Leida

Humans surround themselves with objects and environments they have created in order to become what they already are, and to belong to a place they have never left. Although in doing so we reinforce our values, above all we wish to present ourselves as the bearers of these values – even if there is no audience but ourselves.

Yet humans also use objects in defiance of their values. We may hope that no one notices (not even ourselves) when our desire to consume takes us into conflict with what we consider to be right. Furthermore, when we choose between different product-based meanings, we can easily convince ourselves that our consumer preferences have no harmful consequences and are not dependent on any single rule-breaker. As we browse the market and indulge our desires, we may not even notice that for a long time we have been the product that is being traded, ultimately leaving our desires unfulfilled.

The laws that limit production and consumption take into account the harmful impact on the environment and the health of everyone involved. However, they do not address the dissatisfaction of society that revolves around growth and the desire to consume. Just as for the producer there is no single product that is sufficient in terms of quantity or impact, an object, activity or environment that isn’t yet a consumable is, according to capitalist logic, a challenge to conquer and integrate into consumer culture. Sara Ahmed, in her book What’s the Use?, writes about how colonialism is justified when unused land or resources are put to use. Based on Ahmed’s argument, one could claim that capitalism justifies the release of new products onto the market because it renders existing products obsolete. New consumer needs are created and accompanied by the promise that these will be satisfied with new useful products.

The 6th issue of Leida Travels in the Consumption Zone discusses the contradictory relationship between our desires and our actual needs. On the one hand, consumption can be seen as an activity necessary for survival or as something enjoyable that shapes our identity; on the other hand, we need strategies to help us question the rules imposed on consumers. One possible way to redesign the narrative aimed at consumers is communicated by the cover of Travels in the Consumption Zone designed by Eva Claycom. In her words it depicts a shopping bag whose “contents are dumped onto a scanner and rendered static”. Like the cover, the articles in Leida look at different aspects of consumer culture; the authors address these through their practice or research. Leida’s graphic designers Haron Barashed and Fernanda Saval connect these various perspectives, starting from different departure points and travel in various directions, into a unified visual narrative.

The issue opens with an interview with architecture and design historian Rebecca Carrai, who presents to Taavi Hallimäe the history of the Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA and its carefully cultivated decades-long relationship with its clients. The visual essay by Estonian Academy of Arts graphic design master’s student, Laura Martens, describes how the user experience of various maps of Tallinn, created with different aims and in various ways, has over several years shaped her connection with the city. Artist Urmas Lüüs, prompted by his recent exhibition, writes about the emergence and performance of the middle class and links this to history and the present day. Fashion designer Liisa Kanemägi looks at the unseemly bodily process of sweating as one which should not be hidden, and nor should we be ashamed of it, but can think of it as a participant in ‘continuous design’. Based on the afterlife of her own artworks and that of other artists Ulvi Haagensen discusses the problems of defining the uses of an object and unfolds options for queer use. Artists Aurelie d’Incau and Lígia Fernandes present a project about a fictional travel bureau created in a metro station in Portugal, which together with the participation of metro passengers was an intervention into an environment with clearly established rules of behaviour. Master’s student Ginevra Papi, from the Service Design Strategies and Innovation (SDSI) programme maps out the challenges and opportunities in contemporary design education and highlights the contradictory goals of consumer society and the pluriversal university. Designers and design researchers Kristi Kuusk, Azeem Hamid, Paula Veske-Lepp, Nesli Hazal Oktay and Zaur Babayev present an overview of their remote grandparents’ project, which offers opportunities for grandchildren living in different geographical locations to play and meaningfully interact with their grandparents in a world where people are required increasingly less to be settled in one place. Travels in the Consumption Zone concludes with an article by culture critic Tõnis Kahu, who recalls how newly re-independent Estonia of the 1990s was suddenly exposed to Western consumer culture, long idealised from behind the Iron Curtain, and authors who shed light on its darker aspects.

Traces of consumerism can be found in our inner thoughts, deep in the oceans of the world and in outer space. Wherever modern humans go, their traces have already arrived ahead of them. Hannah Arendt in her 1963 essay The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man gives the example of the astronaut who has been “shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death”. From this, Arendt concludes that the desire to encounter a non-human world reduces the possibility of encountering anything other than humans themselves and the objects they have created.

Today space tourism has replaced the conquest of space as the central focus and Arendt’s conclusion is even more profound. A human who has managed to break free from earth’s atmosphere remains firmly tied to consumer society. The popstars, athletes and businesspeople, and the Tesla electric car that has now been floating out there for seven years – all sent into space by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin or Elon Musk’s SpaceX – along with Arendt’s “fabulous instruments and machinery”, demonstrate how in our search for extra-terrestrial life we are increasingly likely to encounter human phenomena that we sent out there long ago. Earth may have been left behind, but consumer society is already waiting to welcome its travellers.