Blog Interior Scholarship
Blog: Eff Libilbéhéty
As far as I know
August 2021

https://rietveldacademie.nl/en/page/1027929/eff-libilbehety

graduation project, Rietveld Academie, 2021.

 

Homo sapiens are no longer proletarian but cognitarian.

Humans are biological, living organisms characterized by common features (bipedal, ritualistic, opposable thumbs, an instinctive need to belong to a group). Inside of this envelope exists the psychological, the subjective and a peculiar component: the self. There is a lot of pressure on individuals to conform to a group, and it often results in the fragmentation of the self. We try to cope with such friction by using various social appendages, like mobile phones, coping mechanisms, or other kinds of social strategies.
Cognitive biases (glitches of the human brain) are universal tools used by humans to lubricate their collision with the external world. They are shortcuts that condense our experience of reality, to make it clear and digestible. Biases are commonly shared identities that reveal just how fragile the balance is between “the individual” (self) and “the collective” (selves).

In a dialectic between the psychologically constructed and the human-built, various biases are accentuated, highlighted and displayed. This work presents skeletons of the mental human which arise from differing cognitive and perceptual standpoints. Chairs, much like biases, are so commonplace and banal that we don’t even think about relying on them. By burning wood, the banal exterior (bias) is removed and the carnal (the individual) is revealed. These objects ultimately are prosthetics of the cognitive sensoriality of the Homo sapien.

I started around the idea of belonging. Belonging to someone, somewhere, having belongings. Very quickly my research became about the tension between the individual and the collective. How can an identity be full if it has to play within the standards and norms of the group it tries to fit? What is subjective?

I first differentiate this two part of us, the subjective and the universal one. The human is a biological and living organism, characterized by the following distinctive features : bipedal, opposable thumbs and an instinctive need for belonging. The self is the psychological and subjective component of the human (hosted by the physical body). It is unique to each individual of the species. Now, what could represent this intricate relationship between these two entities, the human and the self?

I realize the solution would come from cognitive capitalism, something mental. Cognition is the ability to perceive and react, encounting thought, behavior and emotions. The brain and mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century. ‘We are no longer proletarians working on assembly lines, but cognitarians generating behavioural data that is bought and sold on futures markets’ (Zuboff, 2019).

Here we are! You, I, are a very mechanical machine using preset settings that provokes peculiar reactions.

Today, I would like to introduce you to yourself, and more specifically to your biases. Cognitive biases are shortcut of the brain. They are here to help us to make sense of the world. Let’s say, when you cook pasta you don’t weight your pasta and your tomate sauce every time. No, because we work in heuristics, so we do approximation and it often works. It is the same here. The brain saves energy by engaging in an automatic answer to a stimulus of informations, without analyzing it. The interesting thing about it is that we all have the same biases, like a commonly shared identity. They are an evolution tools that made us where we are, even tho today there are not always adapted. They show all the fragility of the universal human but meanwhile emphasizes each self as authentic.

I studied biases that seemed to show the limit of the human in its identity or in its collectivity. For example, one bias is called moral credential. It states that when you’ve been good, you allow yourself to be less good afterward. I wanted to show the rituals the body does for each bias, as an attempt to make physical a cognitive process. That is why I did chairs, because our bodies rely on them the same way the brain relies on biases.

The banality of the chair and the influence in the way we have a conversation, the chair as a controlling object, full of standards. The chair, at the end, suggests the body even if there is none seated on it. And finally, the chair as the symbole of the 2021 rooted human. The modern human is seated, when they eat, are in public transport, take a shit, work, chill on the computer. The chair, as the biases, is a prosthetic to the human, an extension of the human that intent and define how one relate to another.
A chair for my ass and a chair for my thoughts.

These chairs aren’t the archetypical object we imagine but spaces for the body. You can’t just sit, you need to think of how you’re going to engage with it. It’s continuous effort. First, I translated each bias into a body ritual, because I wanted the bias to be understood by using the chair and not by seeing it. Then, I studied and filmed how this ritual would be in dialogue with a chair.

For it to loose its status of furniture, I burned the chairs and worked on a specific texture that would recall the skin, the carnal. The act of burning is destruction but also rebirth. The burn is a natural protection, again, as the biases. I only used construction beams because I wanted it to be only a structure. The plan here are beams planed and glued together, to make no difference between the seat and the foot for example. These chairs are skeleton of the mental human.

These chairs are united by their functions, to simulate the sensorium of a single person.
This room is simply an archive of human minds.

 

 

Blog Interior Scholarship
Mai 2021
Blog: Eff Libilbéhéty
Homo sapiens are no longer proletarian but cognitarians.

 

To dive into the conscious and unconscious means to fit in society uncovers the fragile balance between the banal and the public. Social appendages, like phones or strategies, are here to lubricate the human’s collision with the external. This liminal space questions the authenticity of each individual and reveals a constraint belonging to the collective. Calling attention to cognitive bias here also relates to how ideology works on a mass of people – because of those human brain’s glitches.

 Almost scientifically, these appendages are dissected and archived to offer an object-oriented horizon arising from a different cognitive and perceptual standpoint. Critical moments of resistance are highlighted through domestic rituals. From each of our pre-saved behaviours only remain chairs of wood and bioplastic, as a prosthesis of bipeds’ rooted rituals. As a dialectic between constraint and freedom, the mind and the human-built, each element is a cross-dressing on how expands the Homo sapiens’ body sensoriality.

the subjective identity ot the universal human

The excrescences of the social game are a liminal space between every day and the public, the intimate and the chaos. By excrescences I mean all the means homo sapiens use to interact with the external (others, situations, nature, culture, society). As individuals, we try to exist as one but also to fit in the collective. That’s called belonging. But this balance between identity and objectivity, or subjectivity and public isn’t that clear. Humans are wired with the same materials: thoughts, actions, emotions. What creates a melody of these 3 modules (regulating their interactions) are cognitive bias and constant learning.

Such prosthetics are there to help us make a sense of reality and the world around us, to navigate as sure as we can. They can be tools but also immaterial props, like above-mentioned biases. Their physicality doesn’t matter: they are an extension of ourselves, not necessarily practical, neither functional. Just a banal add-on, lubricating our collision with what is outside of the limit, outside our selves.

Bias, for instance, are ‘bugs’ of the human mind and sociability. They are unconscious distortion in how one receives information, potentially leading to irrational decisions or paradoxes. Individuals create their own “subjective reality”. Advertising or propaganda, for instance, make great use of our biases because we are often unaware of them and because they are universal (let’s see it as a button that provokes similar reactions even though the individuals have very different identities).

They can be explained logically: robotic shortcuts (or mechanical simplification methods) because our brains are unable to comprehend the richness of the whole visual stimuli and chaotic amount of information that the world holds. So, through these means (rationalisation and abstractions), it creates an affordable world and allows itself to navigate through it. Therefore, it is the same on a biological level: the brain doesn’t digest the whole surplus of information happening daily. To find a rhythm in the chaos, it works with pre-established models (based on previous experiences). Basically, a simulation of what is reality screens in our heads, and the only things the brain analyses are the information that doesn’t match with this simulation. These errors are analyzed and used to create a more performant simulation, next time.

These social toolings are intangible phenomenons shaping the way we behave. Let’s think of religion as an example. For the core of guidance, we created a system of beliefs and rules. Then, finally, things/reality/world had a reason, made sense again. No need to doubt, as there is a precise way to think. We built temples for the core of making sense – temples made of blood and need.

Brain’s models, religion, cellphones. These are excrescences of the human that intend and define how one human relates to another and expands in the world.

prosthetics to (dis)prove the body

20 biases are selected to present all the fragility of the universal human. For instance, the ‘Rhyme as reason’ effect (rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful) or the ‘Law of the instrument’ (an over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”). The 20 biases are investigated through experiences to prove or disprove them, and will be selected to have 10 final ones. Each experience investigates the environment with a new body. As a dialectic between constraint and freedom, an object (chair) is made for each experience. Cross-dressing, transgressive and transcendent, these objects expand the Homo sapiens’ body sensoriality. Finally, each experience makes a human feel a sense of liberation. Limiting the objects to a chair also question the  form/functions, norms and standards, present in architecture. To which extent is it still a chair if you can’t sit on it?

Indeed, the chair is a stable element on which humans rely on. It’s also a conversational object, one that we all have in our homes. Not only at our homes actually, as there is a sit for each of our banal rituals. Eating, toilet, public transport, work. The 2021’s humans and their rooted daily lives. A chair for my ass and my thoughts, perfect prosthesis of our daily millimetric ballets. For the 14 biases, there will be a chair. They are drawn on the papers too. Each chair is as a dialectic between constraint and freedom, cross-dressing on how expands the Homo sapiens’ body sensoriality. My chairs are united by their functions, to simulate the sensorium of a single person but also by two materials.

Each experience is carefully archived (audio, video, notes and conclusion). Indeed, being filmed creates another context, it’s bizarre and performative and emphasizes each of my humans as authentic. Finally, I challenge the person in front of me as a guinea pig and it becomes a number in a research, depersonalized in my archive of human minds.

The diner experience

Sitting all around a table, everyone is well dressed. Everyone has a role to play. It is no matter which one is the most valuable, but a transient discussion on what it is to be a self and how we do when it encounters other-selves. We are offering our more banal performance, seated and eating. The more we go, the more it appears that all the answers we bring just recall more questions. There is no end, no conclusion, only transitory moments of truth. Rationalisation couldn’t help. From the corn during the Inca civilization to the epigenetic, all is discussed. They think I care about what they are saying, or that it matters. They are eating and I observe them coping with the foam forks. Here to play roles, they got an excuse to be themselves. Unscared of the social game because it is a scenery, they appear. My friends were here, in all their vulnerabilities. Behind performative roles, nothing makes sense. It is all scenery.

 

 

Blog Interior Scholarship
April 2021
Blog: Eff Libilbéhéty
How do we sink?
Humans used to be animals. They now pretend to be machines.

 

What is the place of humans in futures societies? How does the dynamics between individual and collective will balance? Western populations face difficulties to maintain current humans’ lifestyle. Let’s talk, or dream, about the decline of European capitalists societies. This sensible experience is irremediable: we are all going to face it, whether you like it or not.

 

Maybe it is just some thoughts of a young adult that has already lost hope before they have even begun to live. Nihilistic? Cynical? A generation that might have everything to feel happy according to society’s standard. But waiting for the collapse of their own society to feel alive again. Thirsty for adventure and to find a lost childhood.  This starting point gave an excuse for a conversation between Tania Phuong and Eff Libilbéhéty.

 

“It’s a story about a guy who falls from a 50 storey building.  As he falls he tries to reassure himself by repeating ‘so far, so good, so far, so good, so far, so good’. It’s not the fall that matters, it’s the landing.”

 

‘Human’ is an aware living organism rushing behind self-accomplishment and instinctive need to belong, while the animal represents the condition where action and reaction are merged. It calls purely to intuition and requires no thinking. Somewhere else in the spectrum rule the machine, with its extreme rationalization of processes. It embodies tools, technologies, and the knowledge to use them.

By transcending their initial condition, humans put in opposition rationalization and primitivity. Our technological progression goes way faster than our biological evolution, and such change redefines how individuals relate to themselves and others. Instinct no longer has a place in a society frantically governed by control. Human, all too human. Fragile but invincible. Consummate, stubborn, temporal. Complex being and yet so simple. Full of surprises.

 

Imagine a world without you, without us. How hard it is.

We are unable to form a complete mental picture of it. To sense its full impact. No matter how much I have read the data and tried to rationalize it. From a systemic perspective, I can’t vindicate a picture of what ‘the collapse of the world’ might be.  No organism endowed of common sense would sign for that. The political paradox of our world: going with the firm intention of reforming the world but never imagining it without us. Merely, there’s a common intuition of it, on the verge of certainty.
How to imagine the consequences of such an event?
Which leader would make a catastrophic analysis of the state of the world and draw a conclusion that how he governs must be radically changed?

This world is cruel. This world is beautiful.

First, it was only matter. Humans try to organize it, and called that society. What is you? What is us? How does that impact the self’s conception when the self is defined by its tools and conventions? How do selves relate to their surroundings when the world is exceptionally technical? Do these technologies and ideas of ‘self’ impact human nature? Is human nature flexible?

What are we going to feel?

I stand for chaos. Ecological and economic data make no sense to me. Most people are too dumb for theory. Life is dissonant anyway. I want to feel. And I want to know what others feel. Should we expect the worst and believe in the myth of barbarity, or can a more united and therefore, less violent narrative be imagined?
This world is guilt-ridden.

As a cataract, the systematic depersonalization of being rhythms one’s perception of their identity and replaces their body awareness with restrictive freedom. It is vertiginous how every banal body action is detained by a strict idea of right and wrong. It shines at the bottom of the tunnel, I hope it’s not an illusion. There’s no fear in my words, but curiosity coming from the misunderstanding of human nature. I tried to tame the collapse of our civilization. As there is no unique version, neither a brutal stop apocalypse-like, how to approach a moment that we know dramatic? How to make sense of something when there is no hope anymore? Is resilience the wiser attitude?

When is it too late?

 

I recently moved rue de Louvain, very much in front of the Belgian senate. My desk is next to the window, and I observe my neighbour when my soul needs to relax. The three people working there are known as ‘the boss’, ‘the intern’, and ‘the douchbag’. They are most of the time smoking on their balcony, trashing their cigarettes on the street. Often they would go home, leaving the window and the light open all night long. I send paper planes. Most of them end up on the street, smashed by car until I remove them. ‘All is wrong’. Two of my fragile agents succeeded, landing on both sides of the balcony’s window. I see them for three months now, getting less and less tangible, damaged by the rain. An archive of this slow death quickly replaced my victorious scream. Although, I know they see them, as every hour they light a new cigarette there. Which leader would make a catastrophic analysis of the state of the world and draw a conclusion that how he governs must be radically changed?

Humans are social, so their path cannot be resumed only by intrinsic values. When their ability to perceive the world scales up to the collective, it multiplies individuals’ restrictions and allows the structures of power to orchestrate grandiose puppets shows. And the obsessive folly of order enters the dances. What is real when the world is fiercely screenwritten?

The madness of a well-oiled method requires unique but, therefore, mundane reactions. Instruments to hack the global consensus are not fierce, and that is where their strength resides. It is absurd, hazardous, and lyric. Merely then, the individual can call themself I.

Self is plural, but the Corbusier himself said, “all men have the same organism, the same functions. All men have the same needs”. How individuals are supposed to be individuals when identities are social conventions? Architecture is the jailer of this millimetric ballet. It encloses the subjects that live in. Standards. Norms. Technologies. Are we just bad people? Emotions decide. Nevertheless, emotions can’t be predicted, neither can someone else know what is irremediably in our hearts.

What is left ?

The frenetic rhythm of well-rounded simulacras, and designers playing to be God. My body is locked in a mechanical dance, accompanied by other bodies. A desperate call to reunite people. A last try out to make this final adventure fun. As there is no answer, at least we could be together in the incertitude.

Different visions, different spaces, and times.

Humans are ‘technical’ to the point that all these means are accepted as a part of a person. Individuality becomes a commodity. How to approach a moment that we know dramatic?
Where is your sensible experience? I don’t belong. I’m a belonging. Humans look at their planet from space. Global warming? System-thinking. We scream numbers, degrees rise, increase in precipitation! While the main question should be: where are the singing birds?

 

Collecting, archiving, destroying.
When the individual-to-individual relationship expands to that of the group, institutional violence immerses individual brutality. They are co-dependent. Don’t be scared. Let us all embrace it together. Are we going to cooperate, or will we dive into more individuality?
Forever renew yet forever the same. Reason melts into systematic control.

Selves are political!

Unlike the collapse of ancient civilizations, the scale changed. We live in a globalized world, and yet still creating infinite connections with causal mechanisms that can’t only be isolated to one particular country. We do universal behaviours shaped by data. The society threatened is the whole world. It doesn’t solve inequalities but only uniforms customs in megalopolises. Fitting in the era of capitalism is an endless race, and it is illusory to belong in a world of fast trends. Indeed, it is a constant self-adjustment in one identity. But also a very convenient way to control a crowd. You never can really isolate and run from society. Society always catches up to remind you where you should belong, despite you.

Humans, you got some bad habits. Your control is a never-ending dominance, in a big large world. And I am really pissed because all of this mess started from an impulse to make sense of ‘our’ world. Hierarchizing and organizing what seemed to be chaos. Humans put rationalization on a pedestal, far, far away from primitivity. As if order and chaos were antagonistic. In our unreasoned race for control, humans become weapons of mass self-destruction. Follow with the deterioration of our home, in the idea of a world slowly being eaten from the inside. A human story in which a certain melancholic feeling mixed with reverie and an imprecise desire for happiness can be found.

The world isn’t global thanks to a magical and shared ideology. Standards aren’t anything universal. They are just colonization of the dominant’s perspective for the simple reason that consensus hardly happens without domination. And it is so bad that humans even believe it can only work that way! The word ‘hierarchy’, the ranking of things, has for main synonyms order. But the more surprising are its antonyms. ‘chaos’, ‘anarchy’, ‘mess’. As if the only way to have order is through a hierarchy. In a nutshell, linguistics admits that without domination, there can be no order.

Liar! The more we upgrade our tools, the more we tend to absorb the perspective of the machine. Unaffected. The system-thinking approach brought by the saint order creates dynamics of control, of which we are our own jailer. Scary and peaceful, it is how we are, and it’s how we’re going to end.

What is measured gets managed!

Perhaps it would be better to let instinct decomposed our selves into chaos, to be reborn. Such surrender lies in banal actions such as oversleeping or taking your life’s decisions by playing dice.

Disobedience is about integrating a ‘new logic’ that doesn’t have control or order as an output. A kind of experience that calls purely to hazard while being intensely mechanical.

Please take a minute to grief your specie. What would be your last words?
Maybe the fall won’t be too bad.
I stand for an uncomfortable design that has no fucking sense.

Self is plural. Hack the fixed shape!
To what extent can we expect a group of six billion people to act in one and the same direction, to preserve their environment, to preserve their own? Micro-symbiosis will come from macro-chaos.

Selves are political. Fuck harmony!

There’s no fear in my words, but curiosity coming from the misunderstanding of human nature. Imagination is my only power facing the certainty of an imminent end. Yet, birth only happens by the collapse of an initial state.

 

„Innenarchitektur und Architektur sind der Schauplatz des Theaterstücks des Lebens“, betont Eff Libilbéhéty. „Als Gestalterinnen und Gestalter versuchen wir, einen möglichst präzisen Kontext zu schaffen, in dem ein Mensch leben kann. Durch die Architektur und Innenarchitektur sind die Menschen buchstäblich IN ihrem Werk. Sie sehen es nicht nur an, sie erleben es gleichzeitig mit Körper und Seele.“

Eff Libilbéhéty studiert Architektur und Design an der Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam und ist eine*r der vier Stipendiat*innen des mit insgesamt 24.000 Euro dotierten Interior Scholarships. Geboren wurde Eff im südfranzösischen Tarbes. Bis 2014 studierte sier in Toulouse Grafik Design. Nach dem erfolgreichen Abschluss sammelte Eff Libilbéhéty umfängliche berufliche Erfahrungen in diesem Feld und unternahm einige Reisen, bis sier begann in Amsterdam zu studieren. Hier legt Eff als Architekturstudent*in einen Augenmerk darauf, einen Kontext zu schaffen, in dem Mensch, Natur und Technologie existieren können. Dabei nimmt sier wahlweise einen philosophischen, soziologischen oder politischen Standpunkt ein, um Beziehungen zu untersuchen: „Mal liegt der Schwerpunkt in der Architektur, mal in der Skulptur, manchmal kommt es aber auch darauf an, neue Regeln oder Systeme zu erfinden. Dennoch geht es im Fokus immer darum, einen Kontext für die Lebenden zu schaffen.“

Die Arbeit als Designer*in ist für Eff Libilbéhéty immer auch mit ethischer Verantwortung verbunden. Sier sieht sie es auch als die eigene Aufgabe an, Gewohnheiten zu hinterfragen. Eff Libilbéhéty verspricht sich von dem Stipendium eine größere „Sichtbarkeit“ und geht davon aus, so andere besser davon überzeugen zu können, bei der Entwicklung von Projekten mit- und zusammenzuarbeiten. Außerdem erlaubt Eff das Interior Scholarship, das AIT-Stipendium der Sto-Stiftung, sich zu hundert Prozent auf Arbeit und Forschung zu konzentrieren. Sier muss sie nicht mehr wie in den vergangenen Jahren Vollzeit arbeiten: „Eine geistige und körperliche Erleichterung. Es macht mich glücklich, so ganz in mein Studium eintauchen zu können.“ Dazu gehört unter anderem die Abschlussarbeit mit dem Thema „Ich gehöre hierher, du gehörst zu mir, das sind meine Sachen.“ Eff Libilbéhéty setzt sich hier mit der Idee von Eigentum und Selbstbesitz im 21. Jahrhundert auseinander. Dabei soll es in der Arbeit auch um „das Finden der inneren Ruhe“ und die „eigenen Instinkte“ gehen.

Juryurteil:

“Die Gesamtpräsentation von Eff Libilbéhéty und damit verbunden das bisher erarbeitete studentische Portfolio ist von Beginn an bis zum Ende hin eine Besonderheit, zu der wir als Jury ausdrücklich gratulieren. Die erkennbare gestalterische wie auch konzeptionelle innenarchitektonische Leistung macht große Freude und inspiriert. Sie deutet auf einen „eigenen kreativen Kopf“ hin; einen Kopf, der hinterfragt, abseits des Gewohnten. Einen Kopf, der Mut, Individualität, Offenheit und Experimentierfreude im und für den Raum aufzeigt. Genau diese Eigenschaften gilt es zu fördern, genau hier setzt die Unterstützung ein, um zukünftig gestalterische Freiräume zu schaffen.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch!”