It’s been a rough, chaotic summer in a string of rough, chaotic years, and the promise of easier times ahead hasn’t felt especially easy to come by. It’s no wonder drug overdoses have become increasingly common, fringe religions are popping off, and wellness culture has started to feel like a strange combination of the two.
The Argentinian creative art direction and design duo of Jose Bessega and Ivo Pallucchini have attempted to make a statement about our ongoing crisis of faith in a project released under their collaborative handle, AMATEUR(DOT)ROCKS. In their latest “release,” the creatives turned faith itself into an eponymous luxury product, not unlike a designer perfume named after benevolent abstract concepts like Chance or Euphoria. Faith’s dropper bottle, however, has no clear notes or ingredients listed other than a “100% ethereal ingredient,” and it’s eternally out of stock on their website. This “ULTIMATE DESIRABLE PRODUCT” comes in an almost aggressively simple design: a black tincture bottle featuring not much more than the word “Faith” printed on in pixelated, receipt-inspired black text.
Bessega and Pallucchini’s project seems to be gesturing at a timely statement on very real and strange problems of our moment. Things have felt out of control on a grand scale for a few years now— politics have been terrifying, the economy has been disastrously unpredictable, and manmade devastation rages on in mediums like war and climate collapse. As things outside of the inner sphere seem to make less and less sense, many people have tried to find a semblance of solace through the maintenance of their bodies, which the pandemic has revealed to be even more fickle and fallible than most of us might’ve previously imagined. There is something about baseline concerns like health and ease that have felt increasingly conditional in an almost religious sense, as if an uncomfortable life is the result of bad choices or behaviors. This kind of thinking is visible in Faith, and the project states its interest in these themes well with the brief but poignant opening statement on its website: “WHY IS FAITH ONLY FOR A FEW?”
