What is the purpose of the Human Cabinet?
The Human Cabinet works with humanitarian, development, and public organizations to improve the situations of the most vulnerable populations. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s analogy that humans and societies are cabinets full of secret drawers, our work opens these hidden drawers, in the humanitarian and development contexts, promoting more effective and accountable support to communities.
The Human Cabinet is a collective of more than twenty international experts with backgrounds in humanitarian and development operations, advocacy, logistics, MEAL, water sanitation and hygiene (WASH), protection, education, mental health and psychosocial support, sport for development (S4D), and disaster risk management.
The Cabinet seeks to improve how humanitarian and development work is conducted by proposing new ways of working that go beyond systems and identifying impactful community-generated, context-specific solutions. We support the public, private, and third sectors to design coherent and effective programs and solutions to current and future challenges, placing vulnerable communities at the heart of humanitarian and development work.
We work for a world where human rights are safeguarded at the grassroots levels, and communities have the agency and decision-making power to steer their own fates.
We respect the capacities of communities and organizations by capitalizing on their invaluable knowledge and assets to enable healthy, organic humanitarian responses and development interventions.
We support communities in their paths to antifragility helping them to thrive and grow when disaster hits hardest.
We mainstream accountability across our support to our clients and communities. Unlike traditional consultancy models, where the third party does not place any stakes into the counsel it provides to clients, we take full responsibility for the success and development which occurs based on our work, recommendations, and research.
Additionally, we establish our work on realistic expectations. Our data analysis identified a recurrent pattern of unrealistic endeavours and goals we aim to address within the humanitarian and development realms.
The story behind the Human Cabinet
In 1936, Salvador Dali remade a plaster “improvement” of Venus de Milo, one of the most famous ancient sculptures in the Louvre, by introducing a series of drawers with knobs covered in ermine fur in his sculpture Venus de Milo with Drawers. Dali was deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, contending that the human body is nowadays full of secret drawers: a cabinet. This curiosity coincided with his first visual experiments on the theme of cabinets – works such as the intimately scaled Atmospheric Chair (1933), in which a small cabinet seems to give birth to a maelstrom of vaguely human body parts.
In The Anthropomorphic Cabinet (1936), Dali transformed the cabinet into a female figure, or, as he put it, an «anthropomorphic cabinet.» The female figure here is more lifelike, and unlike the Venus statue, she is depicted reclining. Her head leans forward over the partially open drawers, and her hair falls forward to obscure the face entirely.
