by Gabrielle Kennedy
#DAEnoussommes was Design Academy Eindhoven’s student-lead reaction last January to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris – the school’s own contribution to the Je Suis Charlie phenomenon that swept Paris and much of the western world.
The event was designed to encourage students to think about freedom of expression and the validity of provocation, but also to explore more generally how designers can relate and respond to the broader issues impacting the lives of people.
Presentations and workshops with journalists, lawyers, Muslims, designers and critics were offered, but the reaction to #DAEnoussommes from both current students and alumni was mixed.
Alix Gallet, a French student who graduated in 2014 with a “Tricking Biometrics” project did not attend the event, but was one of the more outspoken critics. She wrote on the school’s Facebook page that the approach and topics “horrified” her.
“DAE serves the same consensual bullshit as we have [in Paris] which is in my opinion dangerous,” she wrote.
“There is room for politics in this school, but we don’t talk about it. For example, it collaborates with Vlisco but we don’t talk about colonialism, or Zwarte Piet or any other touchy subject. If political topics are not introduced by students, they never get to work on those kinds of subjects. Remember that May ‘68 in France was a student movement and the Beaux Arts school took a very important role in the mediatization of its ideas. But there is ZERO political culture at DAE, and I find this frightening. So very often, some projects, which tend to be political stay very shallow because they don’t get the chance to be discussed. And unfortunately initiatives starting from goodwill are even sometimes the ones praised. It is not responsible and not okay.”
Gallet is now part of the Paris-based design collective Ateliers Populaires de Paris that works a lot on public space projects with a political bent. As a reaction and extension to the #DAEnoussommes event Gallet arranged for her colleague Jean-Baptise Naudy to address a group of the academy’s Man and Communication students in Paris in front of the Place de la République – the monument named after the French Republic.
The point of the presentation was to offer insights into the local backlash against the Je Suis Charlie phenomenon which via the hashtag #jesuischarlie - which now has 1, 218 600 hits on Instagram and over 5 million on Twitter - evolved into a type of branding for what the international media quickly dubbed “the Paris 9/11”.
“Immediately after the attacks the government was talking about new anti-terror laws,” said Gaudy, “but we already have anti-terror laws that were imposed in ‘86, ’96, ’01 and again in ’06. Many were emergency measures that have never since been relaxed so our rights are already diminished. It means that we are always under this so-called ‘threat’ even when nothing happens. The problem with always adding new laws is that there is an immediate perception that we are going to be further attacked despite the reality.”
In fact after eleven people were killed (nine journalists, one police officer and one body guard) at Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris on 7th January 2015 by brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, there was a connected second attack. Amedy Coulibaly killed a police officer the next day and then shot four civilians at a kosher supermarket in Paris the day after that. Coulibaly admitted that he had synchronized his attacks with the Kouachi brothers.
But Naudy’s point was that it is dangerous to erect a sort of immigration equals terrorism equals Islam identity. He said he understood the need for people to react spontaneously and with emotion in times of crisis, but that politicized positions that draw people in emotionally like Je Suis Charlie can do a lot of harm.
When politics endorses people’s concerns, governments can and do take advantage – they end up enabling people to make short cuts far too easily between individual incidents and identity culture.
“It just gets very confusing,” Naudy says. “Everyone has his own agenda and these calls for national unity can too easily become a tool of right-wing instrumentalization.”
Naudy talks about how his own 5 year old daughter had to write “Je Suis Charlie” at her French school in projects related to the incident. He also flashed images of how the slogan was used and abused – one showing the words beaming above Time Square in New York. “Charlie was a left-wing anti-capitalist so why would you put that sign up in NY?” Naudy asks. “What does it really mean?
If the Kouachi brothers had been presented as two crazy guys with murderous ideas, the reverberations of their crimes would have had a far less divisive impact on socety. “They probably didn’t even know who Charlie Hebdo was,” Naudy says. “They have been used to create a divide, a split in society in terms of identification. And because that is probably exactly what they wanted to do, they have won. These attacks are designed to make people feel divided - divided between belonging to Islam and understanding their point, and the rest of the population … and the result is that we all end up feeling like we are surrounded by enemies.”