11.8.09

THE IDEA

On the origin of the onion flavour

Since Mankind appeared, Man has covered himself with layers. In fact, those layers are so important that, without them, there wouldn’t be societies, politics, cultures, art, or even sexuality, feelings, or intelligence. Each one of us lives within those layers, like an onion. The closer we are to another being, the more layers we peel off. The more comfortable we become, the less we need to wrap ourselves in those filters.

On the one hand the onion is important, because it gives us protection, intimacy, and the ability to blend in. But on the other hand, the onion in each one of us can become a problem, because of its complexity. Lies, conflicts and wars, are among the consequences of Mankind’s onion flavour.

The onion flavour is something of great importance but unfortunately, I believe we have only been tasting the outside layers of the onion, the dryer, older, and less tasty layers. For an uncertain number of reasons, we are not making an accurate analysis of what surrounds us. But I don’t blame us for that. In a world where we have to work 8 hours a day, five times a week, 50 or 60 years of our lives, not to mention our family, friends and not so close friends, traveling, television, the internet and everything else, how can we see anything with an accurate depth? How can we see anything at all?

Even though I now belong to that working force, I’ve decided that tasting the onion flavour is important. At least my own onion, and, whether it’s possible, to taste other onion flavours too.

Me, myself and my blog

When I started blogging, two years ago, I wasn’t quite sure of what I was actually blogging about. I knew, of course, that a blog was like a deposit, where you leave all the interesting things you find on your way, and allow other people to see them, as well as discuss them. But there are as many ways to have a blog as the outrageous number of blogs that exist today.
My fascination for the editorial world of books, magazines, catalogues and monographs and tons and tons of images, lead me to a process in which my first blog, Territorius (written in Portuguese, my mother language) started looking like an image orgy of news from the arts’ world. The activity of giving my view to the world soon became an endless and quite suffocating search for the new, the fresh and the unseen.

I’m a very competitive person. Everything I do must be good, efficient and, especially, new. This characteristic caused me a progressive frustration, as I realized that there would always be a better, newer, funnier or more complete blog than my own. It’s a fact that there is always someone doing what you do in a better, faster and stronger way.

I then entered a period I now like to call the Rethinking period. That was indeed the last post of my first and only personal blog. I took some time to think about what I wanted to do with it. After all, 2 years and more than 600 posts isn’t something you dare to throw to waste easily. But it was time to change myself and to rearrange my onion layers.

I knew I didn’t want to stop blogging, because that’s something I really like to do, so I started thinking which changes I needed to make, in order to achieve a more personal and more satisfactory blog.

The fact is that today, the vast majority of blogs are simply a copy of others, in an endless and vicious cycle, where a few create and the rest of us copy. So, what if I joined the group of those few that actually give a personal perspective of the world we live in? This was when I realized that there was something I could do better than anyone else in the world. Why not write about what I feel? If I’m the only one who feels that way, than I’m the best suited person to write about it. If it’s about my feelings for Architecture and Territory (my professional area) so be it. If it’s about my interests, such as Art, Dance, Photography, Design, Fashion…why not? And if it’s just something about the way I’m feeling, there is no reason to be embarrassed, is there?

The enormous amounts of images we are presented with today are blocking us from saying what we feel about the reality. Most of the times, the images we see in Architecture, for example, are not real. And they don’t even pretend to simulate reality, but to create a fake world instead, utopian images never to be constructed. This made me feel increasingly bored about my job and I suddenly realized I didn’t feel that much of anything anymore. Those images are quite appealing, I must admit, but they were not fulfilling me.

I’m usually a very introversive person, when it comes to revealing my emotions. But the truth is that my architectural beliefs, as well as all the others, come from what I am, from my memories and my values, and not so much from what I see or don’t see in the cover of a magazine. This also influences me, of course, but only when related to what I really believe in.

Chronicles of the onion flavour

I chose to use the term chronicle because, from now on, I intend to write about what I really am, what I believe in, and the new things I discover along my path, which truthfully add something positive to my previous position.

I don’t know if I’ll write a lot, or just a few texts. I’ll write whenever I want to, and about what moves me. And if anyone has a new, stronger or simply different position than the ones I present here, feel free to discuss it.

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