The Creative Circle President on Why Creativity is a Pain-Killer
The Creative Circle as an awards body has long been privy to a hunger for inclusion. Last year’s president, Chaka Sobhani set out to remove the barriers that exist in the creative arenas. This year, someone else has taken over the reins. Gabriela Scardaccione, or Gaby as she’s known to her friends and colleagues, is global chief creative officer at ScienceMagic. Gaby and Chaka have been friends since working together back in 2013. When it came time for passing the baton of Creative Circle president, Gaby was the right person for the job.
Amplifying Diversity & Expanding Creativity
“I think what I’m bringing to the Creative Circle is more diversity” says Gaby. She explains that the Creative Circle is working hard to change what the world looks like in terms of representation." Originally from Argentina, Gaby’s main goal is to bring a more expansive kind of creativity to the circle. This begins with ensuring that advertising is not the only celebrated discipline. She wants to include all other disciplines that apply creativity such as the arts, film, architecture and much more. She recognises that this is a feat that may take longer than her presidency to fully implement, but hopes to set the scene for the future in ensuring that creativity is encapsulated in ways far beyond the world of advertising. “I’m trying to use creativity to reinvent the wheel - to help clients and other disciplines to function properly in the world and to do the right thing,” she says.
Gaby is learning everyday of her presidency. She had hoped to put pen to paper and write down a manifesto long ago, but realised that her goals would be ever-evolving with the ebbs and flows of an ever-changing society and creative landscape. “It takes a while to understand the role of the president and to understand the Creative Circle as a whole. What I want to bring is the notion of integration when we think about creative ideas. The world needs more integration in terms of point of view but also in the way people behave in businesses, in real life, and in their personal lives.” Gaby’s opinion is that for many, they think diversity and inclusion has been achieved because in the final analysis of the creative execution it can be seen there - “but this diversity needs to exist at all levels of creative ventures. I want to bring about the realisation that creativity can be used in a very innovative way that achieves these goals.”
Creativity and Pain Relief
She is a firm believer that what the world needs is important messaging, more so than it needs to be sold something - “the world needs lengthening and lifting. If there is selling, we need to use our amazing community of thinkers to bring messaging to the world that matters. Sometimes brands have to be generous enough to send those messages.”
Gaby tells us that there is a great tension in the world that exists between pain and creativity. She believes in the importance of using creativity to communicate pain in order to achieve results that are authentic and true to the representation of the world in which the ideas exist. “It’s important to feel the pain of privilege and under-privilege. Being diverse, or lacking in diversity. Being black, or white. Creativity is an amazing tool for the resolution and relief of pain. It is a pain-killer of sorts,” she explains. According to Gaby, we can only resolve pain via creativity if we actually lean into it and allow ourselves to feel it - it is one of the most visceral actualistions of empathy that one can hope for.
“The world needs to be held whilst it is in pain. When you are able to connect to that pain, it is more likely that you are able to feel the joy too.” She tells us that some of the work that we as a creative community celebrates the most is actually about solving pain rather than being specifically problem based. She gives examples of phone campaigns which are focused on solving the pain of not being able to speak to a loved one. Or apps that show images of items that have been stolen from countries and positioned in museums in far away lands. These ideas are pain focused, and therefore so is the creativity that flows from it.
The perspective Gaby brings is a completely different one from what many of us may have experienced before. Often we are told to ignore pain, and instead focus on things that are more light hearted - the things that could be construed as the ‘easier’ sells. But the path to true diversity and inclusion can only be achieved by first recognising the lack, and leaning into the suffering that has been faced by virtue of it.
On a final note, Gaby tells us: “There is always pain. Pain is inevitable. What I tell my creatives at ScienceMagic is that when they see a brief, look for the pain. What I hope to bring to the Creative Circle is an understanding that true creativity, if it is willing to understand the pain and the hardships of the world, might be able to solve its problems.”
