Pedro Inoue is a designer, activist – and creative director of Adbusters magazine. In form 283, we spoke with him about the power of ideas.

 

Adbusters Magazine, Sep/Oct 2016 issue

 

A tent city in Manhattan or Santa Clauses demonstrating against blind consumerism on Black Friday: The campaigns of the Adbusters Media Foundation are political – and effective in the media. Nevertheless, few people know that campaigns like Occupy Wall Street or Buy Nothing Day were conceived and communicated by a Canadian collective. The Adbusters Media Foundation was founded in Vancouver in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz. Since then, it has published Adbusters magazine every two months, which has made a name for itself primarily through its biting interpretations of famous advertising campaigns. Pedro Inoue has been the magazine's creative director for over ten years. We met Inoue after his lecture at this year's See-Conference in Wiesbaden. While he had seemed a little nervous on stage just before, in conversation he was a lively and attentive interlocutor who quickly made new thematic connections – from the political implications of social media to his Brazilian origins.

You've been working for Adbusters for ten years now. Have you also done commercial advertising?

Yes, I have. After college, I worked for Jonathan Barnbrook in London for seven years. Then I went back to Brazil. Most people who do design there work in advertising. And it's really bad advertising. I had already worked with David Bowie and Damien Hirst, so my portfolio was really good. People hired me so they could tell their clients: "This guy has worked with David Bowie." They weren't really interested in my work. That was really tough. After a year, I had an argument with a creative director about a sock advertisement I was working on. A childhood friend from my old activist days called me and asked if I wanted to meet. We went out and he told me about a humanitarian project he had just carried out in the Amazon rainforest. Later, he looked at me and asked, "What are you doing?" That day I had an epiphany: "Screw this job – I'm not going to work in advertising anymore. I'm only going to do what I truly believe in and with people I truly value." From that day on, I developed this way of working, and since then it has been incredibly fulfilling. I look back at the work I've done over the past few years and I'm really proud of it. Screw sock advertising.

 

Were you an activist as a teenager?

When I went to college, I had to work during the day to pay for college in the evening. The teachers at school were super boring. I constantly argued with them because they demanded that I work on market-oriented assignments, and I didn't want to, because I was already working for the market during the day. After school, I met up with friends and we started activist interventions in São Paulo. We pursued a kind of "friendly vandalism," for which we went to particularly ugly parts of the city. We cleaned up and painted tiles in beautiful colors. Or we went to Cartier stores and hung up posters there that addressed social injustice. I already knew Adbusters back then. My work has always had a political focus. So when I came to Adbusters, it was a very natural development.

Do you think it's important for designers to be politically involved?

If you had asked me that question 20 years ago, I probably would have said yes. Today, in 2019, I don't think you have much of a choice. The world has become political. Politics influences your Instagram feed. You'll find politics in Beyoncé's latest video, in the Pepsi commercial, in the art museum's newest exhibition, on the current catwalk in Paris, and in Hollywood blockbusters. If you're working on a communication project today, part of the job is to read it through the lens of ethnicity, gender, and post-colonial themes. The world has become more complex, which is also why fake news – with its simplification of the world – is so popular. As designers, as communicators, we need to understand that. It's important to see that our work can either reinforce or challenge these prejudices. There's no good or bad, beautiful or ugly anymore. There's only context. I believe the fact that I come from a poor country allows me to see these things more clearly.

The idea of the designer is closely linked to the capitalist system. Do you think this job could exist without consumption?

Design is communication. Any kind of communication. It's not just something we use to tell lies for brands that get people to buy more junk they don't need. The world we live in is on fire, and a crucial reason for that is our consumption. The financial market dictates where we go, and it's destroying humanity in a suicidal way. In my opinion, creativity can help open up new perspectives, as the Situationists did in 1968. Everyone can be creative. An idea can really change things and have a big impact on the world. Furthermore, design is a bridge. You need your environment to design; you can't do it alone. Design is always about relationships. Reducing design to a tool of consumption is too little. Things have changed. For example, the Trump election: Communication played an enormous role. The same thing happened in Brazil. Bolsonaro was elected with the help of WhatsApp messages that spread lies and hate from group to group. These were deliberately poorly made to give people a sense of reality. This can be described as "precarious aesthetics": the cheaply made, anti-professional, mass-driven, easily digestible approach. The same with Trump. Look at the memes that supported him, the use of standard fonts, the ordinary colors, the low-resolution images – this look conveys the idea that anyone could have made it. The Hillary [Clinton] campaign was done by Pentagram. And Pentagram represents these highly intellectual design experts: "We know better" – designing the Hillary "H" as a logo – a system, a variable identity, etc. This stands for the elite – the status quo, the one percent. The game has changed.

Would you say it's also a bit dangerous that everyone is a creator nowadays?

No, I don't think so. At least in terms of activism, it's wonderful that everyone is a designer, because creativity can help spread new forms of protest. Look around you. Financial capitalism is laying waste to our planet, and climate change looms on the horizon. We've been living under an economic austerity regime since the 2008 banking crisis, for which no one – neither you nor I – was responsible, and yet we have to bear the cost. A psychic fever burns in our souls, and a crisis of representation, in which we stop believing every company, politician, mass medium, or institution. I believe that as creatives, we have a responsibility to come up with new stimulating and powerful visions. That means emotional narratives and storytelling. I'm not talking about writing scientific papers; those don't work anymore. We need stories. Trump was elected with stories, with anger. Maybe we also need to work with anger. People should indeed practice creativity and also learn to read images and understand the world we live in.

How can we learn to understand these images?

The thing is, behind images there are always interests. If you flip through a fashion magazine, 90 percent of the images tell you: "You're not enough." As humans, we are, in one way or another, internally messed up. Nothing is perfect (and remember that perfection is boring). The important thing is to try your best. That's what matters. I grew up for years with television and with commercials from big advertising agencies that hired Harvard psychologists to tell me, again and again: "You're not enough." In today's society, because of the permanent presence of digitality in our everyday lives, it's even worse. In terms of education, I try to explain to my children, especially my eleven-year-old son, that we need to understand that we are all incomplete. We are not perfect, no one is. Not even the Photoshop-perfect you see in a magazine is perfect. There's an intention behind it. Don't read the surface. Dig deeper.

On stage, you said you watch commercials with your son, but without sound.

Yes, if you turn off the sound, you turn off the emotions. Try watching a horror movie without sound, then you really pay attention to the images. Advertising isn't made to be carefully watched. Advertising is designed to be noticed only out of the corner of your eye.

Social media has made that even worse, hasn't it? Now you really don't know what's advertising and what isn't.

Social media is a completely different territory for me. People used to go to record stores, buy a record, go home and listen to it. Today you just open Spotify. You think you have a direct connection to the musician, but actually, between you and the artist sits this parasite that sucks up all your information. That's how real money is made. Free isn't free. They use us and the stuff we like in a way that isn't transparent. Social media is a trap that tracks our eye movements, our smiles, our thumb movements on Instagram. That's what makes Instagram so powerful and Zuckerberg so rich, because he gets all the data from everyone, and he sells it and doesn't talk about it. Maybe if they started saying: "Hey, you know what? I'll give you $500 a month if you use this app every day. Because we're going to make a lot of money with it, so you should get a share of it." If that were the case, great, but it's not. And now social media has actually managed to change elections in the United States and Brazil. And when Zuck[erberg] realized what the hell he had done, he just said: "Huh, sorry." That's not enough. Whenever you fill out those captchas from Google, "show Google you're not a computer by marking bridges, bicycles or streets," you're working for Google. You're teaching the computer to think like a human. Really? We're all working for one of the biggest and richest companies in the world? Without getting a single damn cent for it? At Adbusters, we have something we call "Moonstruck," which takes place every full moon day in 2019. You spend 24 hours without a screen. You don't use computers or phones. People love it. You can put your phone away and have a whole day without looking at it. Of course, you'll check your phone again the next day anyway, but it's interesting to see how damn addicted we've become to these glowing little nightmares.

You worked with Jonathan Barnbrook, who signed the First Things First Manifesto 2000.¹ How would that manifesto look today?

That's a very good question, and I don't have an answer to it. When the first manifesto was written in 1963, it was about relatively normal design work in 1963. When it was revised in 2000, it questioned the role of advertising and consumption. Today, almost 20 years later, I think we should try to include what's happening on social media. Design creates context, generates culture, and creates systems. Before, it was a lot simpler. Nowadays, our work deals much more deeply – and more broadly – with the flow of information in our current consumer society.
At Adbusters, we firmly believe that we can shift the cornerstones of this society through aesthetics, communication, and activism. A First Things First today would have to include a much more complex and intertwined web of interests, as well as our privileged position as professionals in this world. Name your top ten designers in the world. How many of them are black? How many are women? And how many come from poor countries? When I started working with Jonathan, his political work consisted of designing posters. For my generation, posters weren't enough. We had to develop ideas. Then the next generation had these ideas and created a movement – like Occupy Wall Street. Today, we need more than a movement. A next step.

 

 

Adbusters issues 2015 to 2017

So, if Adbusters were founded today, what would it be?

I think it would be a fiction-based project, like the series "The Handmaid's Tale." I like to see Adbusters as a journey – a journey of the individual living in these crazy times and also as a journey of humanity – what have we created as a species on our small planet? Where is all this leading? So in terms of the journey, it might be more of a film. Adbusters might be an ongoing series that tries to challenge the notions of this old world – through emotional content – while embarking on a search for a newborn world.
You always have to be aware: it's only a matter of time until we face the mother of all damn battles – climate change – and when you look back at your life and professional work of the past years, what do you want to be remembered for? Launching a slick sock commercial or founding and participating in an ecological movement? It's up to you.

 

¹ The First Things First Manifesto was drafted in 1963 by graphic designer Ken Garland. Along with 21 other signatories, Garland positioned himself against the "trivial" campaigns of a fast-paced advertising world and for "things that deserve our skills and experience more." The British graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook revised the manifesto around the turn of the millennium. Barnbrook, together with 33 other creatives, also called for a rethinking in the design industry, away from advertising luxury goods and towards "more useful, durable, and democratic forms of communication."

 

Interview: Nina Sieverding, Katharina Zemljanskij

 

This article originally appeared in form 283 – The Power of Design. TO THE ISSUE