American Girl in Italy by Ruth Orkin, 1951
methodology
1. Understanding what I’m looking for and creating the flâneuse checklist
Before starting the search, I need to understand what’s a flâneur, it’s characteristics, and after that what’s a flâneuse and how is it different from the flâneur.
The origin of all differences between men and women, is that women are destined to exist in private, while men exist in public. When women enter into the public space, they become sexually available beings that are getting into spaces where they should not. Women are always objects of contemplation, even while being active subjects, because this is what legitimates being observed by men.
The flâneur
From The Painter of Modern Life from Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur is defined as the artist-poet of the modern metropolis. The flâneur is a man-child that possesses every minute the genious of childhood, that is, someone for whom no aspect of life is dulled.
He has a childish perception, acute and magical by force of ingenuity. This makes him sincere without being ridiculous. He lives a childhood recovered by will.
Crowds are his domain as water is for fish. He’s out of home and nonetheless, he feels at home everywhere. He’s the center of the world.
At times when everyone else is sleeping, he’s putting in paper the same delicate view previously dedicated to objects. He seeks modernity and present life’s fleeting beauty.
He’s a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
The flâneuse
To define the flâneuse, I’m taking The revolution of the flâneuses by Anna María Iglesia as a starting point, considering the rights that give structure to the book.
The right to occupy the streets
The right to see without being seen
The right to consume without being consumed
The right to exist on their own
The right to authorship
The right to walk as insubordination
The origin of all differences is that women are destined to exist in private, while men exist in public. When women enter public spaces, they become sexually available beings that are getting into spaces they should not.
The flâneuse checklist
Optional
2. Finding the characters that represent them in the chosen novels
I picked two novels written by Latin American women from a similar age and background: The writers Isabel Allende (Chile) and Laura Restrepo (Colombia). For each, I read a novel that had a woman as protagonist and most of the events happening at a capital city. I also researched about their biographies and personal stories to better understand the point where they were writing from.
Paula, by Isabel Allende
In December 1991, Allende’s daughter Paula, aged 26, fell gravely ill and sank into a coma. This book started as a letter to Paula written during the hours spent at her bedside, and became a personal memoir and a testament to the ties that bind families – a brave, enlightening, inspiring true story.
This book was written during the interminable hours the novelist Isabel Allende spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital, in her hotel room and beside her daughter Paula's bed during the summer and autumn of 1992.
Faced with the loss of her child, Isabel Allende turned to storytelling, to sustain her own spirit and to convey to her daughter the will to wake up, to survive. The story she tells is that of her own life, her family history and the tragedy of her nation, Chile, in the years leading up to Pinochet's brutal military coup.
— from Goodreads
Dulce Compañía, by Laura Restrepo
A reporter for a gossip magazine is sent by her boss to cover the appearance of an angel in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.
She reluctantly takes on the task because she couldn't care less about religious matters and finds such a hackneyed topic extremely boring, and she has no idea how deeply she will become involved in a brutal chain of events that will escape her control and rationality.
Who is this supposed angel, this perplexed and astonishingly beautiful boy whom the faith of the neighborhood's inhabitants keeps locked up in a cave? What connects him to the reporter who falls in love with him, the mother who searches for him in agony, the priest who tries to destroy him, the doctor who wants to hospitalize him, the women who bathe him, feed him, and turn him into the supreme object of veneration?
— from Goodreads, translated with Deepl
3. Describing the flâneuse characters
After reading the novels, I started building the character for each city, guided by a list of questions I defined based on the flâneuse checklist, and guides from costume design studies used to help students create characters from an aesthetic point of view. This is how the profiles for Irina (from Laura Restrepo) and Francisca (from Isabel Allende) came to life. I also used the Personas and Empathy Map tools normally used for Service Design to arrange and understand better the information gathered from the novels and biographies of the writers.
My questions
Costume Design guidelines
personas & empathy map analysis
final result: paseante latina website
The final deliverable for this project was a website telling the a short story for each character — a day in the life — with a collage that gathered the most important aesthetic attributes for each character. To create the collage I used photos I took in each city between the years 2015 and 2017 and mixed them with free images found online that helped tell their stories. You can visit the site here.
— final thoughts
This will always be one of my favorite projects because it let me use my industrial design formation in unexpected ways. It also made me realize I really like to work on theoretical projects that might not have an application in the real world as expected, but are twice as challenging on their own. I didn't expect to be using design tools to understand books and create characters that —at least for me— really feel alive. I would like to keep working on this project and include as many cities as I can, discovering hidden characters and understanding different ways of inhabiting the world in the process.
