LATIN AMERICAN CENTERED SPECULATIVE DESIGN

         LACES(D) was a discursive intervention in the form of an open conference held at the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego, in April 2018. The conference was composed of a lecture, an expert meeting and a mediated panel that seeked, as a whole, to reflect about Speculative Design as a potential area of knowledge, political practice and art. LACES(D) focused on the public debate and the construction of a diagram of contemporary critical issues and its unfoldings in the fields of Media, Architecture, History and Art, proposing a shift of perspective, even if temporary, in the disciplines of design.
        Considering the process of the first year review as a ritual of the Master of Fine Arts Graduate Program at UC San Diego, where a committee is mobilized around an art project to produce a critique that is inscribed to a personal context, LACES(D) acted as generative platform that inverted this process. Moving away from placing material objects in a gallery as a creation of contemplation, we hoped to use the structure already in place (university, committee, community) to generate a research agenda that could serve as a conceptual armature for future projects and collective action.
    The conference, therefore, was a site of intervention to mobilize a discourse agenda as a material prompt around the issues of colonialism, the industrial military complex and tactical communication against the neofascist wave in Latin America.

"At a time when I see, again, across campus, an almost obsessive optimism about a future dominated by "driverless cars", by Amazon and the endless potential for distributive exchange economies and beyond. Nobody is talking about public agendas. I'm saying this because, eventually I would like to reorient the idea that, yes, let's pixalate Speculative Design with Latin America"

–– Teddy Cruz, architect and full professor at UC San Diego Visual Arts Department