TEDxJoven@RíodelaPlata - Alberto Montt - De lo cotidiano al día a día

TEDxJoven@RíodelaPlata
Alberto Montt - From routine to 'day-to-day'
I make illustrations.
For those of you who don't know what Illustration is,
it's every image
that one creates to accompany a text
or to convey some meaning,
may it be yours or someone else's.
I've always wondered why Illustration was in my head.
And... this is the problem:
to find that thing that I had been attracted to,
that had made me what I am.
At some point that word had to be in my brain.
And I've always wondered how Illustration got into my brain.
And it turns out that we are all constantly receiving information.
From here, from there, from books, magazines, videos, from the things we eat...
But we only allow some of these things to get into our head.
What drove me crazy as a child
was the reason behind a certain person, or any of you,
retaining some things and discarding some others.
So, I would like to talk a bit about where I come from.
Because that is exactly the item that I think really important
to mention in order to understand some of this dynamics of the brain.
There are scientists in this room, and I am sure they can explain this process better than me.
But the thing is that my mother and my father got married.
They loved each other... I hope!
And I was born in Quito, Ecuador.
I am Chilean because my father is Chilean and Ecuadorian because my mother is Ecuadorian.
But well, that is another story that both nations will have to figure out.
I was born in Ecuador because, as I said, my mother is Ecuadorian...
and we lived in a very small town located in the foothills of the Andes,
which is a jungle in Ecuador. That is a rainforest area.
I lived in a sort of field where by father raised animals
and he would go to town once a week and bring me books.
We had no television, no radio.
It sounds sad, but it was amazing. We had a river, animals,
we hunted boas
and... Yes, really, we hunted boas.
I've got pictures.
It would've been better to say 'I've got boas', but no, I haven't.
So... in childhood that was my entertainment.
And my dad, he would gently go to town and bring me some magazines.
The magazines he used to bring me were, for example, El Condorito, which you must probably know
made by an illustrator called Pepo, a Chilean illustrator.
And at that time, well, that was what we had in Ecuador.
He'd bring me El Condorito and I'd make drawings, when we weren't hunting boas
And those drawings were my entertainment.
They used to leave me alone. Probably my mother would be cooking, my dad doing something else
And those were my first approaches to drawing.
And those drawings, that were the only printed thing I could have access to
I had no books or anything of the sort.
It was just that: drawings.
I was probably 4, 3, 5 years old, I don't know, I'm not sure.
And... well, I got El Condorito.
I was lucky enough that another thing that got to that town,
that was called Tandapi, it is called Tandapi...
At least the last time I checked. In Ecuador those things tend to change.
Also Ediciones de La Flor got to that town.
The things that came out from Argentina. It was an agitated time in Latin America.
There were dictatorships everywhere.
People from here running away, people from there leaving, coming, moving...
And part of these movements also entailed cultural movements.
Ediciones de La Flor, an Argentine publishing house,
had an spectacular catalogue of humor, with the greatest brains of Latin American humor
at least in my knowledge.
Among them, Quino. You all know him.
And I got to Mafalda.
in those years, Mafalda was just the stories of some kids.
I couldn't read.
Little by little, I started reading
and, well, at first... you know how it works:
you begin by trying to interpret words but concepts are always vague
and... things like this caught my attention.
I don't know if you can read
But it's one of those jokes that Mafalda had which you read,
then moved on to the next page because you hadn't understood it
and suddenly in the School of Arts
you rose up sweating in the middle of the class and said: I got it! Snob!
It happened to me. With a joke in which Manolito, you must remember...
He slips and things fall and he gets a wall dirty
and Susanita comes and ask: what are you doing? Did you fall? And he says: no, I'm doing happenings.
I couldn't understand it.
I remember laughing hysterically for half an hour during one class of art history,
being sent out of course,
and then trying to explain: look, happening, 25 years ago... well, it doesn't matter.
The thing is that those concepts that at first were just ideas slowly emerging
became a way of seeing the world.
In one way or another, Quino and some other big ones... Fontanarrosa, Caloi (it's a shame),
were my nannies and those approaches to literature and to the world.
Then I began discovering some other things by Quino which carried a high degree of opinion
and that were forgers of my view.
So then... my life came to a point where I made drawings
and in Ecuador they were used for making t-shirts for... for yankees.
I took them to a company, and the girl from the company rejected my drawing
and said: "well, I'll do you a favor, because what you've brought is similar to this..."
and she gave me a book by Gary Larson, a Yankee humorist
who is absolutely crazy, and I remember opening the book
and finding this vignette
Help... help, quack.
This blew my mind in so many levels.
Because it had no logic at all, and still it blew my mind.
Why doesn't the duck fly? How did he write 'quack'?
And I was stunned, really.
It was like: but how?! he isn't flying!
Well... time went by and I realized there was something there.
I studied Illustration (actually it wasn't Illustration, it was Design)
and, as a designer, I was always frustrated by not having the chance of doing the drawings myself
and working with them and... it got to a point where I got fed up with Design, I got fed up with Illustration itself
and I decided to open a blog. The idea came up and I said OK, this is the space where I'll find myself
and that thing which made me fall in love with what I studied.
To tell you the truth, I wasn't so much in love with what I studied.
My mum took me there because she was sick of me being home.
But I opened a blog, and this blog was a personal space,
in fact it still is.
So I told 3 friends about it because I wanted to show them what I was doing.
These silly images. Sort of a translation of what I was doing,
of what I had in my head. Well, I told my friends.
My friends told other friends and these friends told other friends.
And, obviously, not everyone liked it. Those are no longer my friends.
No, no, I have tolerance for frustration and yes, yes, many are still my friends even if they don't like it.
So, this blog, which was a place of reunion with what I loved
turned into a place of recreation and... a break for me.
A place where I began uploading images regularly
and I set up this blog, that is called... "in daily doses".
It's on the web: www.endosisdiarias.com, anyway.
The thing is that this blog started growing exponentially
and I began uploading images, and those... those images
reflect what I wanted to say,
what happened to me daily, what I wanted to talk about with other people.
I know, I know that many of you can relate to this.
Modern pharmacology can help you solve it.
And, deep down, it was becoming a little diary.
I wrote about what I found interesting, what I liked,
things that happened to people I loved or hated,
and that, you can laugh again, yes, I knew.
So, that... that space that for me at first was a place to...
Let me concentrate! I'm serious...
A place... that for me was a place of entertainment,
turned into a place of entertainment for other people.
And that was amazing, because, deep down, I found out that what had made me fall in love with illustration
and stories, also made other people fall in love with those same things.
And what struck me the most about this space
wasn't just that it allowed me to be in contact with other people
and to pour my obsessions, which are many,
but that it also gave me a voice,
that it was a space where I could,
where I could express my opinions, right?
And I think that's the most valuable thing that has happened to me professionally.
Now, in this site, which is public, I can express my opinions
and talk about what matters to me and what is happening to me,
what I want, what I wish...
So, this site, besides being a...a, how should I call it? a megaphone,
was also sort of a little diary.
I could... find myself, understand myself.
Have you noticed that when you verbalize what is happening to you, everything becomes clearer?
So it made me save a lot of money on psychoanalysis
which, any way, would've probably been, I don't know, wasted on a psychoanalyst... I don't know...
But what I mean, and I'm closing with this,
is that those ideas that were daily ideas or every a certain amount of days
and that at first looked just like a small... a small step, right?
A small meeting with oneself.
Eventually, after 7 years, that's the time the blog has been open,
they end up being a lot of ideas.
And... these many ideas, in my opinion, are what matters.
Because it may happen that a vignette, an idea, a drawing,
doesn't have much importance
But when you are constant and... and you become reflective,
it also makes you focus more on yourself and on what's going on around you.
At least that's how it was for me. It was this.
And... I hope all of you, in some way or another, make a record of your processes.
Because you never know where you'll end up, OK?
Those processes may end up in something you have never thought of.
And... I just wanted to tell you that.
Thank you very much!