Ocupando Grietas

A Framework for Creatives

Ocupando Grietas (Spanish for Occupying Gaps) takes shape as a dissected publication designed for physical intervention and self-directed exploration by the user. The Ruminations canvas is a constantly actualized space to reflect, question, and participate, providing a material experience through its theoretical grounding. Through a manifesto, glossary, cartography, and booklets, the narrative strategies of Magical Realism are reframed into actionable principles. Users become co-creators of meaning by using the very tools that created the canvas to write, cut, pin, and reassemble its parts. Its materiality pays homage to the Latin American creative spirit, embracing layered perspectives. Like Magical Realism, it embraces ambiguity and interdisciplinarity to question paradigms and bridge fiction with reality, framing design as a participatory act of resistance.

A conversation between Magic and Reality

The project explores the relationship between Latin America’s lived realities and the narratives that have emerged from them. From colonial impositions to modern history, the region has often been misread through foreign eyes. Its legacy of conquest, extraction, and dependency has marked its fabric, yet it has also fueled resilience, creativity, and defiance. Within this context, Magical Realism emerged not as a fantastical retelling of history, but as a way to voice a reality too vast and paradoxical to be contained. Storytelling became for Latin American writers an act of resistance and memory. This project extends that legacy into design, reframing Magical Realism’s narrative strategies as tools to question and invite the alternative. Positioned within the critical and the speculative, Ocupando Grietas proposes design, like literature, as a discursive playground where the designer, much like the author, acts as a critical agent in shaping their context.

Negotiations of Method

Ocupando Grietas is grounded in the understanding that research is never neutral, but embedded in systems of knowledge, power, and representation. Drawing from a cross-pollination of disciplines, it questions dominant epistemologies, destabilizes fixed hierarchies, and renegotiates what is considered valid. Both in theory and form, the framework resists linearity and singularity, instead embracing intuition and creativity. Researcher and user become active participants in producing knowledge through cycles of analysis, storytelling, and reinterpretation. This process engages emotion and empathy, opening dialogue beyond academic circles and making visible implicit meaning-making. Mirroring Magical Realism, the project unfolds as affective, and reflexive, inviting alternative ways of knowing and creating.

And in the inbetweens, the no man’s land and the land of all, poems flourish from fertile ground. That space inhabited by ghostly words invites the beautiful symphony of the artist’s life.