In 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende became president of Chile. A broad alliance called Unidad Popular, composed of most of the Chilean left and center-left, backed his candidacy. Their plan was ambitious: to establish a truly democratic, socialist society in a country plagued with deep inequality of all kinds. The project relied in no small part on helping its participants, all Chilean citizens, to envision a different kind of life and country for themselves. In How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design (Lars Müller Publishers, 2024), editors Hugo Palmarola, Eden Medina, and Pedro Ignacio Alonso analyze the everyday items designed and mass-produced in this new era that promised prosperity, as well as the iconography used by Unidad Popular to foment the idea of a modern, more egalitarian Chilean society. While such a society did not come to be—Allende was deposed by a US-backed military coup in 1973—the attempt at it yielded lasting insights, both about design and about government.
POLINA GODZ:
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