase has become one of the most repeated mantras in this culture of effort: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” However, far from the motivational character that underpins its success, this phrase is, above all, a tribute to failure. You can always fail again and do it even more catastrophically. This reflects how, when misunderstood, the culture of effort turns into a culture of sacrifice, where resilience is not so much a reflection of personal character as it is of the individual’s socioeconomic status: failure does not affect everyone equally.
«Not without contradiction, many of us would prefer the path of modest but free creation over the accumulation and wealth subordinated to passionless work. That’s what we think and say before discovering that freedom diminishes when there is no money and only expectation. Then we succumb to ‘whatever comes out,’ postponing life and that passion».
Due to their context, those who can afford to fail to believe that giving away the most valuable aspect of creativity is fair and equitable. The highly devoted professional will tell you that you must be there and that your idea, design, text, work, and project will be selected sooner or later. This kind of information nourishes the enthusiasm of young entrepreneurs who want to embark on the path of autonomous and unrestricted creation to begin the journey that transforms vocational practice into a practice that allows for an emancipated life and a paid job.
«It doesn’t take long to realize that today’s cultural system benefits from many politically disjointed creative individuals. A multitude fed by unpaid interns, hourly employees, and temporary workers… wandering freelancers and perpetually connected young people who almost always ‘compete’».
Preview of the text published in the number 386 of the Arquitectura magazine, COAM (Official College of Architects of Madrid).
Not being paid forces one to adopt a highly competitive stance, breaking potential bonds and synergies among colleagues. Straining the already vulnerable labor ecosystem of creative practice affects all those below or coming after. A perspective that politically disarticulates all the agents involved in the process. Additionally, economic stress inevitably impacts the final result, forcing the focus to shift toward survival rather than seeking the most appropriate response to the project. Creativity requires time for work and pause to avoid hasty, immediate, or empty solutions.
Public architecture competitions arose as an equitable opportunity to enter the job market. However, this figure has degraded over time, and architects have gradually lost rights: unattainable economic and professional solvency, suffocating terms and conditions, and reduced fees… Therefore, we must reflect as a collective so that our work is valued again. It is necessary to rethink this figure of public competition from a more dignified perspective and for it to become the essential seed for the profession to regain its diminished credibility. We must know that change begins by looking in the mirror; enthusiasm and vocation in professional practice are only valuable in a sustainable labor ecosystem.