Abstract

Taking the Insular Snow project as a case study, I intend to show how collaborative art and design practices can contribute to social creativity and sustainability by running counter to the innovation/tradition dichotomy. A product of the Western historical narrative, the tradition/innovation dichotomy equates Western modernity as the universal telos and, concomitantly, everything that resists its conversion—the different knowledges or cultures—as “non-modern,” and “traditional.” Within this narrative, the “modern” is conceived as the acceleration of change and the advancement in time through it, and the “traditional” as the static, or fixed in time. In this context, the tradition/innovation dichotomy fosters an atomistic view of the individual context, separate from nature and the cultural context, contributing to the naturalization of social differences and an anthropocentric view of the world, and thus being at the heart of the exploitation of people and nature. I argue that change and innovation do not necessarily imply the overcoming of the traditional by the modern. Rather, they can be seen as part of a continuous flow that feeds into the tangible and intangible cultural heritage, forming a political process of reinterpretation and creation of historical meaning.