Meet Enea Sernesi | Designer and researcher

We had the good fortune of connecting with Enea Sernesi and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Enea, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
The short answer is curiosity. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been incredibly curious about the world around me. Growing up in an artistic and international family only fueled my passion for exploration. With my mother being Argentinian, my father being Italian, and myself being born in Italy but raised in Uruguay, I was exposed to a wide range of cultures and perspectives. I think that living between two different worlds—Uruguay and Italy—inspired me from a young age to be curious about different cultures of expression and communication. In high school, I participated a couple of times in a design competition organized by NASA, where once we won second place and got to come to the U.S. to participate in a three-day in-person competition, which was my first encounter with a design project; I even pulled my first all-nighter to finish editing. The last years of high school were also crucial, as my two closest friends and I were in the same class and had a lot of fun working together on creative projects. I remember the last year we proposed to our teacher that the final project should be a short film project because we had an idea in mind, and he accepted. That was probably the most fun I had in high school.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’m a designer, and through my formal education I was exposed to different modes of design. Probably one of the most difficult things I had to go through in my career was the process of de-idealizing the figure of the designer, and starting to question the implications of my own practice. As a result, my work is interested in how design can serve as a way of generating knowledge, as process of critical inquiry and synthesis; in this way, design can become a mode of research that creates spaces for new contextual questions, that potentially allow the emergence of bottom-up responses—even within the institution of design itself. As opposed to top-down ideas of design as “problem solving”.
In my most recent work, I’ve been working on community-based speculative futures workshops to think about alternative and empowering futures in gentrifying areas; the goal of these workshops is not to “solve gentrification,” but to subvert—at least for a few minutes—the position of powerlessness against market-driven developments, and to create space for active conversations about resistance and contestation. In this case, visual language serves as a tool to channel and visualize emotions, fears, and dissatisfaction about the future, while starting a conversation about collective alternatives.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I really like to walk and not be dependent on a car. I would probably take my boyfriend to historic neighborhoods like Downtown LA, Highland Park, and Boyle Heights. In these places we would walk through the residential areas of the neighborhood and talk about the rich and controversial history of Los Angeles as a city. On another day, I would like to visit the Huntington Gardens and the Huntington Library, as well as the Heritage Square Museum and LACMA. As for food, we would explore the food trucks in the areas we visit, and someday we might eat some Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Overall, I’m a lucky person. I’m lucky to have amazing friends who inspire me to always question myself and the world around me. I’m lucky to have amazing professors at ArtCenter College of Design who always listen to me, inspire me to be thoughtful and critical, and give me great advice.

Instagram: @eneasernesi

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enea-sernesi/

Image Credits
The people in most of these pictures are participants in the workshops, and I have their informed consent to take and send these pictures, which intentionally do not show their faces.