A closer look into a Social Design project - Eloísa Cartonera

This post is a first attempt to put some of that down to paper (or as nowadays, “put it down to bytes“) and share some of the lessons I learned and processes I experienced.

A short introduction to the “cartonero” publishing phenomenon: For an introduction to this universe of cardboard books, cumbia dancing and half-naked heroines, allow me a brief picture of the context most of these projects sprouted from, the 2001 crisis: We are aware how troubled Argentine economy has been in its short - but intense - history. To talk about a “crisis” in Argentina is awfully general and encompassing. When was there no crisis? - we could ask. Throughout the last decades there was an acquiescent middle class that was recurrently pacified through manipulative and often corrupt political measures, like paring the dollar with the peso. This huge middle class, historically the largest in Latin America, was forced to wake up to the hardships the lower classes had been experiencing since always, when in 2001 all bank accounts were frozen and no one could have access to their own savings (1) . Half the population fell below poverty line, people were thrown out of their jobs in massive numbers, industries and services were closed overnight, and an unparalleled social turmoil emerged. People got together and filled the streets, both protesting as well as organizing in communal projects. This was the start of the famous barter clubs, and all sorts of similar collaborative endeavours and forms of self-government. To survive, thousands of people were forced to collect scraps of cardboard and paper from the gutters and rubbish bins to sell for whatever they could get, giving birth to a whole new class of urban poor. They were known ascartoneros, meaning the “cardboard pickers”.

Then came Eloísa…Eloísa was the name of an enchanting Bolivian woman with which Javier Barilaro fell in love with. Barilaro, graphic artist, together with acclaimed writer Washington Cucurto were busy at this time (summer 2003) with manufacturing poetry books. The love affair between Javier and Eloísa is said not to have gone very far, but her name and beauty would in any case serve as muse to the birth of a great big family: the Eloísa project. And from there, an extended family of sister-Eloísas and cousin-Eloísas would come to arise, all over South America.

With the challenges offered by the crisis and the reunion of the inspired artists, the ground was set for the creation of a publishing house. The only piece missing is said to have arrived in a sunny spring afternoon in a pink bike wearing a green skirt. She was artist Fernanda Laguna, who met the two book-manufacturers and offered them the space for the first Cartoneria. In those early days in the quarter of Almagro one could buy not only books but also vegetables. The project was an immediate success.

Eloísa is often said to be “a product of the crisis” or a project which “aestheticized misery“. Truth or not, this is far from how they portray themselves. If you ask any of them, they are a work collective. They get together to be together, to learn new skills with one another, to make a decent living, and to serve society around them. In addition to all, they take great joy out of producing beautiful books and meeting new people.

Ricardo Piglia, one of Eloísa’s published authors and household names, and a great name of Argentinean literature, couldn’t have state it better: “It’s not about making a cult of poverty, but rather, not allowing oneself to be intimidated by it.”

A reporter’s treat…One of the most extraordinary aspects about the Eloísa publishing phenomenon is undoubtedly the media attention it got all through the years. I can’t recall a day’s work where there wasn’t a visit of a reporter, a photographer, a student, or a scholar of some sort. In the half a year I was there I witnessed so many articles I grew tired of always hearing the same story, like a fairy tale. Adding to that some more six years of inquiring and interviewing, it is immense what has been said and published about Eloísa.

When organizational storytelling gets too detached from what is happening, or when it becomes symbolic of the values the organization somehow “sells“, some beautiful myths can arise. Even in the case when nothing is apparently “sold“, I reckon this could also be the case.

As myths, they are not necessarily true, but they do stand for an essence which is there. Eloísa is surely a good example of a project that has an aura, and for that has been largely mythicised. Again, I’m not interested in unravelling what is actually true or not from all the kilometres of paper printed on behalf of Eloísa. Much more than books, Eloísa sells myths. They sell idealistic dreams of alternative modes of functioning. So it makes perfect sense that they are surrounded in stories that are very much myth-like. It makes sense that the name refers to a beautiful yet unreachable woman turned into myth, and that one of the mentors behind it is one of Argentina’s most polemic literary myths these days (I mean Cucurto, and please do go on reading for more on Cucurto, because I had to save that for last…).

One of my favourite myths is definitely the one about the renowned musical atmosphere one is supposed to always enjoy at the Cartoneria. Before arriving, I had a picture of it as some sort of ongoing concert of cumbia and dancing, and that is mostly because most of the articles and depictions do mention this. Eloísa is most often portrayed as a small place where people paint covers and drink mate-tea to the sound of popular hits. This story is still told, even when the radio got stolen more than one year ago, and the cartoneria is silent ever since.

This silence turned out to be a blissful one for me, hardly a huge fan of such music, and thankful for the many discussions that took place to “fill the silence”. Between the people working around a table together, with the people who came to visit, discussions ranged from every topic imaginable, from politics to sex, from cultural clichés (it’s an international venue after all) to being-Argentinean, from language to literature, to love and life. I didn’t find the concert hall I had imagined, but I found a small community of debate, a sort of social “agora“.

Much more than books (3)…One question mark that was always in my mind raised: What is it that they sell, really? In objective terms, you might hold in your hands a light-weighted book made of reutilized cardboard, directly picked from the streets, colourfully and amusingly hand-painted in all styles and outcomes - therefore always a unique piece. There are no two books alike. They look odd and precious, but most likely you won’t buy them for their quality. The binding promises not to last long, it will most likely leave stains in your purse or in your hands, and they can’t be folded. You may come to find pages glued to each other and it is not rare to find books with missing pages. Buying such a book surely places you a thousand miles from the normalised and standardised experience of any normal bookshop. It’s almost an adventure. Yet, there is something truly irresistible about them, and once you start buying them you will often find yourself starting a collection.

It is evident that Eloísa doesn’t sell only books. As said above, they also sell myths. They sell values, idealism… they sell hope. They sell - or better put, they offer! - different values to different audiences.

To the average Argentinean, they offer an opportunity for questioning his strong but globally dominated publishing industry, and the traps of their profoundly capitalist-dependent culture. For the lower classes, they offer a way-out prospect for those who feel helpless or overpowered by the lack of employment. For everyone else, it offers some beautifully romantic ideas of other ways the world could work. It also offers access to and visibility for a phenomenon that shouldn’t go unspoken, that of the thousands of people living of their societies’ detritus.

In operational and social terms, it offers potentials - to establish a closer relationship between reader, writer, and publisher; To enact literature in a closer dynamic to social and economic cooperation, by offering feasible prices to those who can’t afford regular book prices, therefore providing quality literature to a large numbers of readers who wouldn’t otherwise pay for such books. For all of us interested in Social Design, they offer an inspirational example of a project that can stand by its own, and they offer books which are symbolic of community power in moments of crisis, and which certainly feel like tokens of bottom-up empowerment.

Ah, of course, they also sell books. Beautiful and one of a kind books that might stain your purse or get glued to your wallet, but which intonate some of the best voices South-American literature has to offer.

The catalogue…Definitely, one of this project’s greatest achievements is the impressive catalogue they managed to pull together. In the early years, it launched with acclaimed writers, such as Ricardo Piglia, or César Aira. These were followed by very experimental texts by unknown or emerging authors, as well as rare and out-of-print books. Nowadays, with almost two hundred titles, ranging from poetry to short stories, short novels and theatre plays, even literature for children; it has broadened his scope to include authors from Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Costa Rica and Peru.

It never ceased to amaze me how such meagre productions, in a material sense, could embed such high cultural value. Nonetheless, this is said to be typically a Latin American characteristic, that of achieving economically weak but culturally strong products and social structures. It costs close to nothing to produce one of these items, at least by western standards, but the literary quality is even so of very high value.

Aesthetic and the role of arts…In those hectic days when the streets became a horizontal meeting point for all classes, a new temporary flattened class was improvised - more awakened, united, and above all, a hiper-creative one. This was a creativity born out of the most extreme conditions, which is arguably a criteria most theories on creativity require.

This reminds me of a phrase many project-owners and people I spoke with used during our informal interviews: “The la deseperación nasce la créacion “(5). This sentence gave me the chills. I am one that defends freedom from the suffering anguished artist stereotype. And yet there was another saying, and this I heard solely at Eloísa, which I found even more unsettling: “Las tapas feas venden más“, I was explained - Ugly covers sell more.

This stood of course for a very particular artistic approach, one that in the beginning truly surprised, even chocked me. I came to perceive how poverty is in this case very much a deliberate aesthetic choice. It is nothing compared with a phenomenon such as green-washing, because these covers don’t pretend to refer to a poverty they have nothing to do with. They describe exactly the backdrop they were born off, and in that sense, they are genuine. They are surely not some deceptive strategy aimed towards selling more books. But the people selling and painting the books are in any case very much aware of the values and the myths they are selling (as previously discussed) and they do take advantage of that. Badly-painted covers do sell more, because they look more “crafty”, less “professional”, and more “genuine”. They appeal to romantic ideals and they represent a social phenomenon we can then empathize with, namely poverty and the cartonero phenomenon.

This results in a strong aesthetic positioning based in a strong and visual reactivity to high culture and institutionalized art, everything properly crafted and standard made. It offers implicitly a return to the rough, rude, raw and ready-made aspect of objects. This is achieved by the use of bright and primary colours from very cheap pigments, an intentional unskilful aspect, lack of precise finishing and attention to details, and little or no elaboration in what regards ornaments and sophisticated visual elements.

The position of the designer was gladly abolished. The book covers can be designed by virtually anyone. If you enter the store one day and feel like painting some covers, you are very welcome to do so. Anything that you might be able to put together will be good enough; there are no covers better than others. Anything goes - and that is somehow liberating.

From a designers’ viewpoint, it is also noticeable how the covers had no visual reference of the content, beyond stating the title and author. There are no typographic copyrights issues, as everything is hand-drawn, cut, glued, and then painted - or directly painted. There is no template, no designated cover designer, no artistic direction whatsoever.

There also isn’t a consensus when it comes to the role of arts in all this. Despite being a project where literature, painting, and crafts have such protagonism, I was often explained how this project has “nothing to do with arts“.

In the earlier days, the artistic was first defended by Barilaro, who by the time I was there had already left the project, in his own words, to work “on its own things“. In his work as an artist Barilaro explores the same universe of typographic vernacular and cumbia-dancing-meets-book-publishing. A sort of meeting point between artistic expressions, social systems, and life at large. This has everything to do with artistically unifying concepts of artistic practices such as Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” concepts (6), which Javier himself has in different interviews referenced as an important link to the social design work carried out by Eloísa.

He was also one of the elements in the team that took the project to the 27th São Paulo’s Art Biennale, by that placing the project in a clear institutional art setting.

Ramona Leiva was the one accompanying Javier in his institutional art pursuits, and she is as well another important piece of Eloísa’s story. As Barilaro, she has left the project to pursuit her own projects. At the time she was with Eloísa she expanded the concept to include a tailoring section. They redesigned used clothing and made T-shirts with images of the writers they publish.
A reporter once asked Ramona “What is an artist?” To what she replied: “Someone who does what s/he enjoys” (7).

After stepping away from Eloísa Ramona initiated together with other former prisoners, being a former prisoner herself, a beautiful crafts collective called “Yo No Fui” (”Wasn’t Me!“).

With Javier and Ramona’s departure, there was no one else who clearly stood by the role of arts in this organizational dynamics. Not that there is anybody clearly opposing it, but I felt from the discourse that the project is perceived to have developed towards something “more social“. “It wasn’t just about art anymore“, I was explained.

This was when I realized how “artistic” can be spoken about in contradiction to, or at least incompatible with, “social“. Everybody is aware that this endeavour was artistic from the very first day, started out by three artists, with creative and artistic intentions. But in six years it is said to have become “less about art and more about people“.

These are two paradigms existing within social design practices: it is distinct to have a design or arts project, initiated by designers or artists, who utilizes people and communities, and by that becomes “social” (social as content and territory); or a project that is initiated and taken forth by the people themselves, regardless of their “artistic status”. This is the road Eloísa travelled in six years, which lead me to eventually find participants who defended art had nothing to do with it what so ever: this one project is supposed to be about people.

I was forced to ask them - But are they necessarily self-excluding? And forced to ask myself - How to find a discourse where all these levels can co-exist and people don’t perceive them as self-excluding?

Economical sustainability…This was hardly the only question I was forced to ask myself. So many others followed, especially on the topic of money and economical sustainability. Does a social design project need to be economically sustainable to be effective? How about all those wonderful ideas inside organizations which can’t make ends meet? Furthermore, how to escape the subvention dependency? The thing about Eloísa is that it actually works. It works, in the sense that they are self-sufficient. They have never taken a subsidy or funding of any sort. And this is rare. On the other hand, this puts an economical pressure over the project that makes it often neglect the social and artistic aspects of it.

Simply because books must be sold…I found it curious, and symptomatic of how (none) organized it all is that they said not to keep track of their sales. Books are produced as they are missing from the shelf, and this is not quantified. Yes, they could show me their “best-sellers”, that is, the titles that sell more. But they couldn’t estimate if this meant three hundred or three thousand books sold. (A rough estimate tells me that they have to sell at least 400 books per month to keep the people that keep the project running). This pressure towards self-sufficiency and the unarguable need to sell, as said, brings a pressure that raises many issues. No doubt this is a progressive publishing model, with obvious social and cultural value and which in some extent does challenge the dominating neo-liberal economic hegemony. But on the other hand it can be said it goes on feeding the system it attempts to attack, it is as capitalist-dependent as any other business, and instrumentalizes strategies of marketing and franchising (see below, on the expansion of the Cartonerias through South-America) like any other business.

Measuring impact and the problem with numbers…So, it works. But to which extent? Surely one wouldn’t defend that such a project has any major impact over the Argentine economic situation. If accounted, the number of people directly profiting from this project is quite limited. You have a handful of cartoneros who profit from the cardboard they can sell, a even lower number that could actually get off the streets and start working with the books instead, and this way you have a group of 5 to 10 people directly making a living out of it, and then you have a larger audience which surely profits from the high-literary-quality/really-low-price product they offer. If you also consider the above mentioned ideological outcomes, i.e., what they sell (offer) beyond the physical books, then you have even a larger audience to assess when measuring impact. And this can already account for you and me, probably thousand miles away from Buenos Aires, but nourishing from the inspiration they present.

Measuring impact is one of the most pressing debates in Social Design these days, and not a straight-forward one. Never to forget that one is dealing with people above numbers.

Cardboard and recycling…The environmental component was what got me in touch with Eloísa in the first place, through TreeHugger’s article. But in the end this turned out to for me be the least well-solved aspect of Eloísa.

So you have a picture, imagine that every night tens of thousands of people (8) walk the streets of Buenos Aires going through every rubbish bin. They are the cartoneros, the city’s unofficial recycling system. They open every container and rip the plastic bags apart when scavenging for the materials they can later sell. If on the one hand this activity keeps many families from falling completely beneath the poverty line and enables materials to be reintroduced in the production and consumption chain and therefore not wasted, the way they do it is also what turns Buenos Aires into a huge urban dump, and therefore decreases life quality, health and environmental urban levels.

It’s often said that Eloísa sells recycled books - but that’s incorrect. They take cardboard that would in any case be resold, and give it a new life. That is surely something. But they are in any case using bleached white paper and chemical pigments and manufacturing new books with it. They don’t trade, they sell.
They are environmentally and economically wise (as this often goes hand in hand) but they don’t directly solve any environmental issue. What they do, and that has to be valued, is raise awareness to the life prolonging potential that any material in our trash bins has. If you take this further, you can even consider an implicit metaphorical statement in the way that material excess and social excess, both created by capitalist and neo-liberalism, is reintegrated in the larger social landscape and given a new life. In any case, if evaluated for its environmental impact I would have to say this is hardly this project’s strongest asset

Washington Cucurto…It’s quite difficult to talk about Eloísa Cartonera without mentioning Washington Cucurto. If Eloísa has covered many rolls of newspaper, Cucurto has flamed many more. This enfant terrible of Argentine literature is either adored or loathed, but hardly anyone remains indifferent to him. Often I experienced when I told people I was collaborating with Eloísa, the first inquiry I got was “What do you think about this Cucurto fellow…?” - and whatever I might answer would then determine the future of this potential relationship.

Cucurto is a pseudonym of Norberto Santiago Vega, born in one of the many impoverished communities of Buenos Aires. In 98, he won a prestigious literary prize and achieved notoriety for his poetry collection, Zelarayan. This was later banned from public libraries and burned for its obscene, pornographic and xenophobic content. His writings are down-right polemic and his plots are carbon copied from his life experience in the night-life of Buenos Aires, with all the social outcasts and all the political turmoil. Very far from the tradition of Borges and other erudite cultural expressions, Cucurto’s writing touches the nerve of the Argentine intellectuals. Nevertheless, he is a phenomenon of notoriety, with media coverage from such publications asThe Guardian, Rolling Stone, BBC World, or Financial Times.

In 2002, before Eloísa was born, he owned a small publishing house that would be ravished like many others by the economic collapse. In the summer of 2003 he was manufacturing colorful poetry books with his friend Javier Barilaro - and the rest is history.

There is obviously a parallel between the negation of Europeanized, neo-liberal and high-culture values in everything that could be said both on Cucurto’s fiction and poetry, as well as on Eloisa’s aesthetic choices and overall positioning.

A Social Design project inside a Social Design Project…In 2005 Cucurto attempted an interesting literary social experiment. Every week he would publish a new chapter from his unreleased “Hasta quitarle Panamá a los Yanquis” (”Until I take Panama away from the Yankees”). This was done every week at 7pm, before leaving to one morecumbia night at Samber or Bronco (9). Internauts could then have free access to the text, and enough time to read and actually meet the author for a dance in the very same night. This is again just a small example of one more strategy used by Cucurto and his clan to bring the writer-reader love story out of its platonic canons and into the physical, euphoric, sensual dance-hall.

Exploring the web…This small experiment above was only possible because this online presence had already been drafted. Eloísa was already running for three years when designer Pablo Martín approached Barilaro with the exciting idea of taking the project online. Back then the web of cartoneriasacross South America (now most of them with their own blogs and online presences) hadn’t grew into what we have today, so there was little material about all this online. Pablo grabbed the opportunity and together they built a very unique website inspired in all the elements that make the daily tasks at Eloísa - the cardboard and the letters from cut-out stencils, and the color that characterize Eloísa. Pablo later extended his collaboration with the project to a series of comic series in which he drew and Cucurto wrote.

Going viral through South America…With time, the concept would expand and become so popular that it travelled to neighbour countries. Today it has spread with different names to different cities - same core concept. You will find Sarita Cartonera in Lima, Peru; Animita Cartonera in Santiago, Chile; La Cartonera in Cuernavaca, México; Yiyi Yambo in Asunción, Paraguay; Felicita Cartonera in Asunción, Paraguay; Dulcineia Catadora in Sao Paulo, Brasil; Mandrágora Cartonera in Cochabamba, Bolívia or Yerba Mala Cartonera in La Paz, Bolivia - and others.

If on the one hand this feels like a hopeful symptom of viral spreading of counter-discourses against cultural and economic hegemony, it is ironic how it so closely resembles the mechanism itself rejects, such as franchising. It happens all too often that marginal and borderline cultural manifestations are integrated or even swallowed by mainstream culture, and this way fundamentally perverted. This is only to shed attention into the fact that, beautiful that it may sound that Cartonerias are popping up everywhere, this could also turn it into one more brand phenomenon.

Much more than books - II (3)…We have seen how they “sell” (offer, make available) much more than books, but do they produce more products other than books? I learned that several of the other Cartonerias added social and educational events to their activities, ranging from workshops to book launches and discussion round tables. This wasn’t happening at Eloísa at the time I was there, even though it is included in the bigger picture.

In the bigger picture though, was now something truly to look forward to. At the time I left they were purchasing a piece of land one hour away from the city. One hectare of land to build a house and start an organic food garden, a non-formal school and who knows what else. The book production could go on from there, while reconnecting people to nature and working the land. Self-sustainability is still a pre-requisite.

This happening, would mean that something that started off as a business platform with liberating aspects to it would actually turn into an integral and holistic project beyond money-dependency and generating self-sufficiency, self-governance and self-empowerment.

Looking forward to the next chapters…!...By Joana Bértholo.

Useful Links
Official website.
Eloísa Cartonera at SocialDesignSite.
Conference Cartonera Publishers: Recycling Latin American Bookscapes; October 8th-9h, 2009 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Footnotes
(1) This episode was caustically called “The Curralito” and you can read more about here.
(2) Pet name they give to their workshop, short for “cartoneria“.
(3) “Mucho más que libros” is actually one of the main slogans of the project.
(4) in ” El telegrafo online“, 21 de marzo del 2009, “Literatura humilde, pero rebelde”
(5) From despair comes creation.
(6) See also www.social-sculpture.org
(7) “¿Qué es un artista? Alguien que hace lo que le gusta.”
(8) It’s hard to estimate how many cartoneros there might be, due to not being registered and all, but number point to something around 100.000 (source: Pablo Schamber, Una etnografia de los cartoneros, Editorial SB, Buenos Aires 2008).
(9) Famous venues for dancing cumbia in the Buenos Aires’s quarter of Constituición.