Kinetic furniture by Ian Stell inspired by Latinx philosopher Giannina Braschi
A New Chair Inspired by a Philosophical Concept: “Things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.”
When industrial designer Ian Stell announced his plans to design a chair that resembled a lamp, poet Giannina Braschi encouraged her friend to take his concept further. She said, “Make the chair function as a lamp.” This challenge was born of her philosophy that “things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.”
Stell rose to the challenge and built a kinetic device that morphs from a chair into a lamp and named it “Giannina.” He explained how the invention transforms from one functional object into another: “When in its chair mode, a wheel that’s shaped and positioned like a soup bowl rolling on its edge acts as a backrest. Out of the center of this wheel—at a perpendicular angle—an oversized saddle is mounted. The wheel spins around the central axis until the occupant leans back in the chair, acting as its brake. When the chair is unoccupied, the wheel can be flipped over to be a lampshade over the LEDs mounted beneath the saddle.”
In the spirit of Braschi’s literary hybrids, the designer explained that this namesake chair is also “attempting to exist between typologies, resistant to being categorized, but striving to have purpose.” Its purpose is beauty.
Excerpted from World Literature Today (O’Dwyer, Tess. “Popping Up in Pop Culture and Other Unlikely Spaces: Latinx Author Giannina Braschi Crosses Over.” World Literature Today 95.2 (2021): 19-21.)
Drawings of the Prototype of the Giannina Chair: a spinning seat and a standing lamp.
The Giannina Chair, a drawing by Ian StellThe Giannina Chair in upright position as a chairGiannina Chair by Ian Stell in lamp mode
In the spirit of Braschi’s literary hybrids, the designer explained that this namesake chair is also “attempting to exist between typologies, resistant to being categorized, but striving to have purpose.” Its purpose is beauty.
World Literature Today
About the Designer Ian Stell
For Ian Stell, material choice and fabrication process follow the conceptual intention. This tactic has led Stell to work with a broad array of media, at scales that range from miniature to monumental. His projects span furniture, lighting, accessories, interiors, sculpture, installation, and beyond. Stell continues to cultivate fluencies in both digital and handcraft techniques, celebrating the rich cross-pollination that results from a broad approach. The objects he makes are often kinetic or reconfigurable and require a high level of precision in their manufacture.
Stell’s work has been presented in a number of New York venues, including solo shows at Matter and group shows during New York’s Design Week. He has also exhibited at Triode³ in Paris and Salone del Mobile in Milan. Stell’s first in a series of functional, intersecting staircases was installed in July 2015 on the banks of the Spree River in Berlin. This staircase, called Diagint, was fabricated near Torino by a factory that provides prototyping and limited production to some of Italy’s premier automotive companies. As of this writing, he is preparing work to be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Swiss Institute.
United States of Braschi:A Deep New Look into a Puerto Rican Visionary
Avid fans of Latin American and Latino literature have long been following the Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi. Best known for penning the first Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! and geopolitical tragicomedy United States of Banana, Braschi is an ardent champion of Puerto Rican independence—and of free expression. Often called revolutionary and prophetic, her high-voltage writing puts forth big ideas in highly stylized ways that put the reader’s imagination through an intense work-out.
Now, a new collection of essays by well-known scholars helps foster a deeper understanding of the innovation and relevance of her work. Co-edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer, Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) features pieces by fifteen specialists across diverse fields, each casting light on her rollicking humor, unbridled imagination, and scathing critique of American capitalism and colonialism.
Ilan Stavans, an early champion of Braschi’s translanguaging works, opens the anthology with a foreword that reads as a love letter in Spanglish to the Puerto Rican poet-philosopher.
“I have always visto a Giannina Braschi como mi heroína. And I’m an adicto,” write Stavans, in a bilingual play on words. “There is something mágico in her juego de palabras, her exploration of tenses, her anxious, uncompromising bilingüismo que ni es de aquí ni es de aquí ni es de allá, ni tiene age ni porvenir, y ser feliz es su color, su identity. Braschi crea una lexicography that is and isn’t atrapada en el presente. ¿Could she be anything but Latinéxica?”
“Without doubt, Braschi’s books challenge the constructs of society and the expectations of readers. They ask us to work for our pleasures—and displeasures,” observes Aldama in the introduction to the anthology. “I consider her work in the 1980s and 1990s as anticipating a future ideal reader,” writes Aldama. “And we see more of these ideal readers in the flesh and blood today; they are the ones like Torsa Ghosal, like me, and like many others who relish an aesthetics of discomfort; in narrative fictions that challenge our gap-filling and puzzle-solving capacities in and across multiple languages, identities, and experiences.”
Braschi’s canon-bending works in Spanish, Spanglish, and English have created space for a growing number of experimental Latina/o poets and storytellers, such as Carmen María Machado, Elizabeth Acevedo, Raquel Salas Rivera, Salvador Plascencia, and Monica de la Torre, to name a few. Of note, her ingenuity has also sparked a myriad of cultural adaptations into theater play, chamber music, painting, short-short film, sculpture, comics, artists books, as well as kinetic design, as catalogued in a lively chapter by Dorian Lugo Betran, entitled “Leaping Off the Page”.
VERDICT: RECOMMENDED
For those who are new to Braschi, Poets, Philosophers, Lovers will illuminate her role as a pioneer in the Latina/o vanguard in literature and philosophy. For long-time admirers, this volume reminds us why we keep coming back to her radical texts with renewed vigor—for the challenges and pleasures of an intensive work-out.
“At long last! Aldama and O’Dwyer have brought together a lineup of talent to match the vivacious audacity of Giannina Braschi. Admirers of Braschi will feast on every sumptuous page of this book, and they’ll return to her lush storyworlds with renewed vigor. Poets, Philosophers, Lovers reveals the challenging necessity of this transformative Latinx author.” Christopher González
This collection of essays, by fifteen scholars across diverse fields, explores forty years of writing by Giannina Braschi, one of the most revolutionary Latinx authors of her generation. Since the 1980s, Braschi’s linguistic and structural ingenuities, radical thinking, and poetic hilarity have spanned the genres of theatre, poetry, fiction, essay, musical, manifesto, political philosophy, and spoken word. Her best-known titles are El imperio de los sueños, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. She writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English and embraces timely and enduring subjects: love, liberty, creativity, environment, economy, censorship, borders, immigration, debt, incarceration, colonialization, terrorism, and revolution. Her work has been widely adapted into theater, photography, film, lithography, painting, sculpture, comics, and music. The essays in this volume explore the marvelous ways that Braschi’s texts shake upside down our ideas of ourselves and enrich our understanding of how powerful narratives can wake us to our higher expectations.
Chapter 10: Leaping Off the Page: Giannina Braschi’s Intermedialities (Dorian Lugo Bertrán)
Chapter 11: Free-dom:United States of Banana and the Limits of Sovereignty (Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús)
Chapter 12: The Holy Trinity: Money, Power, and Success in United States of Banana (Francisco José Ramos)
Chapter 13: My Dinner with Giannina: Rolando Pérez Interviews Giannina Braschi
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Frederick Luis Aldama is distinguished university professor at the Ohio State University with a joint appointment in Spanish and Portuguese as well as faculty affiliation in film studies and the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of over 40 books and the editor of 9 book series.
Giannina Braschi, sitting in the Flying Carpet Armchair (1972) by Ettore Sottsass at R&Company in New York City in 2019.
The avant-garde writings of Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi have long been the subject of college courses and doctoral dissertations in fields ranging from Latin American studies and Spanglish linguistics to postmodern and postcolonial literatures. But these days her radical texts are popping up in popular culture and far-ranging spaces traditionally devoid of Latinx poetry, such as television comedy, chamber music, comics, industrial design, and even urban planning.
The quirkiest permission request of late came from the producers of the television series Modern Love based upon the eponymous column in the New York Times and featuring Anne Hathaway, Tina Fey, Ed Sheeran, and Andy Garcia. Braschi’s book United States of Banana will be a prop on the set of an upcoming episode of this romantic comedy, presumably as an objective correlative that offers some insight about a character in whose home the novel appears. If this is a set designer’s way of saying you are what you read, what should viewers assume about a character who reads radical contemporary world literature? Library Journal described United States of Banana as a bizarre but intriguing book for fans of philosophical fiction like Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Such fans are likely to be heady, creative, and up for a challenging read.
Braschi’s fans are likely to be heady, creative, and up for a challenging read.
Born in San Juan and based in Manhattan, Braschi writes cross-genre works that are structural hybrids of poetry, fiction, essay, theater, manifesto, and political philosophy. Her titles include the poetry epic Empire of Dreams, the Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing!, and the geopolitical tragicomedy United States of Banana about the fall of the American empire and the liberation of Puerto Rico. Her work has been widely adapted into other art forms, including paintings and wood carvings by Michael Zansky, short-short films and a photography book by Michael Somoroff, an artist’s book by Italian printmaker Giorgio Upiglio, and a staged production of United States of Banana by Colombian theater director Juan Pablo Félix.
Maritza Stanchich, professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, observed that “Braschi’s reach has come to exceed not only the boundaries of literary genres but literature itself.” A growing number of creators are using her experimental texts as a springboard for their own cultural productions.
On the world music scene, a young Puerto Rican composer, Gabriel Bouche Caro, shed light on his creative process in connection to his compatriot’s work. The emerging musician discussed how he conceived of Foreign, a new composition for chamber ensemble with baritone voice. “I took fragments from chapters of Ground Zero, the first part of United States of Banana, and built my own libretto. It’s a short piece, and it deals with the concepts of identity, understanding, and communication expressed through my own prism in a musical sense,” he said. Braschi’s musings about the feelings of American immigrants and the sounds of their “foreign-speaking English” prompted his own line of inquiries. “How does my/our foreignness affect our (musical) environment? Is it tied to a sense of belonging and to a sense of being through utterance?” He pointed to aspects of the novel that he found to be of particular musical interest, noting, “Her concept of re-contextualization of existing themes, characters, stories; the exploration of individual and collective self through dialogue; and the representation of ideas of national identity and political meaning—all presented in a way that’s not ‘on the nose’—are especially of interest to me.”
This challenge was born of her philosophy that “things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.
Ian Stell’s Giannina chair (2020) foreground; Maarten Baas Clay Classic Series (2006) background. Photo taken in Giannina Braschi’s home in New York City in 2021.
Drawn to its raucous satirical elements, Swedish cartoonist Joakim Lindengren rendered a different section of United States of Banana into a Swedish-language comic book with poet and translator Helena Eriksson. Their adaptation focused on the aftermath of 9/11 based on Braschi’s depiction of American life after the collapse of the World Trade Center. In response to the matrix of literary references in the original, Lindengren brought to his interpretation a dense overlay of quotes from iconic paintings, photojournalism, movies, illustrations, and cartoons. Riffing on Picasso, Dalí, Magritte, Escher, Tom of Finland, and Walt Disney’s Al Taliaferro, his treatment of art history and pop culture echoed Braschi’s treatment of literary history: an homage rife with irony. The work is now available in English as a graphic novel from the Ohio State University Press, with an introduction and teacher’s guide by Amanda M. Smith and Amy Sheeran.
Braschi has also influenced the design of three-dimensional objects. When industrial designer Ian Stell of New York City announced his plans to design a chair that resembled a lamp, Braschi encouraged her friend to take his concept further. She said, “Make the chair function as a lamp.” This challenge was born of her philosophy that “things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.” Stell rose to the challenge and built a kinetic device that morphs from a chair into a lamp and named it “Giannina.” He explained how the invention transforms from one functional object into another: “When in its chair mode, a wheel that’s shaped and positioned like a soup bowl rolling on its edge acts as a backrest. Out of the center of this wheel—at a perpendicular angle—an oversized saddle is mounted. The wheel spins around the central axis until the occupant leans back in the chair, acting as its brake. When the chair is unoccupied, the wheel can be flipped over to be a lampshade over the LEDs mounted beneath the saddle.” In the spirit of Braschi’s literary hybrids, the designer explained that this namesake chair is also “attempting to exist between typologies, resistant to being categorized, but striving to have purpose.” Its purpose is beauty.
Architects who have cited Braschi as an inspiration include theoreticians and practitioners in the burgeoning field of ecological urbanism. Amidst growing attention to climate change, green technologies, and sustainable design, ecological urbanists draw from ecology to propose socially inclusive urban settings that are sensitive to the environment. Mohsen Mostafavi, Marina Correria, Ana Maria Duran Calisto, and others at the Harvard Graduate School of Design led a Latin American project that proposed remedial and long-range planning solutions for parks and river systems from São Paulo to Santiago, educational infrastructures, and agroecology in the region. Their culminating publication, Ecological Urbanism in Latin America / Urbanismo Ecológico en América Latina,was organized around seven core concepts: anticipate, collaborate, feel, include, mobilize,curate, and adapt. Every section of the book opened with a defining passage by Braschi that illuminated one of these seven organizing principles of socially responsible design. Her definitions ranged in form from prose poem to Socratic dialogue.
Dorian Lugo-Bertrán, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at the University of Puerto Rico, posited that the wide application of Braschi’s writing stems from its own performativity and intermediality. Her work is not only daring artistically and politically, but it also engages with other artforms and media in provocative ways that can invite an open conversation or incite a visceral response. “There are portions for everyone, from any discipline and non-discipline, who cares to respond. One may paint, sculpt, act back in a myriad of tones: enamored, agitated, pensive,” he said, noting that the page is a catapult for something else.
New York City
Tess O’Dwyer is a translator, editor, and arts consultant in New York City. She and Frederick Luis Aldama co-edited Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (2020), with a foreword by Ilan Stavans. She also translated Empire of Dreams (1994), by Giannina Braschi, and Martin Rivas (2000), by Alberto Blest Gana. She is a board member of the Academy of American Poets.
Giannina Braschi 