camila esturilho she/her
camilaesturilho@gmail.com
camilaesturilho@gmail.com
With all my affection and consideration to this program: I will let words about experience and pragmatic [or technical] skills find their place in my curriculum and portfolio sections. In advance, I hope you enjoy reading this letter as much as enjoyed writing it.
:::
My best friend once told me she thought I hated her before we ever interacted, and I guess I can see why. This is pretty much how I look from a distance: a mean-mug, kind of a indifferent expression on my face. But to clarify, most of the time I'm just living in my own head after forgetting my glasses at home.
I have a bit of a low social battery, but I love to socialize and to be transparent about how I perceive and produce the world around me. I'm also a formally diagnosed gifted woman, with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (not OCD as many people think, is OCPD). I got that bad type of perfeccionism -not that type one talk about at a job interview, but the one that makes them go fifteen hours straight in a rabbit hole of useless utilities, without realizing is now 8am and they hadn't even eat yesterday's dinner. I love anecdotes, naming playlists and cleaning my house. I'm also a huge fan of Magic the Gathering, ceramics, travel-sized products and children pedagogy.
I'm twenty-nine, sindicalist, born in Brasil [with an S], been living in Portugal for the last six years. Moving in here just happened, really, as well as many things in my life. It might seem that I lack some kind of motivation or goal orientation, and, from the perspective of efficient results, sometimes I might do. I'm more interested in processes in between, and this is an important thing to bring to the table here: for the last thirteen years I've been working in the architecture field to pay bills. As a teenager, I just casually knocked at an architecture's firm door, with expectations of finding out if I would like to study it as a profession. Turned out, I discovered years later, being a very lazy person with a huge curiosity about pretty much everything and a necessity of surviving in this economy, is a good fit for any market.
So, the majority of my learning was through working. Till now, I've used academic spaces as recesses, where I could spend energy on theory, on politics, on everythinhg but whatever project, template or information management tasks filling my nine-to-five days and extra unpaid hours. This is why, sincerely, I am applying for this program. For the first time in many years and a burnout later, circunstamces allow me a genuine engagement with an academic space, enriched by all those years of practice.
Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist I like very much, who dedicates his work mostly to concepts of resonance and social acceleration, said that the present is a brief moment between horizons of experience and expectation. Modern technology [mainly the ones associated with velocity and efficiency in logistics, comunication and production] and the way it transforms our interaction with physical space, makes us experience time as a resource like any other product we consume, making it harder for us to trust experience and, most important, be able to create new expectations about everyday life. Mark Fisher, in the same side of the coin, argued that the future is cancelled: we cannot produce a world we cannot imagine. These two culminate, intentionally or not, on why we try to go back to retro aesthetics and why we've been expecting flying cars and immortality for at least sixty years, but are still producing, well, essentially...management styles. I can be wrong about it, yes. But I prefer to dedicate myself to imaginative labour, in a sense it becomes a fact, rather than pure value or faith. Maybe giving it another twenty-nine years unlearning, learning and unlearning again, I can subscribe a future, once more. Maybe I'll be learning and unlearning for a couple of months within this program.
Besides all this, I like being informal. I need my earplugs to sleep and I eat simply when I'm hungry. Random hours. I like to illustrate when I'm happy and to write poetry when I'm sad. I recently bought a little radio and often turn it on so I don't have to choose what to listen to. I'm always afraid of mistaking technocracy for progress, I am fascinated that passports work on trust rather than truth and I cannot cross borders without one, yet on its own it could travel the entire world. I love self-tracking everything and i leave my future self a lot of recorded notes. I take a lot of time transitioning between tasks and sometimes I lie about optimization possibilities at work: I would rather wait until these automations truly make us work less, instead of just giving us more tasks. Sérgio Ferro was right when he said that the architecture we produce must gain a new consciousness: the same labor relations will always produce pretty similiar new forms of architectures. The information management, thought, is indeed impressive in our field.
This is not randomly written, nor do I find it silly that these are the pieces of information and reflections I've chosen to share here. I don't have the self-esteem to tell you why I would be a good fit to this program and, again, not because I lack motivation, but because I lack being realistic. And to be realistic, I've heard, simply means taking too seriously the systematic threat of uncertainty and exclusion. This is precisely why I like children pedagogy: curiosity is their ultimate ordinary answer to uncertainty.
The only possible way I could finish this letter is saying that "being a very lazy person with a huge curiosity about pretty much everything", can be a good call for this.