DAMN° 76

76 / SUMMER 2020

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on the power of colour

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CONTENTS DAMN° 76

RED Intro 20 PHILIPPA SNOW Red-Hot Moments 22 GRACE MCKEEVER THE POLITICS OF POP CULTURE

It’s a Colourful Life 26 SILVIA ANNA BARRILÀ STUDIO RENS

WHITE Intro 32 EARLWYN COVINGTON Machines of Beauty 34 ANN BABE BEYOND THE PALE

Handle with Care 38 GABRIELLE KENNEDY CULTURAL CERAMICS

Redesigning Reality 46 GABRIELLE KENNEDY CHRISTIEN MEINDERTSMA

GREEN Intro 58 ZULEIKA SEDGLEY Blooming Opportunities 60 SAMUEL ILIFFE ALGAE PLATFORM

Technology’s Neverland 66 JOSH PLOUGH THE LANGUAGE OF ECOLOGY

Rem Koolhaas’ Rural Sublime 72 CRISTINA GUADALUPE GALVÁN COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE

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CONTENTS DAMN° 76

BLUE Intro 78 SOPHIE RZEPECKY Decoding Clothing 80 SARA KAUFMAN WORKWEAR

The Life Force of Things 88 SOPHIE RZEPECKY STUDIO PLASTIQUE

BLACK Intro 96 EGBERT ALEJANDRO Everything is Woven 98 GABRIELLE KENNEDY MINIA BIABIANY

The Orientation of Opinions 102 EMMA SINGLETON DISNOVATION.ORG

The Rights of Colour 106 EMMA LUCEK POLARIZED PALLETTES

The Tensions of Expanded Design 110 JOSH PLOUGH JUDITH SENG

PINK Intro 116 BRENDAN SHANAHAN The Most Abstract of All Colours 118 EDO DIJKSTERHUIS MATHIEU MEIJERS: THE ARTFUL THEORY OF PINK

Think Punk 124 CRISTINA GUADALUPE GALVÁN JULIA SCHER

Pinking Virgil: the B-side 128 EARLWYN COVINGTON VIRGIL ABLOH

Off the Spectrum 136 GABRIELLE KENNEDY FERNANDO LAPOSSE 12

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CONTENTS DAMN° 76

YELLOW Intro 142 NADINE BOTHA Lifting Spirits 144 GIOVANNA DUNMALL CAMBRIDGE CENTRAL MOSQUE – A CITY OASIS

Are You Yellow? 150 NADINE BOTHA TZE WOON CHAN: THE COLOUR OF PROTEST

Ideas as Ecosystem 154 RAJESH PUNJ NIENKE HOOGVLIET

Research & Realities Jordan Söderberg Mills Fernando Laposse Candiani Studio ThusThat Ann Demeulemeester x SERAX María Boto Ordonez Various

163 166 169 173 179 183 186

ETERNAL LIGHT AND A SPOTLESS MIRROR TOTOMOXTLE GREEN IN A BLUE WORLD THIS IS COPPER + RED MUD FAMILIAR EMOTION IN A NEW MATERIAL PRINTING MICROALGAE Products

Featured exhibition An Experience of Colour 194 ANNA WINSTON KLEUREYCK. VAN EYCK’S COLOURS IN DESIGN

A Letter from...

Nothing is as Valuable as Generosity 206 RACHEL MASON JOHN BALDESSARI

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EDITOR'S NOTE DAMN° 76

Editor's note The spring of 2020 has rocked many of us to the core. A debilitating pandemic that lead to the cancellation of many cultural events and exhibitions. The brutal killing of George Floyd after his arrest in Minneapolis spawning a more emboldened #BlackLivesMatter movement that’s gaining momentum globally.

Throughout each chapter we explore some of the myths and realities of how the application of colour in contemporary art and design both feeds and challenges these perceptions. We cover sexualty, gender and race and how colours have come to symbolize power structures of hierarchy and money.

Our expectations and sense of hope tilt towards a rise, but our wills switch between exhaustion and exhilaration with each new update. There is also the consequent action towards the removal of statues that effectively monumentalize ideology in our designed environments – a literal freeing of the air to tell a different story about the past that reflects our evolving values.

We also called on some esteemed writers to position their personal perspective on our selected colours to further highlight the cultural power of a hue. For colour is more than just a pigment.

Technically, colour is the spectral composition of visible light while pigment is the colour of a living cell - it’s art versus science, culture versus biology - yet most hilariously some from even our own circles try to own colour.

It’s always a struggle for print, but we passionately believe in fighting for its existence – for the long tactile read, for taking the time to contextualize design and art in a broader, more political picture. So we battled, the issue is finally realized, and with a lot of content that despite being mostly commissioned well before recent events, still breathes with relevance. on the power of colour explores how through time colour has been appropriated as an aesthetic and economic tool. Colour is a visual characteristic that entails choice making it necessarily political. Colour is science, it’s psychology, it’s communication. But mostly, colour is perception and nobody really knows how this works.

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Some of the articles in this issue feature designers currently showing in the KleurEyck.

Van Eyck’s Colours in Design exhibition running through till February 2021 at Design Museum Gent and then moving to Tripostal in Lille from 8 April 2021 to September, under the title Colors, etc. in co-production with Lille3000.

Curated by one of DAMN°’s publishers, Siegrid Demyttenaere, this exhibition reveals how a more experimental, less industrialized relationship with colour can fundamentally change how a design practice operates.

Will Cotton’s pink semi-naked cowboy was always slated for the cover, but given our delayed print date and world events we decided to opt for two options – also Minia Biabiany whose exhibition has just opened at Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’ La Verrière gallery in Brussels.

It felt fitting as we ready ourselves for a vital cultural shift that demands that we all start to genuinely clarify our commitments. / Gabrielle Kennedy

illustration by Olivier Heiligers olivierheiligers.nl

This issue was curated long before any of this happened – our devoted team of writers submitting work before and throughout lockdown. But with all the uncertainties and particularly the essential decision to not hold Milan Design Week this year, we were left in the lurch. Our scheduled show, Daily (un)Common Things, was sadly axed, leading to a lot of economic uncertainty.

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COLOPHON

Covers

Contributors Egbert Alejandro Ann Babe Silvia Anna Barrilà Nadine Botha Lut Clincke Earlwyn Covington Edo Dijksterhuis Giovanna Dunmall Marta Gallli Cristina Guadalupe Galván Samuel Iliffe Sara Kaufman Gabrielle Kennedy Emma Lucek Rachel Mason Grace McKeever Josh Plough Rajesh Punj Sophie Rzepecky Zuleika Sedgley Brendan Shanahan Emma Singleton Philippa Snow Anna Winston

MINIA BIABIANY, Musa Nuit at Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’ La Verrière gallery, Brussels WILL COTTON, The Taming of the Cowboy at Galerie Templon, Paris – Brussels

Detail of the installation Murmuran que el cabello es la memoria, 2017 Courtesy of the artist © Minia Biabiany

Bareback, 2019 Courtesy of Galerie Templon, Paris – Brussels

Opnions on contemporary culture DAMNmagazine.net

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allu chair, wooden table round and ceiling lamp n°5 by muller van severen

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RED

The world first met Cameron Diaz in a dress the colour of a maraschino cherry: short, as fitted to her body as a very sexy tourniquet, and bright enough to leave an after-image, it behaved less like a dress than like a statement of intent. Diaz was 21 years old when she stepped on-screen in The Mask (1994), and was not yet known for the more interesting qualities she would embody later on in her career – her screwball elasticity, her tomboy’s aptitude for grody, goofy jokes – making it easy to depict her as a perfect, pretty object of desire for the film’s more outré hero. Initially, the part was meant to go to Anna Nicole Smith, whose lifelong love of the red dress bespoke not only a desire to emulate the late Marilyn Monroe, but a familiarity with the kind of attire that female porn performers might wear to the AVN Awards. (She was busy, it turned out, appearing in Naked Gun 33 1/3, in which – a red dress apparently being too subtle for its wardrobe team – she wore black latex, hot-pink spandex, and her underwear.)

Women in red dresses are, above all else, sexy; they are exclamation points in the visual language of a movie scene, a fashion photograph, or an awards ceremony. The red carpet itself, a staple since the first Hollywood premiere in 1922, is sometimes said to have its cultural roots in Ancient Greece, thanks to the mention of a "floor of crimson broideries to spread/For the King's path” in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon. By the first full-colour broadcast of the Oscars in the Sixties, it was unthinkable that celebrities should pose on any other colour, the familiar bright shade a part of the universal vernacular of Tinseltown. Cinema buffs can now enjoy The Woman in Red (1935), The Woman in Red (1947), The Woman in Red (1984), The Girl in the Red Dress (2008), or The Woman in the Red Dress (2016). In The Matrix (1999), a woman wearing a red dress is quite literally a pre-programmed distractionary tactic in an unreal world, and in Inglourious Basterds (2009) the surviving Jewish heroine wears one to wreak revenge.

When Bette Davis’ Julie Marsden wears a red gown rather than a white one to her debut at the ball in Jezebel (1938) – “This is 1852 dumplin’, not the Dark Ages,” she purrs. “Girls don't have to simper around in white just because they're not married” – it hardly matters that the film is black and white: her rebelliousness burns the screen.

“Red,” the drag queen Lola breathes, in Kinky Boots (2005). “Red is the colour of sex!... Red is the colour of sex and fear and danger and signs that say, ‘Do. Not. Enter.’” What Lola wants are boots in blood-red and not burgundy, a statement more or less the same as Diaz’s bodycon mini-dress makes in The Mask: You should look, and you should absolutely want to touch.

A woman in a red dress, like a drag queen in red boots, is unafraid of courting the attention of the viewer, and of men in particular, even if that attention might be dangerous. A woman who wears a red dress may or may not have a pistol in her garter. She is indelible, unforgettable, and as at ease with the male gaze as she is with feminine envy. It is difficult to know whether her brightness is the luring brightness of a bird of paradise, or that of a poisonous animal. “The effect of [red] is as peculiar as its nature,” Goethe wrote in 1810. “[It is] grave and magnificent.” /

PHILIPPA SNOW 20

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Kelly LeBrock in The Woman in Red, 1984 © Photo Agency RED

22 THE POLITICS OF POP CULTURE

by GRACE MCKEEVER

Red-Hot Moments What do you consider your red-hot moments? Was it what you wore, the sex you had, the gig you went to, the banner you held on a march, the creepy boss you dethroned? Fashion, film and music thrive on them.

And when pop culture does hit the sweet spot it becomes so much more than an earworm experience, it becomes a statement. Looking at the red-hot moments of the 2010s, what do they spell for the moods and movements of 2020?

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RED Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

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t’s not just a new year. It’s a new decade.

So, what does that mean for design and pop culture? Well, art always reflects life reflects art. Design is like art, and pop culture is life. The two are symbiotic. It’s this intersection of the figuratively visual pop culture melded with the literal visuality of design that reflects the state of the people. Design takes on a mood and movement and statement, and pop culture pushes it into public consciousness. The 2010s were a time of social, political unrest around our world, which is why mainstream artful conception emulated those feelings of anger, frustration and passion through film, fashion, advertising and other facets of cultural representation.

Since pop culture-design is an evolution, to forecast the future it is instrumental to look at the past. As new as anything appears, as constantly as ‘what’s hot’ changes into something fresher, the reality is that it’s just adapting

to a new environment. Nothing is truly new; it’s a bit of history and a pinch of future. It takes the last thing that was cutting edge and it cuts some more edges off until it’s something totally different. Innovation in the pop landscape takes on the mood of the moment, the movements in society, and creates something that echoes it through objects, music, graphics, literature, you name it. That’s why it changes as quickly as society does.

During the 2010s, feminism became even more global, which is why we had watershed moments like #metoo. The reverberations of which were felt across our lives and seeped into the spheres of the sartorial world with the likes of Jameela Jamil and her suits, into film where we saw the impact of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and into music where being a bitch had the word boss amplified, loudly, before it. So let’s take a look at red hot, angry, passionate moments in pop culture through 23

THE POLITICS OF POP CULTURE Grace McKeever

design of the past decade and the meaning behind them, that will spell our mood for 2020.

FASHION

Fast forward to 2019’s Met Gala and we can behold the progress made within those 10 pivotal years, where the theme of the evening was Camp: Notes on Fashion. It was pomp, androgyny, pride and exaggeration. Though we have a long way to go in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, the fight for them over the last few years has been crucial, especially thanks to activists with such prominent platforms.

In terms of fashion in 2020, we’ll see alternatives to the long-held trope of sex appeal to reflect movements now to the fore in feminism.

We’re already seeing young women like Billie Eilish “[reinvent] pop stardom” through her image and voice, which refuses to cater to the male gaze. Goodbye patriarchal expectations. Hello edgier looks, more daring styles and condemnation of traditional standards of beauty. Green hair? Sure, it’s Behr’s colour of the year after all.

FILM The 2010s were a time where the focus was often on escapism through cinema. We need a place to escape when our cultural climate faces atrocities against humanity, such as 24

Billie Eilish

In 2010, Lady Gaga kicked off the decade by showing up to the MTV Video Music Awards in a frock covered bosom to ankle in real, red, raw meat. Frankly, we hadn’t seen something so iconic since Björk and her swan. The pop powerhouse is the politics of design in popular culture personified; this garment wasn’t just a red carpet controversy for the sake of headlines, it was a campaign for gay rights. A radical statement protesting the military’s ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy, which finally ended in 2011.

the Weinstein scandal and his consequent 23 year sentencing for sexual assault and rape, Trump’s presidency or personal data breaches. It’s why we began making more science fiction, more surrealist, more Disney live-action kind of films, and why they received so much acclaim. To make fantasy more touchable, and for the sake of a few hours, push reality away.

However the historic significance for coloured representation in cinema was resounding with the likes of Black Panther, which became the highest-grossing individual superhero film of all time and the highest-grossing film by a black director of all time. It was a movie that simultaneously achieved this need for escape, while supporting a larger movement towards acceptance and against oppression. Later this year, we’ll have the sequel to the very surreal 2018 film A Quiet Place, which features actress Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf, playing a young girl in the film who is also deaf in a supernatural world that requires silence for survival. Not only does it emphasise the struggle of deaf people, the fact that it features Sim-

RED

monds calls on Hollywood to wake up. But the societal unrest over this issue has to permeate the silver screen, which we hope to see in 2020. Cinema can still promote the sensational with CGI, AI, costumes, and faraway space odysseys, while casting in a way that better matches the diversity of reality.

Taylor Swift is the second highest-grossing artist, the highest-grossing female singer of the 2010s. Her music is relatable and she became even more so when she broke her silence on her political views in October 2018. Music is not only about what we hear. Take Swift’s 2019 video for You Need to Calm Down, in which she celebrates LGBTQ+ people and their allies through art. It’s evocative of our time where same sex couples can adopt, marry and be present more widely. Of course, the fight still isn’t over, but that’s why we need our pop culture to be present and visible and political.

Musicians even use their album art as a form of expression and a fight for acceptance; Rihanna’s album Anti released in 2016 features a child whose eyes are covered by a crown. Created by the artist Roy Nachum, the artwork is covered in braille making it more universally accessible. These real, concrete statements show a shift towards inclusion, understanding and thoughtfulness within pop culture and society in general. For the next year, and decade to come, music will forever push boundaries, not just lyrically or instrumentally, but also visually. In the last year, we’ve had many artists approach the female experience to make it accessible to everybody; Kesha, Amanda Palmer, Lizzo to name but a few of these iconic, inspirational women. The wave of expression of our history and our stories is only going to get bigger and bigger, and how we present that will get more vivid.

Anti, Rihanna, 2016, artwork by Roy Nachum

MUSIC

All this history of the last decade is why, in 2020, we project a year of taking this revolutionary state of mind a step further; an elevation from anger, rather a power in place of all the hurt, shame and frustration we had to go through in the last decade for our voices to be heard. Its landmark moments predict how we’re going forward into the next 12 months.

In 2020, pop culture’s expression through design is going to become more daring, more raw, more transformative with more velocity. Where we’ve been in the last 10 years demands it of us. Now that we have allies on the upper-tiers of society in the public eye fighting battles for equality, inclusion, diversity and justice, we need to see them expand their reach to help more minorities. We’ve got a lot further to go in terms of societal and political change, but in 2020 we want to see power in the right hands for the right reasons making the right statement through the pillars of popular culture.

It’s not just a new year. It’s not just a new decade. It’s a new crusade. / 25

26 STUDIO RENS

by SILVIA ANNA BARRILÀ

It’s a Colourful Life 26

RED ROOD BY RENS

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STUDIO RENS Silvia Anna Barrilà

It would be wrong to say that the Dutch research and design studio RENS have a completely monogamous relationship with the colour red, but they have been pretty faithful partners. Sometimes by chance, sometimes by design, in research, experiments, installations and products the colour takes on many forms: fading, reacting, illuminating, telling stories about life, culture and even death.

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hen Dutch designer duo Renee Mennen and Stefanie van Keijsteren from the Eindhoven-based studio RENS began experimenting with colour, they started with red. It was a turning point in their joint career, which began in 2008 upon graduation. Since then, colour has played a key role in their research-based practice.

As is often the case, RENS’ relationship with colour happened by chance. “We had some red dye, like the simple one you use at home to dye your clothes,” Mennen and van Keijsteren explain, “and we started playing with it: we dyed various kinds of textiles and began collecting samples from suppliers, to see how differently each fabric reacts with the tint according to the material, the original colour, and the combination of the ingredients.”

Using the same recipe, they always got different results: from carmine to scarlet, from vermilion to bordeaux, from ruby to crimson, all forming a beautiful palette. This by chance dye playing ultimately resulted in the ROOD by RENS 28

clothes collection, whereby donated garments were given the red alchemy treatment. “This experiment informed our practice,” Mennen and van Keijsteren say. “We became interested in the process more than in the end product. We like to understand the characteristics of the material and the way colours work.

We are also fascinated by how society tries to classify them, even if

at having a conversation with the visitors about the perception of the colour system and the instability of colours, which is something we (the people) seem to try to conceal, while it can be magical and beautiful.”

it is not really possible because of all the things that influence colour, such as light.”

To visualize their concept, the two designers demonstrate its applications in our homes by creating an installation composed of 30 iconic SE 07 dining chairs, designed

by Martin Visser for Spectrum in 1960, in 30 colours inspired by Jan Van Eyck’s 15th-century paintings.

Along with Spectrum, they also collaborated with Kvadrat for the fabrics and with the Light & Lighting Lab of the KU Leuven University for the lighting. Even if, at first sight, you cannot spot the different types of artificial lights, the colours are deeply affected, so much so that a green textile can appear red.

This idea of the impact of illumination on the perceived colour of objects is at the centre of one of two commissioned installations for KleurEyck, the current exhibition at the Design Museum in Gent, Belgium. “Through this work Changing Perceptions / OBJECTS we aim

“It is also interesting to observe which colours change more than others,” Mennen and van Keijsteren explain. “In every project we noticed that the red tones change much more than the blue and the green ones. Against our expectations, because it looks strong and

As is often the case, RENS’ relationship with colour happened by chance.

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Changing Perception / OBJECTS Installation in collaboration with Light & Lighting Laboratory KU Leuven, Kvadrat, Spectrum, commissioned by Design Museum Gent Photo: Filip Dujardin, Š Design Museum Gent

RED

STUDIO RENS Silvia Anna Barrilà

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RED

has strong meaning, red seems to be the weakest colour and the most difficult. For instance, in ceramics it is not possible to make a really bright red. We also did a project about fading, which results showed that red was the most faded by the sun. But this is what makes it also very beautiful”.

Red is also the protagonist of their second project, Changing Perception / ONLINE, which arose from research for the previous installation. “We were searching on the internet for a painting by Van Eyck, Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban, when we noticed that on Google Images there are thousands of variations of the same artwork. The question is: which is the real one? It is an important issue today, as people often do not go to museums to see the original painting; they see it online and take it for real. Furthermore, how does colour change the perception of the painting?” So, in collaboration with the Dutch company NLXL, they created wallpaper with different versions of the painting to question the notion of reality and perception.

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ROOD BY RENS (1/2) A clothes collection connected by the colour red.

Different shades of red, from dark to light and variable in intensity and saturation, form a beautiful palette.

Changing Perception / ONLINE (3) Wallpaper installation in collaboration with NLXL commissioned by Design Museum Gent.

Photo: Filip Dujardin, © Design Museum Gent Mourning Materialized: commisioned by the Zuiderzeemuseum Enkhuizen (4) One of the most conspicuous traditions and customs in the Zuiderzee region was the characteristic costume in times of mourning. People who had lost a loved one wore regulation colours in shades varying from deep dark blue or black immediately after the death, to red when the mourning period was concluded.

Reddish: RENS & Cor Unum Ceramics (5) Each table object was placed in liquid pigment.

From that day, it paints itself, void of any human intervention. The porosity of the material and the duration of the dye decide on the outcome. The colorant soaks into the material, draws a pattern and leaves traces.

Re-vive: RENS & DESSO (6) By using a manual dyeing process on the out-ofdate collections, the carpets are re-coloured with red dye. The interacting yarns and red dye produces new and unique colour shades every time, giving each rug its own identity and renewed creative life.

The research nearly always becomes a product. (today part of Tarkett), re-dyeing high-quality remnants and giving them a second life in their Re-vive Collection, which includes rugs and carpet tiles.

Another fruitful partnership has been with the Dutch ceramics company Cor Unum. The Reddish Collection saw RENS apply their research to ceramics and analyse how the red pigment reacts with this material. “We did not design the product, but the process,” they explain. Each object was placed in the liquid pigment and then left to paint itself without human intervention, the porosity of the material and the duration of the dye determine the outcome. The process remains active for years, and time and use will change it. “When we start something, we never think too far. We play with it and, by doing so, we go further.” /

A previous work was Mourning Materialized, commissioned by the Zuidereemuseum in Enkhuizen as part of its Outdoor Museum design route. Inspired by, and researching the history of the Dutch region of Zuiderzee and the local culture of wearing red at the end of mourning period, they created a series of tapestries dyed using traditional methods. The results acted as a visual biography to reflect the people’s life span.

As Mennen and van Keijsteren state on their website, “the research nearly always becomes a product” – even if it’s not something that comes off a production line in hundreds or thousands. Since 2014, they have collaborated several times with French carpet brand Desso

madebyrens.com KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent, Belgium, until 21 February 2021 designmuseumgent.be 31

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WHITE

I don’t feel very white. And that is precisely the point.

There are ways to feel colour (and even ways to spell it), and in all the nuances are suggested education or under-education, intuition or prejudice. The world around us is for the most part explained and even experienced as a mélange of our cultural and biological factors, which dictate our social norms as both individual and groups towards an understanding of the ‘facts’.

What is fascinating about the colour white is that there is a knee-jerk response to whether or not it even is a colour, and that depends entirely upon the viewpoint of someone else, scientist or socialist. Hard or soft. Beginning with Newton who generated astonishment with his 1704 work, Optics, he revealed that something which is seemingly colourless when passed through a prism of glass creates a spectrum of colour, and when repeated with a second prism of glass, the two combined rainbow-like spectrums produce white light. So the facts. It’s no wonder that in 1810 Goethe (Theory of Colours) would begin nudging the Newtonian point of view towards a bridge that connected science and intuition, writing about the nature, function and psychology of colours.

In 1980, somewhere in America two groups of fifth graders from two redistricted elementary schools put on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. One school based its on the 1939 MGM classic, released the same year as Gone with the Wind, the other chose to mash it up with a film called The Wiz (1978) featuring Diana Ross as Dorothy. I remember it very well because I played the Scarecrow (the Michael Jackson one). When I got to church the next Sunday, the other kids ridiculed the effort, as if there was no place like a shit-brick road of conformity.

Goethe (not Newton) would not be surprised by a society that accommodates a confessional strain of storytelling, or a PC no-offence narrative on both political curves despite the malevolence that lies in all that is left unsaid. Newtonian hard science proves that white contains all wavelengths of light, and Goethean soft Romanticism says that darkness isn’t just the absence of light, but an active ingredient, which means any life is one where the sum of all colours meet. This fact is the one-and-only colour of human otherness, the white that makes up the prism of 7.6 billion humans and leads us to a more considered tomorrow. /

EARLWYN COVINGTON 32

Cosmetic Surgery Kingdom, faces, Bora Hong, 2015 - ongoing

On my birth certificate from the State of Georgia (US), there is a block titled ‘race’ that had been dutifully written ‘White’ (capital W). Neither Goethe nor Newton would be surprised that this statistical quantification exists, but strangely enough, it is the very point where design and colour theory meet. What it claims to not imply is the century-ever class categorization that begins with this couching of a statistical outlay at birth, which in turn becomes a life-long curious stigmatization of White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Other, Blank, and Unknown, which we all know is just false. As recently as a few months ago, Barnes & Noble teamed up with Penguin Random House in an ever-hopeful call to diversity by releasing ‘diverse editions’ of classic novels with people of colour on the cover. That pissed off everybody. The ad agency apologized pulled the campaign and excused this epic fail.

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34 BEYOND THE PALE

by ANN BABE

“Just being white, you will win.” These words make perfect sense – if you are a white supremacist.

However, they come from the marketing of Korean skin-whitening products. A multi-billion industry, South Korea is considered the ‘Cosmetic Surgery Kingdom’ and its colonial pale hangover is still aggressively sold to women. But can the system be hacked so women have control of their own bodies?

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Cosmetic Surgery Kingdom, Bora Hong, 2015-ongoing Photo: Femke Rijerman

Machines of Beauty

35 WHITE

BEYOND THE PALE Ann Babe

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n South Korea, the new year couldn’t come fast enough for some women’s rights proponents, who are eyeing – restlessly, optimistically – what the 2020s will have in store for the movement. Despite a handful of major wins in 2019, among them the Supreme Court ruling to overturn the national abortion ban, feminism has, even in the nascent era of #metoo, #escapethecorset and #nomarriage, been relegated mostly to the margins of this deeply gender-unequal society, as an extremist campaign unfairly discriminating against men.

Now, in the coming decade, women’s rights activists are hoping they can bring feminism to the forefront, toppling oppressive structures and, finally, rewriting misogynistic systems.

Already in 2020, the nation’s first-ever feminist party has entered the political fray, launching on International Women’s Day at the beginning of March. And around the bend, in 2022, another development that, on its surface, would be easy to discount as shallow, will take effect. By 2022, in response to a widespread call from women, the Seoul Metro will ban all plastic surgery ads from the capital’s subway stations, removing the floorto-ceiling displays that so commonly flank transit walkways and stairways, and prohibiting the sales of more in the future. In a country where aesthetics are everything, this is no small victory. These ads, which inundate commuters with the image of the so-called ideal Korean woman – sometimes pictured, for effect, alongside her former, inferior self – are perhaps the best representation of the worst, most damaging standards.

It is this imagery, along with that put forward by the country’s makeup, skincare, K-pop and K-drama industries, that show why South Korea is the Cosmetic Surgery Kingdom, as artist Bora Hong calls it in her titular project that started in 2015.

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In one part, Hong’s ongoing project compares plastic surgery to chair design, examining whether the pursuit of ‘being better’ can actually be regarded as ‘good design’. Another part sees her markup and cut up photographs of her own face. “Ultimately, Cosmetic Surgery Kingdom questions the meaning of cosmetic surgery, and how modifying an individual’s body also transforms their originality and freedom,” the project declares. For viewers, these graphic alterations are additions that feel more like subtractions, posing the query: what is lost to capitalism in a kingdom like this, which reduces citizens to a mass of consumers who are pressured to buy anything, even if they can’t afford it, in order to be beautiful.

For women, the burden to be beautiful is all consuming, and never-ending. It entails more extreme ‘fixes’ like surgery, yes, but also five(or even 15) step skincare routines; facial contraptions to coax coveted ‘v-line’ jawlines; double-eyelid tapes, glues and strings; Botox; laser and electrotherapy; collagen injections to plump not only lips but also the area underneath the eyes for a babyish ‘cute fat’ look; massages for lifting and firming the cheeks; LASIK and contact lenses; and eyelash extensions. The list goes on.

Yet, despite South Korea’s infinite inventory of beautifiers, inversely and perversely, its conception of what constitutes beauty is decidedly singular: small face, big eyes, pale and opalescent skin. The obsession with paleness reflects not only an archaic social prejudice that connects darker skin to rural workers and poverty, but also, as some have pointed out, the enduring legacy of colonialism. This is the war waged, as effectively through othering ideologies as through heavy artillery, and the traumas it buried into the Korean identity, both individual and collective, that linger to

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this day. But it cannot be ignored that the discrimination withstood was, in some ways, also absorbed and then perpetuated by Koreans and towards Koreans as well as others.

The superiority associated with whiteness is what makes skin in South Korea no mere fleshy organ, but a woman’s most important asset and investment, and the ultimate commodity. It denotes worth, privilege, and status.

It is a symbol of purchasing power and social reach, or at least the potential thereof. A light complexion is sought after via toners, essences, serums and creams, sunscreens, tablets and even reverse tanning. When achieved, it makes a statement as strong as any designer gown or diamond necklace.

In her exhibitions Universal Skin Salvation (all works, 2018) at the Knockdown Centre in New York, and Universal Skin Salvation: 2.0 at Princeton University in New Jersey, Korean American artist Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin examines the skincare regimen as an aspirational journey. Her interactive installation focuses on lactic acid, the bacterial compound present in some fermented foods (including kimchi) but leveraged as a skin-whitening agent by the K-beauty industry. By applying Shin’s custom K-beauty products, viewers can “test the limits of their skin as a site of experimentation”.

That an aesthetic can be constructed by way of a daily routine – step by step, layer by layer, morning and night – speaks to why transformation, even if hard earned and incremental, has mass appeal. And that the ritual should be carried out in perpetuity if it has any hope of imparting real results, reminds us that when it comes to transforming oneself, the allure, not the actualization, is enough to make sales.

It helps that the allure is also created by way of promises, no matter how false and toxic (both physiologically by way of chemicals and

emotionally by way of messaging) they actually are. For the forthcoming The Beauty of the Beauty Industry exhibition, which will take place later this year in Bangkok, Hong studied the terminology used to promote Korean and Korean-influenced whitening products and procedures in Thailand. By looking at their marketing, including package design, online ads and video ads, she noted some patterns: words one might expect, like the dramatic descriptors of ‘pure’ and ‘action!’ and even the objectifying ones that talk of ‘repairing’ human faces and bodies as if they were things at a shop. But then also this: “Just being white, you will win.”

The women who demanded that plastic surgery ads be removed from Seoul’s subways recognized the problem of beauty marketing.

Marketing is not just marketing; marketing is a mechanism. “Advertisements that sexually objectify and commercialize women are uncomfortable to look at. Please do not authorize advertisements that reject gender equality,” one complaint to the Seoul Metro said.

Indeed, ad imagery used to manufacture selfblame within women – who are made to believe their only value lies in their appearance, and that to be accepted as valuable, she must spurn who she is and submit to someone else’s standards – does reject gender equality. And in doing so, everywhere and ad nauseam, such imagery shows us, day in day out, how a multi-billion dollar industry is tying the patriarchy to a country’s economic success. For the women facing this machine, it can feel like they have little true agency or choice. But can the machine be hacked? Can it be broken?

Women and their allies, in the realm of art and in every other, are working to find out. / borahongwork.com jaeyeonshin.com 37

38 CREATIVE RESIDENCY ARITA

by GABRIELLE KENNEDY

Bird's-eye view of Arita, photo: Kenta Hasegawa

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CREATIVE RESIDENCY ARITA Gabrielle Kennedy

Just looking at some ‘fast’ objects seems to make chips and cracks appear before you eyes. But if you can afford to pay more, the added value to you and the maker creates a whole different ecosystem. The knowledge, skills and crafting of ceramics is embedded in the Japanese town of Arita – but their existence is fragile. One way to counter this has been a residency programme that teams up international designers with the local artisans.

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In Arita centuries of dedication to the art of ceramics is in jeopardy, unable to withstand competition from easy-access mass production. Theirs is an industry of quiet humility – locally sourced raw materials, locally trained artisans and craftspeople committed to producing. For 400 year they have only been making local designs.

But while Arita – the birthplace of Japanese ceramics – has always been a very specific and elite, local production, that thinking was only ever limited to how products were made.

Never were the wares solely destined to local markets. Even when Japan was a faraway, mysterious and closed off archipelago, barred by the emperor from trade or relations with Europe, special arrangements were made to sail Arita ceramics across the Indian Ocean to its European aristocratic collectors.

That trade was always via the Netherlands with the notorious VOC company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie/Dutch East India Company). It’s a little bit puzzling why centuries later and with globalization blurring boundaries and obscuring relations, the relationship

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between Japan and the Netherlands defies the odds and stays strong.

“I think history plays an important role,” says Thomas Eyck, a highly regarded Dutch design distributor.

“Objects get more ‘reason to exist’ when they refer to former times.

The Holland-Japan connection is a very old trade connection, and especially the Japanese like tradition, which explains some of this.”

“I also think Dutch people like the story,” says Yoriko Ishizawa, programme director of Creative Residency Arita. “Both countries like the attention it brings.”

The big difference between then and now of course is that society – more urban, more nuclear – has a different relationship with ceramics. We are more materialistic than ever, but our status symbols have changed. Owning fine dining accoutrement is no longer as de rigueur for the wealthy as it once was.

“People have access to everything these days,” says ceramicist Mr. Setoguchi, who has been potting at the Sehyou & Co. Ltd factory for 40 years. “There is so much choice,

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Tijmen Smeulders, UTSUÀ glazing

Tijmen Smeulders, UTSUÀ carafe

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CREATIVE RESIDENCY ARITA Gabrielle Kennedy

making the cultural value of Arita wares less important, especially given their higher price.”

It costs €1,99 for an off-white Vardagen main course plate from IKEA. For a set of four of the more rustic looking Gladelig plates, it costs €12,95. The average price for a plate made in an Arita factory is €35.

The maddening reality is that these numbers although once upon a time irrelevant, today make a difference.

And it's the domino affect of these shrinking markets that threatens the very survival of Arita ceramics.

The diminishing commercial appeal makes it harder to drag marketing, communication and distribution systems in line with international competition. In its heyday there were 200 ceramics factories in Arita. Today there are just 120 and if any more shut down, even justifying the mines becomes questionable.

“Design fairs like in Milan and Dubai are important and financially interesting if the distribution & communication are well arranged,” says Eyck. “I am always surprised by Japanese companies.

They show beautiful collections, but without any commercial follow-up. I know some companies in Arita that have exhibited in Europe but only sell their collections in Japan. How they survive, I don’t understand.”

The biggest sting for many factories is that to prove their cultural worth, they must survive economically.

But unfortunately a market economy mostly fails to recognize the allaround superiority of what is being created in Arita.

Arita ceramics are porcelain – made from pure and fine white amakusa clay mined from the mountains 42

of the Kumamoto Prefecture. “The unique white-grey colour is a specific characteristic,” says Carole Baijings from Scholten & Baijings – one of the first European designers to make a mark in Arita.

This unique material plus the skills and craftsmanship of the local potters make the wares created there unbeatable. “It is not just their individual skills,” says Eyck. “It is the combination of all the different specialties that one can find in Arita – making moulds, glazing techniques, casting clay. Because the whole porcelain history started there, the local knowledge is amazing.”

The biggest sting for many factories is that to prove their cultural worth, they must survive economically.

“Arita has perfected the ideal combination between mass production and traditional crafts, like nowhere else in the world,” adds Baijings.

Scholten & Baijings' success paved the way for other designers like Aliki van der Kruijs, Bas van Beek, Tijmen Smeulders, Floris Wubben, Dimitri Bähler, and Antye Guenther. They all found a spot in Arita via the Creative Residency Arita programme.

The residency, directed by Ishizawa, was launched five years ago and is one of the most interesting initiatives to bolster local industry. In it, two artists and two designers are invited each year from Europe to stay in Arita and work on a project in collaboration with an experienced potter. The platform gets funding from the Dutch Stimuleringsfonds,

the Dutch Mondriaan Foundation as well as the local Saga Prefecture in Japan.

“The Dutch have stayed invested in the residency for so long because it comes via a cultural body that understands well the point,” says Ishizawa. “The problem at my end in Japan is that it all depends on mainstream political support and every time we get a new mayor, funding depends on if he or she feels to continue. So far we have had a lot of luck and interest, but with the incoming government it is hard to say if they will want to keep it going. It gets complicated because the economic impact of cultural initiatives is never immediate. Some local stakeholders understand that, but the vast majority do not have the capacity to see the importance of the creative industries.”

That culture sits at the mercy of the personal interests of those in political power, speaks volumes of the sort of world we live in today.

“Our reality is that the people managing these sorts of decisions don't have much passion for it,” says Ishizawa. “They have to do it because they inherited it, but they don’t really feel or crave its importance.”

The Arita ceramics industry itself does believe in it and the results have attracted both cultural and commercial attention. Scholten & Baijings really made the most of their time and connection there.

Acting as creative directors with Teruhiro Yanagihara they developed the porcelain brand 2016/, which teamed up 16 international designers with local artisans – a venture that proved so successful that the works continue to be sold.

Another Dutch designer, Tijmen Smeulders, also developed a brand

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Work of Denis Guidone, the latest participant in the residency, photos: Remco Vrolijk

Sehyo Kiln

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Scenes from Arita, photos: Kenta Hasegawa

CREATIVE RESIDENCY ARITA Gabrielle Kennedy

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out of his residency with trading company Marubun. UTSUÀ is thus far a collection of 11 functional table objects and was released last year in Milan at Rossana Orlandi Gallery. As per Eyck’s observation, that brand is currently exclusively sold in Japan.

“For this collection I collaborated with the artisans at Kawazoe Seizan, a potting factory specializing in Celadon glazing, but also regarded for their precision in bigger production runs,” says Smeulders. “In this work I tried to bridge the gap between Japanese craftsmanship and cutting- edge technology, so we used 3D printing to prototype and CNC milling to make the most accurate moulds possible.”

The most recent Arita resident is Denis Guidone, who incidentally had to stay in Japan due to Covid-19.

Like Smeulders, he sees Arita’s future linked to its embrace of new technologies. “I think craftsmanship and industrial design have never before been so close as now,” he says.

“This is a new opportunity for the region and where I see its future.”

For Guidone it is also about shifting perspectives. “I really think that creativity can be stronger when the designer encounters a different culture and philosophy. I wanted to go to Japan to put some distance between my cultural background and myself. Its like (Martin) Heidegger said: if we see things too close we are not able to see much at all.”

In Arita, Guidone designed a series of tableware objects inspired by the concept of ‘affordance’, referring to those physical qualities of an object that hint at how best to manipulate and use it. The shapes of the functional table objects create an asymmetry, which double as a way to hold and manipulate it to avoid problems like hygiene concerns and extreme temperatures. There

is also a lamp, made from porcelain with a high glass content that emphasizes light and shadow.

“It’s the pairings that make the residencies so successful,” explains Ishizawa. “The artisans are skilled and they know their material, but when they are paired with European designers and artists everyone’s boundaries are pushed. They all achieve more than what they thought was possible.

“I’ve worked with several materials and producers in the past but this really was something else,” says Smeulders. “Working for three months with one material in a small town that breathes and dreams about porcelain created a hyper focus. Seeing the working hands, the beautiful tools, dusty workshops, pigments, talking with the potters and listening to their stories has been so influential to my practice.”

Because when it really comes to specific and more complicated projects, the designers don't have the skills, but the artisans don't have the vision. “Together they can really do something new,” says Ishizawa.

The hope is that by giving Arita porcelain an added layer of value, the pieces become interesting to a new audience. “I believe that valuable items are still worth making,” says Eyck. “I believe that it is not the material, but the design and craftsmanship that defines what is ‘valuable’ anyway. Indeed there are fewer people buying a 65-part service set these days. It is not the trend anymore, but I do see a shift to more unique and well-made items.”

And more recently other companies are pursuing collaborations with some of the Arita potters, like Muji and HAY. These really help factories to stay afloat. “Ideally factories can get a contract with a bigger company that gives them access to

a larger market as well as smaller special edition contracts with individual designers,” says Ishizawa.

“It is the combination that ends up working well. It keeps the ideas flowing which later helps to garner more commercial work.”

When Scholten & Baijings developed their Paper Porcelain range for HAY, the company apparently took the idea to China. “The first prototype arrived: thin, refined, and including all the cutting lines of the cardboard model,” says Baijings, “but only in lily white. It seems in China they have large magnets hanging above the porcelain, to make sure that not a single speck of dust gets in. Normally speaking, a clever idea, but of course, in this case it didn’t work at all. The colour of the next attempt was beige/grey, and there was indeed dirt in the porcelain, but now big spots, almost lumps, and the structure felt really coarse on your hands. No way would you want to drink from that cup.”

In the end to get the necessary finish the project had to be made in Arita because even when a mould is used, the process and finishing have a human touch and the glazing is done at hotter than usual temperatures.

This is very different to the very commercial work being produced in large Chinese factories that are all machine made. “You can’t compare the products of the two countries,” says Baijings. “So far, my experience has been that if no one can make it, Arita can, specifically when it comes to (mass) production.” /

cri-arita.com @creativeresidency.arita utsua-arita.jp 2016arita.jp 45

46 CHRISTIEN MEINDERTSMA

by GABRIELLE KENNEDY

Christien Meindertsma defies all trends and at a time when design becomes more and more institutionalized she stays obstinately free and single, letting her instincts and personal experiences inform and guide her positions.

So while her work is always political, it’s a modest form of politics removed from the swell of woke movements that struggle to truly dent the status quo.

All images by Samira Kafala, except installation view

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Redesigning Reality

CHRISTIEN MEINDERTSMA Gabrielle Kennedy

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n 2010, designer Christien Meindertsma bought 10,000kg of flax from a farmer in the Dutch Flevopolder (a region of reclaimed land) by matching an offer of €3,200 from a Chinese company. Today, 90% of European flax heads straight to China. “If you have too little of any material, you can’t really make a dent in the industrial process,” she explains of her ongoing commitment to make everyday objects that have a cost and value that are more closely aligned. By buying the crop she had enough to pursue a proper material investigation plus produce a product for the market.

Meindertsma trained at Design Academy Eindhoven, graduating in 2003. It was an era when students were less focused on the politics of the Institute, and more on simply designing.

“It was really hard work there,” she says smiling. “I remember Matthieu Meijer’s colour classes. We would paint all night using different combinations until our sight changed. We didn’t sleep before presentations.

Then sometimes the next day Matthieu would come in and say it was all totally horrendous. But that was art school education back then and the more open and naïve you were, the better it worked. It was hard, frantic, adventurous, completely overwhelming, but also a playful preparation for the real world.”

Plus the work ethic acquired there stuck – the high demands for exactness, ideas and beauty characterize Meindertsma’s practice today.

“In one class we had to start with square pieces of white paper and make architectural sequences” she says. “The lines had to be dead straight and that is really hard. Still today, every time I am folding and cutting paper I think about this class and that the cut has to be perfect.”

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Meindertsma rails at the more institutional attitude in art and design education today. “The coaching is cleaner, more careful and the words and consequently the ideas more controlled and filtered.”

For her graduation project Checked Baggage, Meindertsma conducted research at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam in the nervous months after 9/11 to discern at what point one becomes safer. “Everything that is confiscated at check-in is later sold off,” she explains. “I went to one of the auctions and for 800 guilders bought a whole shipment.

“It was so much money for me at the time and I felt quite ashamed,” she continues. “I just had this feeling

that my thinking and my approach to design could amount to something. Nobody knew what I was doing, but I was trying to show how strange it all was and thought that using what existed was better than designing something new. So I collated and indexed all the findings and made a book.”

Over the years and with subsequent projects she perfected this sort of methodology as a research strategy. And for her, research was design – the two lived together, enmeshed in an inseparable marriage. One becoming the other.

People started calling it ‘documentary design’. Now it doesn’t need a name – it is how many designers

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“I am always trying to say something, it is most often about materials.

I want people to connect and to feel the transparency in my work.”

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design. One might say Meindertsma was instrumental in normalizing this, but she modestly plays down the suggestion. “I just like to have an open and non-judgmental way to work,” she says. “I wasn't even sure myself when I started down this path. There was just something about the categorizing of objects removed from their contexts that brought me closer to their owners.”

What Meindertsma is describing is how a broader positioning of design can be a way of understanding and making sense of the material world and its social connections.

“To me one storyline feels like one opinion,” she says, “and I like to work in layers. I want the process to always be visible, but always in an artistic way.”

For One Sheep Sweater she produced knitted garments, each made from the wool of a single Welsh sheep and for Tree Track she made a wooden train track from an entire Dutch beech tree.

Then there was PIG 05049, a book she made to index all the possible uses of pig parts from candies to paper and cosmetics. For another publication, Bottom Ash Observatory, she filtered 25kg of ash left behind after waste combustion into separate materials like glass, steel, zinc, copper, and silver.

The recurring process is to collect, sift, isolate, and analyse. It is as if by zooming in on a single element Meindertsma gets more acquainted with the broader material landscape.

In the last few years Meindertsma moved back to the Betuwe countryside where she grew up. “I swam in the summer and skated in the winter on that lake over there,” she says, pointing to an impossibly picturesque stretch of water surrounded by weeping willows. In the closest village there is a motorbike store, a florist, and a baker.

In her sun-drenched studio, it’s her material research that dominates – oak, bone china, flax, textiles, colours, samples, and prototypes.

Sitting in the centre is the best example of an object that boasts everything Meindertsma represents as a designer – the Flax Chair.

Designed in 2014, it was a collaboration with natural fibre specialist Enkev and initiated by Label/ Breed. As a limited edition it cost €600 a piece, and it exemplifies her drive to embed material re-

search in an end product sold at a price that stays fairly and accurately to its value.

Of course, the issue is that the everyday object and furniture market relies on a harsh and globalized business model. It’s fast, it’s big and it requires participation in a closed system that tolerates limited effective rebellion.

Her very real humility means the conversation stops there, but her eyes dash across towards her various flax products, a lot of which have been copied and then mass-produced to be sold relatively cheaply.

In collaboration with Dutch rope maker Touwslagerij Steenbergen, for example, she made a collection of chandeliers from flax rope that have been heavily ripped off albeit in different materials – turning a heavily researched aesthetic into a cheap(ish) product that looks like hers minus the stories she is focused on telling and sharing.

“I am always trying to say something,” she says. “It is most often about materials. I want people to connect and to feel the transparency in my work.”

For most of the products that make daily life possible, much is hidden and closed source. The systems are impenetrable to the point where we lose all intellectual and emotional connection to how things work.

Meindertsma’s politics is almost always made clear in the work – it is clear that she would never work with factory-farmed pigs. It’s also clear that she derides the disassociation too many people have with the toils that go on behind the scenes to make our lives possible.

For the KleurEyck exhibition in Design Museum Gent, which will travel to Lille at the end of spring next year, Meindertsma is showing Fibre Market. A research project she did 51

CHRISTIEN MEINDERTSMA Gabrielle Kennedy

together with Wieland Textiles and Valvan Baling, it uses the Fibre Sort Machine that efficiently and accurately scans and sorts clothes based on yarn type. The concept was to cross check 1000 labels on jumpers that show what percentage of wool is used. The finding, which you may or may not be surprised by, was that almost none of the garments from the various brands tested were really made from the wool percentages stated on the labels, but rather a blend of different yarn types. After sorting, the sweaters are shredded into fibre, ready to become something new.

Also exhibited is Donegal Tweed, a project borne out the Fibre Market. Irish Donegal tweed is typically adorned with tiny coloured flecks.

Historically this was a process developed to make the most of the scarcity of colourful yarns – peppering them throughout a textile for decorative effect. Meindertsma instead used the leftover colour-sorted yarns from Fibre Market to make the flecks.

In 16th-century Holland a linen cupboard was used to position a household’s wealth right alongside its stash of gold and porcelain. Back then, textiles were mostly wool or linen because sheep and flax did well in the climate that stretched from France, across Belgium, and into the Netherlands. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the UK that cotton really took over – the new machines manufactured cotton brought across from the colonies at unto then unprecedented speed.

really needs a client equally committed to the sorts of reforms that interest her. “And companies don’t want anything too difficult,” she says, “even when they agree that it matters, they have to work to deadlines. They need to communicate, and obviously it all has to end in a profit.”

“Cotton is much easier to spin and work with,” Meindertsma explains, “but it also needs an enormous amount of water to grow so the agricultural practices are much harsher on the environment.

The fully biodegradable Flax chair was done for Label/Breed. The Flax tea towels – embroidered with maps of the European flax region – are distributed through Thomas Eyck and sell for €38, a difficult price point.

To successfully merge research and product design, Meindertsma

“Of course H&M and IKEA can do it cheaper,” Meindertsma says, “but

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this is an honest price. This is how much it costs to design, make and distribute locally without that horrible gap between what things actually cost to produce and what people are paying in cheap stores. It's a huge problem for us all, for designers, for the environment, especially when you consider that from that €38 nobody is making very much money.”

Meindertsma wants to stay independent and works with no assistants or interns. “I like my company to stay small, light, and flexible. I like to have space to wonder around in the research and to allow myself to take detours,” she says. “It

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Fibre Market (detail) / Photo: Mathijs Labadie and Roel van Tour

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CHRISTIEN MEINDERTSMA Gabrielle Kennedy

works because all projects are collaborations, so I never really work alone, and it is important to me to work in a horizontal way.”

How people valued linen in the 16th century was more closely aligned to its actual value. “I don't want my work to be pointing fingers or blame,” she says. “I also have kids and have to dress them, so I understand well that it is almost impossible to step out of reality.”

But surely it's the responsibility of designers to be making at minimum a dent in that reality. Because someone in the capitalist model has to step it up to change the course.

“Exactly,” Meindertsma asserts.

“Only 250 of my Flax Chairs were produced. It is about redesigning reality. But a chair is an industrial product, and to have the infrastructure the company needs to be a certain size. Now my chair is moving towards a bigger producer that can make the numbers, but the possibilities to do it this way are few.”

And on whether this approach and results is art or design? “I don't like it when people call it art,” Meindertsma says. “Personally I find the highest possible goal is to make objects that are a part of real life. To do a really good job at just that is hard enough.”

Meindertsma’s next project has been heavily delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ten artists were asked to explore typical craft techniques from 1620, when the first pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower to the USA. “I guess I was asked because there were some British people who came from Leiden, a small town in the Netherlands, on that ship,” she says. “I am doing a collaborative project with Elizabeth James Perry, an American 56

“Properly focusing on what is wrong with the production chain is hard because it requires making different decisions that are more about taking care of people and land, it would mean paying fairly for materials and finished products, and most importantly making and consuming much less.” artist and member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe. Her product is a beautiful cuff made with traditional beads made from shell and glass beads.

“Of course you have to be very careful with this kind of collaboration,” she continues. “Anything you do or say is probably insensitive. There is no getting it right because so much of it has already gone wrong in history. But I do think it is important to do projects where your own way of seeing things is challenged and where you are forced to be open, to learn from others with different perspectives, even if that is risky.”

The interactions with the other artists involved have made Meindertsma reflect very personally on her Dutchness. “In early conversations I kept thinking and occasionally saying how my own ancestry doesn't interest me that much,” she says. “I was struck by how everyone told me how Dutch and privileged that was in itself, and how it goes hand in hand with how assertive we can be in the Netherlands. [As a Native American] Elizabeth James Perry told me that her people prefer to preserve their culture to winning. This comment really hit me.

“I have always striven for total transparency,” she continues, “because I thought that was what would

make the world a better place, but I have also come to understand that people can benefit from a lack of transparency too.”

Because the truth behind the commercial system is a blend of murky and complex. Too often it’s easier to just not know. “Properly focusing on what is wrong with the production chain is hard because it requires making different decisions that are more about taking care of people and land,” Meindertsma concludes. “It would mean paying fairly for materials and finished products, and most importantly making and consuming much less.” /

christienmeindertsma.com KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent, Belgium, until 21 February 2021 designmuseumgent.be @samirakafala www.samirakafala.com

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GREEN

Green could be seen as the Pollyanna of colours. The shade of choice for overly earnest environmental charities or overly positive hippies – the colour that just wants everything to be okay. But there’s more to green than tree hugging and hemp loving. Green represents all parts of life, good and bad, and when you put that all together, it packs a mighty punch.

Let’s start with the basics. Green is what’s good for us; its delicious morsels keep us strong and healthy, and do so without the need to sacrifice another living being. It’s the colour of fertility, telling us when spring has sprung, and that perhaps we should get springing too. It’s the colour of growth. Its presence, or lack thereof, tells us what time of year it is, how much rain we’ve had, or how much fire has taken away. Vast and mighty, growth green is our most precious resource, and also the most threatened. Why? Because of a whole other bunch of greens.

There’s military green. A hard, aggressive green that tears through land in the name of power, and leaves lifeless rubble in its wake. There’s nuclear green. A terrifying, sickly green that shows that we’ll stop at nothing to demonstrate our dominance. There’s money green. The green that makes the world go round, baby. The green that we dedicate almost all our waking hours to. The green that’s one letter away from greed. The green we earn and spend mindlessly at the expense of other people and our planet. And there’s envy green. The green that tells us what we need to ‘have’ to be successful, and that we can never ‘have’ enough. The fuel for our consumption addiction that endures even though it supercharges climate change and human suffering.

Now I know that’s a lot to put on green. But I also know that we’re in a climate emergency, and how we approach green is kind of the biggest deal. If we want to move towards a better future that is just and sustainable, then we need to give green a makeover. We need green to be more than things the world gives us, and more what we take away from it. We need green to mean action. It’s no surprise that I’ve come to this conclusion. After all, I work at an environmental public service called Do the Green Thing that uses creativity to tackle climate change. At Do the Green Thing, we do all we can to bring people’s attention to the unsustainable status quo. But we’re only a tiny part of a much bigger movement.

Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, Luisa Neubauer, Isabelle Axelsson, Loukina Tille, Xiye Bastida, Kevin J. Patel. Awe-inspiring young advocates for our planet who are transforming green into a booming rallying cry, a collective cause that we all need to gather around.

That’s the kind of green I want. Shut up and listen green. Radical change is possible green.

Do something now green. Because green isn’t the sweet stoner passing around a spliff at a psytrance rave. Or luscious forests that only exist for our pleasure. Or the billionaire earning more a day than everyone else will in a year. In the battle for our future, green is the most powerful weapon we’ve got. /

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Sleeping Mosswoman with Ghost, 2015, Kim Simonsson, 2015 Photo courtesy of Jason Jacques gallery

60 ALGAE PLATFORM

by SAMUEL ILIFFE

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Blooming Opportunities For hundreds of years industry has experimented with algae as a material but with limited success.

Can designers possibly change that?

Since 2017, Atelier Luma has been busy researching answers to that with its Algae Platform, which recently extended to London in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts. There some exciting potentials for algae in the city’s complicated waste management programmes have been discovered.

Atelier Luma Photo @ Victor Picon

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ALGAE PLATFORM Samuel Iliffe

Yet within a couple of miles of the Canal, cutting-edge research on algae is showing its potential in delivering drugs, fuel and electrical energy, and its ability to suck carbon dioxide and pollutants out of the air and water while growing.

It is difficult to define algae – it is a haphazard group with members in every taxonomic kingdom other than animalia. For the most part they can grow using sunlight, but some do not. They mostly grow in water, but some do not. Earning the name ‘extremophiles’, some species live in conditions almost no other organisms can. We owe it to them for making the earth’s atmosphere habitable. Humans have used algae for thousands of years. Our many uses fall into two categories: the benefits of algae while it is growing (it filters pollutants out of the air and can filter wastewater, and it can do this with energy we do not provide), and the benefits of the harvested algae (a supermarket of useful products for many areas of our lives).

Historically the use of algae has been the latter, the useful products taken from algae. As with any resource their use is dependent on supply, quality, and cost of extraction. In the 1700s kelp, a type of seaweed or macroalgae, was used in the making of glass and soap. This low-quality resource ballooned in price when supply of better quality barilla ash was cut off during the Napoleonic 62

Wars. When those ended and trade reopened, cheaper and better quality barilla soda crashed the market for kelp ash. Most of the people working in the highlands of Scotland making this kelp ash were driven out to be replaced by animal farming, and the kelp ash industry was virtually finished by the 20th century.

More recently, America turned to algae to make fuel. American oil prices spiked during the 1970s after tensions with the Middle East.

In a bid to stop relying on oil, the Aquatics Research Programme made biofuel from algae. However a combination of tensions cooling down, which lowered prices of oil, and the fact that the Programme failed to produce algae oil anywhere near the quantity demanded, meant that by the 1990s it lost its funding and was closed down.

Where previous attempts at making biofuel from algae have failed, the University of Greenwich aims to stand apart. Its project, the D-Factory, turns microalgae (Dunaliella salina) into an assortment of valuable products as well as fuel, in the hopes of splitting the capital costs. Over at Imperial College London, Marin Sawa and others have reduced the boundary to mass-producing batteries from algae. The algae produce electricity by photosynthesizing in the light and converting carbon dioxide in the dark, but they have been laborious to produce. The brilliance of the design here is that Sawa used inkjet printing for the parts, which act as parasites on an already mass producible technology and could make them biodegradable.

At University College London, Saul Purton is reducing the time it takes to grow new genetically modified strains of algae. “You don’t need to be an expert in molecular biology to do this,” said Purton during a recent conference on algae in Cambridge.

“We’ve speeded up the process from

months to around one and a half weeks.” As a system this has endless possibilities, which makes it quite exciting. Purton has looked at adding vaccines for specific diseases to algae. This could be hugely important for aquaculture, as fish readily eat algae and suffer much worse from disease than in the wild. The promising aspects of these projects are their focus on the longer-term benefits of algae, such as finding renewable alternatives to our daily products, and reducing pollution in our environment and making our food chains more robust.

Since November 2019, I began to research London’s historic and contemporary uses of algae, as well as proposing alage related designs in the context of London. This work was a part of Atelier Luma's Algae Platform. Atelier Luma is the design research programme of Luma Arles, located in Arles in the South of France. The Algae Platform began as a bio-laboratory in 2017 at the Atelier, with the aim of exploring the potential of algae from the vast wetlands of the Camargue. The project evolved into a transnational platform, building an extensive network of experts through pilot projects on diverse territories.

Algae Platform London, the latest iteration of Atelier Luma’s Algae Platform, was launched in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts for its Eco-Visionaries exhibition. The Algae Platform London commits to explore a new type of geography: the metropolis of London. With almost nine million inhabitants, London has a unique set of urban challenges in terms of resource scarcity, social density, and waste management.

My first thoughts around the metropolis were of the blooms that appeared in the summer – I was living near to Regent’s Canal at the time.

It became clear the algae blooms in

Seaweed found in the UK from the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity

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n August of last year Regent’s Canal in London turned bright green. The hot weather and excess of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus were perfect for an algae bloom, a massive growth in the Canal over a metre deep.

While this can be a mere nuisance, some species can be toxic. An algae bloom that grew in Hatchmere lake in Cheshire killed Kendall, a King Charles Cavalier, after the dog jumped in and paddled around.

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64 A mixture of algae and mud scraped off of a wall on an access point to the River Thames

Map of Beckton sewage works where London's sewage is treated

Algae-covered steps leading down to the River Thames

Research rip One

Atelier Luma / Photo @ Victor Picon

Spirulina microscope / Image @ Atelier Luma

Cured material

Urin Mat prototype

ALGAE PLATFORM Samuel Iliffe

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the Canal and other parts of the UK were a signal of an interrupted cycle of resources.

The increase in algae blooms is connected to an increase in excess phosphorus in lakes and rivers, which interrupts the cycle of phosphorus on earth. J. Driver from Albright and Wilson, a manufacturer of phosphate, wrote in 1999 of the impact of urbanization: “[it] broke this virtuous cycle and phosphorus, which had long been carefully reapplied to the land, began to leak in ever increasing amounts into rivers…” Scientists have shown that reducing the phosphorus in waterways is the most effective prevention of these blooms.

But there was a time when urbanization was not as detrimental. Driver goes on to say a “valiant attempt was made to return the nutrient values to the land, in the form of Night Soil”. Two hundred years ago Night Soil Men, or Gong Farmers, would collect human waste in London and sell it to nearby farmers as fertilizer.

It was an example of reconnecting the phosphorus cycle in an urban context. However, the Gong Farming industry in London ended by the 20th century. One problem was the introduction of a closed sewer system that took London’s effluent a few miles east. Other innovations laid waste to Gong Farming like indoor plumbing, flushable toilets, and synthetic fertilizers.

Unlike manure, synthetic fertilizers like rock phosphate are a finite resource. The highest quality phosphate rock is already depleted and lower quality resources increase the price. The bigger problem is that 70% of deposits are in Morocco and Western Sahara, and other populous countries like China and USA have less than 40 years supply. People are worried about the geopolitical effect of one country having control over the crops of so many others.

Studies at the Rich Earth Institute show that between 50-100% of the phosphorus that humans need to grow food is available in our own waste, or Night Soil. However they turned their attention specifically to urine, since it makes up 1% of our waste by volume but contains 40% of the phosphorus.

home for algae to thrive in. By growing the algae in the waste before it ran into rivers, the rivers themselves might suffer fewer blooms. The design is also a reimagining of the forgotten industry of Gong Farming, which had all the elements of eco-consciousness in a time before eco-consciousness was a word.

Research from Kanja Tuatanet and others have shown that certain species of microalgae can grow on undiluted urine. These have the potential to be used as biofertilizers.

As well as looking at the past, this work fundamentally considers our future which will be an increased population and warming temperature, both of which could contribute to increasing eutrophication in the London area. The United Kingdom is a country with no rock phosphate supply, whose imports are almost entirely from Morocco under EU trade agreements that will certainly change due to Brexit. It should be looking for renewable sources. Anthropogenic runoff of phosphorus is related to the increasing eutrophication of oceans, negatively affecting the cycle of phosphorus on the planet.

This phosphorus cycle is one of the nine planetary boundaries proposed

by Johan Rockstrom and Will Steffen – boundaries that if passed mean the planet’s habitability is threatened.

One problem that still persists is the difficulty in source-separating urine. The alternative I am looking at is taking urine directly from urinals. I have been trapping, or immobilizing this microalgae into a sheet that can be placed in a urinal. Sheets that prevent urine splashback, or urinal mats, are already used in urinals. This is quite important as design interventions around human waste frequently fail when they require any change in human behaviour. People do not even need to know what the mats are doing, which is another benefit as the recycling of our waste is a topic that evokes disgust in many people.

The traditional urinal mats are used for about 30 days before they’re thrown away. If they can be recovered, the 30-day time period could match the life cycle of algae immobilized inside. Many places that have public urinals have frequent deliveries, some even get their urinal mats delivered, and it could be possible to parasitize off these services to recover the used mats.

They could then be processed into a form usable as fertilizer and delivered to farmers for use.

My design is inspired by the bloom I saw on Regent’s Canal, but interpreting it as an opportunity rather than a problem. Waste was supplying nutrients to the water and providing a

Throughout Algae Platform London the role of a designer has constantly been questioned. What can designers possibly add to the algae community that can’t be by a scientist, or engineer? I think it might be the ability to connect all these different actors together, to look for the value in algae that is not just economic, to zoom in and out of the different fields of algae study and to communicate their importance to society. / royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/architecture-studio-display-algae-platform See Producing (in) the City: atelier-luma.org Samuel Iliffe was designer-in-residence of Algae Platform London at the Royal Academy of Arts and founder of Aromavert, samueliliffe.com 65

66 THE LANGUAGE OF ECOLOGY

by JOSH PLOUGH

Untitled, from the series: Yesterday I met a really wild man, 2015, Diana Lelonek

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Nature: Technology’s Neverland 67

THE LANGUAGE OF ECOLOGY Josh Plough

The relationship between nature and technology has always been polarized to the max – it’s an either or scenario that thinkers from both camps have tried to fuse. But the attempts too often feel fake, a clumsy bridge on the brink of collapse. Many artists think the problem comes down to language and more specifically an absence of metaphors that really describe an interconnected existence.

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’m walking through a nondescript consumer electronics shop in the Netherlands, or wait, am I in Poland, France or the UK? These places all look the same. Piles upon piles of electronic devices.

Whatever subtlety existed in shop displays has given way to crude piles of white, brown, and grey goods.

They don’t even bother taking the stuff off the pallets; they just haul it into place and wait for the inevitable. This can’t last forever.

As they stand, they’re the future dumps, intellectually and physically; we just haven’t quite realized it yet.

On many of these devices we’re offered nature as an example, as the literal wallpaper to our digital lives; something to witness but not experience. Nature, in all its vast terror, is atomized and replaced by images of what will soon be fantasy. It’s technology’s idealized and romanticized version of nature.

These stock wallpapers will be the backdrops to the apparently inevitable singularity. A force rendered beyond agency specifically for our pleasure. It’s bitterly ironic how the very thing we’re destroying by buying this stuff is used to sell it.

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Nature and technology have always had an odd relationship, though. As Alfred Nordmann, professor of philosophy at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, explains: The most advanced technological research programmes are thus bringing about a curiously regressive inversion of the relation between humans, technology, and nature. No longer a means of controlling nature in order to protect, shield, or empower humans, technology dissolves into nature and becomes uncanny, incomprehensible, beyond perceptual and conceptual control.

Maybe this explains why we have opted for the language that’s associated with it today. We’ve had to mine our past so as to be able to verbalize and comprehend our connected present. We’re failing, it seems, to grasp the enormity of the network and our place within it.

But there are those who are trying to untangle this mess by examining the language used, and asking us to see ourselves as not just living through our devices but with them.

The British artist and writer James Bridle has been discussing this for

some years now. In his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2019) he writes: What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought.

A new shorthand is required, one that simultaneously acknowledges and addresses the reality of a world in which people, politics, culture and technology are utterly enmeshed.

This plea for a new metalanguage can structure our thinking away from the idyll that it currently exists in with its farms, clouds, and streams. The network has already laid claim to our natural world, hollowing it out while occupying our imaginations. So, according to an increasing number of designers and researchers, we should ditch all the previous associations in favour of an all encompassing image and shorthand: ecology. Using this we can start to restructure our thoughts surrounding technology as it does away with the dissected imagery. It’s at once approachable and incomprehensible. As Joanna Skorupska, founder of Radicalzz, says:

GREEN PET Environment, from the series: Center For Living Things, 2017, Diana Lelonek

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THE LANGUAGE OF ECOLOGY Josh Plough

Motherboard Nature, from the series: Center For Living Things, 2017, Diana Lelonek

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For me ecology is an ecosystem.

And an ecosystem is a system where everyone and everything is connected and relies on one another. Every action you take affects the other person or thing.

An approach fostered by Skorupska would allow enough room for our imagination to propagate. It allows us to think about the world, digital or not, and its connections without having to fully comprehend what mitochondria or SoCs do. As Bridle notes: “Survival and solidarity must be possible without understanding”.

So does digital ecology mean going back to nature? Not quite, because we need to be reminded that we never left it. The Polish artist Diana Lelonek’s work visualizes this for us, creating yet another fissure of critique in the digital. Her work Yesterday I met the really wild man is a series of photographs of naked wanderers, in what could be tribes, roaming across different natural, post-industrial and peripheral urban landscapes. As Monika Bakke, associate professor in philosophy at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, notes while in conversation about Lelonek’s work: Humans do not need to return to their animalistic past, because in fact they never ceased to be animals in the first place. They don’t need to return to nature, as they never existed outside of it.

Another project by Lelonek is The Center for Living Things, which according to the artist is “a research institution founded in 2016 in order to examine, collect and popularize the knowledge concerning new humanotic nature forms. All exhibits gathered in the Institute's collection are abandoned objects, used and no longer needed commodities – wastes of human (over)production, which

have subsequently become the natural environment for many living organisms.” They act as a memento mori for speciesists, those who see humanity as separate and above the natural or rendered worlds. Both Lelonek’s and Skorupska’s work, while differing in approach, position us within an interconnected system where there is no clear hierarchy.

They place the inanimate and animate in the same sphere and ask us to imagine more carefully how we’re connected to everything, whether it’s networks, illegal mines or discarded motherboards.

But for this to have the effect that’s needed it cannot only be communicated via artistic or designed interventions. That’s why Radicalzz is also pushing for an educational approach, as Skorupska describes: It’s about trust, but it’s also about education because people are getting more aware but it’s still not enough… it’s because there is a lack of education in the tech field.

I would like to educate people so they will have the power to force the companies to play fair with them.

This process has already begun.

Radicalzz carried out workshops with school children on the subject during which they discovered that 80% of the participants didn’t know there was a link between ‘the cloud’ and environmental degradation. This lack of awareness – which we can all sympathize with – can be bridged by imagination when the term ecology is introduced. Whether we’re discussing the carbon footprint of video streaming or holding a piece of styrofoam covered in Leskea polycarpa and Amblystegium serpens, we’re actively participating inside the ecosystem of technological critique.

In practically every walk of life there are people demanding that we change our attitude towards the

planet, and there are about as many opinions on how to achieve this to boot. So which one do we pick?

There is of course no simple answer.

But the ones that foster imagination and connections are the ones that link what an artist produces with the way we read and walk through a shop like MediaMarkt. We need more moments like these. We need more ramblers to make connections for themselves when traversing the ecology of things.

It’s with the likes of Bridle, Radicalzz and Lelonek that a revolution of thought can be brought about that subverts these commercial spaces. An ecology of thinking sees these sites as ecosystems, allowing us to examine and imagine. And if enough of us establish this ability to think then the more points of reference we’ll collectively share; the bigger the web will grow; and the more likely it is that Microsoft and Apple will start adding wallpapers with titles like Child Miner, Congo; Severed Finger, China; and Data Centre Next to Melting Glacier, Sweden, to their stock collection of backgrounds. I want to hope. /

radicalzz.network dianalelonek.com luminategroup.com/posts/blog/data-isnt-thenew-oil-its-the-new-co2 The Subversion of Paradoxes / LaTurbo Avedon, artist & curator: Vimeo jamesbridle.com 71

72 COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE

Rem Koolhaas’ Rural Sublime

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by CRISTINA GUADALUPE GALVÁN

Laurian Ghinitoiu courtesy AMO

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COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE Cristina Guadalupe Galván

“Omissions and simplification help us to understand – but help us in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator’s neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.” Aldous Huxley

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uxley’s quote is from his book Brave New World Revisited published in 1952 and it applies to the letter to Countryside, The Future, the new exhibition organized by Rem Koolhaas and his think tank AMO that opened on 20 February at New York’s Guggenheim.

In an article called Why Are Museums So Plutocratic, and What Can We Do About It?, published in Frieze magazine earlier this year, artist Andrea Fraser said: What is very specific about the US model: [is] not so much that many museums were founded by individuals or that they depend on private funding, but that the system supports the non-democratic and often plutocratic governance of putatively ‘public’ institutions.

Ian Scoones, one member of the coordinating team for the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) from the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam warns us: Architects even those with good intentions, don’t always have the best interests of inhabitants in mind. If you are living in areas where you have this kind of corporate influence, you might be rightfully suspicious of metropolitan designers sudden-

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ly showing an interest in the rural.

Cities, the cradle of democracy (the Polis for the ancient Greeks), were for a long time thought of as the most efficient solution to ecology and overpopulation, as its concentration left large amounts of natural areas untouched. Like most architects of his generation, Toyo Ito (Japan, 1941) long considered the city the only place to work and construct a discourse. Koolhaas (Netherlands, 1944), who came a bit later into architecture from journalism, even called his practice The Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Since its inception it has studied the culture of congestion and ‘bigness’, the metropolitan environment and so on, up to Koolhaas’ last exhibition in New York at the New Museum called Cronocaos (2011), on urban preservation.

In the academic reception of this exhibition almost all authors criticized the lack of scientific thoroughness of the analyses presented. In a response to OMA’s Preservation Manifesto, Jorge Otero-Pailos, director and professor of historic preservation at Columbia GSAPP wrote: Cronocaos gave the false impression that preservation had overlooked post-war socially committed architecture, making preservationists appear to be in collusion with

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ruthless developers and free-market ideologues, when, in fact, preservationists were fighting to preserve market-averse brutalist social housing projects (…) long before OMA sounded the alarm (…) The graphic tables and wall labels in the exhibition, while often compelling, regrettably tended too quickly toward the hyperbolic and jumped to conclusions based on undifferentiated data. They did more to conceal, rather than reveal, the contemporary changes in the nature of the relationship between architecture and preservation.

In 2007 the UN declared that half of mankind was living in cities, and that it was likely that by 2050 it will increase up to 70 or 80%, a tipping point suddenly transforming advantages into liabilities, since now, the overconcentration of metropolises is actually accelerating the greenhouse effect.

In Brave New World Revisited – written nearly 30 years after the original novel – Huxley said: “The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals (…) is now the central problem of mankind.” He is clear on the impact overpopulation would have: “[it] leads to economic insecurity and social unrest. Unrest and insecurity leads to more control by central governments and an increase of their power (…) the probability of overpopulation leading through unrest to dictatorship becomes a virtual certainty.”

Koolhaas told us in the press conference that Countryside, The Future, is “a show about sociology, anthropology and politics”. Curated by Troy Conrad Therrien and organized together with Samir Bantal – head of Koolhaas’ think tank AMO – and a vast array of

international collaborators and students, the exhibition chooses to portray a limited number of very specific conditions in non-metropolitan areas throughout the world.

Koolhaas’ pretentious slogan for the press: “I'm interested in the country for the same reason I was paying attention to New York in the 70s. No one else was looking,” sounds really catchy but it’s not true. Just like with Cronocaos. It’s more like fake news.

Actually it’s Japanese architects – unfortunately as a consequence of the 2011 tsunami and earthquakes – who might be the first architects to see opportunity outside metropoli-

“Architects even those with good intentions, don’t always have the best interests of inhabitants in mind.” tan areas. And Koolhaas knows this very well, since the postscript of his book Project Japan: The Metabolists Talks, written by Toyo Ito said: We need to start by questioning the way we relate to nature (…) Being an architect from outside, I had a hesitation in getting involved in reconstruction planning for towns and villages (…) I think now is a good moment for us architects to break away from this mode and regain a viable relationship with nature.

Ito, Atelier Bow-Wow, and SANAA are the most well-known faces of these new investigations outside the city. As Kayoko Ota (architecture curator, Harvard professor and working at AMO for a decade between 2002-2012) says, “The islands and villages are – potentially – a frontline of architectural reinvention today.” In her essay The Posturban Phenomenon she writes:

In the new relationships emerging in these islands and villages, architects have managed to realize a testing ground where they can insulate themselves from the systematic penetration of modernization and attempt to forge a new engagement with society – an act that is also one of professional survival in the face of capitalist urbanization.

Inside the Guggenheim exhibition – which despite its apparent complexity is more or less organized geographically – I was surprised to see that in the Japanese section the only topic at hand was robotization. No mention at all of the Japanese posturban phenomenon and the community oriented work Japanese architects are doing there, despite having an expert on the topic in their team (Ota is quoted as a key collaborator). Instead AMO chooses to highlight, as Koolhaas explained to us, how robotic prosthesis might be used to prolong the working years of Japanese peasants whose tired bodies can no longer do physical work on their own… I must say, a rather less humane and less relevant approach to what Japanese architects are actually developing in their countryside.

Is architecture a social practice? I guess it depends on which architect you ask…

In that same postscript for Project Japan, Ito asks himself critically: “The people or community which we always argue for in our architecture – aren’t they just an abstracted scheme?” In the Guggenheim they sure are… Koolhaas talking about a posthuman architecture in a show spearheaded by overpopulation?

This very ambitious exhibition mapping the whole world with plenty of omission and simplification is far from being naïve, but as Oliver 75

COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE Cristina Guadalupe Galván

Wainwright from The Guardian gently points out: “There is a naivety to how Koolhaas recounts some of these revelations.”

effects, of which perhaps the emergence of a worldwide populism and the current waning of globalism are only the most identifiable.”

“It has nothing to do with architecture,” Koolhaas admits. “It is more anthropological and sociological.”

Really? If the show is truly anthropological and sociological why is there no research on the biggest sociological problem the countryside faces today: that is the rise of populism, which is responsible for bringing the far right into power again and putting at risk our democracies. The countryside voted Brexit and Donald Trump.

Perhaps it’s interesting to see what images Koolhaas chose to illustrate his article. There is not one single inhabitant of the countryside (out of the more than three billion who live there) in any of the 10 images.

The coordinating collective of ERPI addressed this in its 2018 conference called Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World. The international conference focused on the social and political processes in rural spaces that are generating alternatives to regressive, authoritarian politics.

None of which can be found in this exhibition either, and they live in the same city…

But there is one person who is actually showing up everywhere – in the first image of his own article and culminating in one of the last images of the spiralling show – and that is Lance Gilman. Fake shock tactics? Gilman is a real state devel-

If the show is truly anthropological and sociological why is there no research on the biggest sociological problem the countryside faces today.

The link between corporatization and industrialization of agriculture and populist politics is a reality of which, after all these extensive researches with hundreds of collaborators around the world, has an importance that Koolhaas seems totally unsure about. As the US formally starts to retire from the Paris agreement and Brazil is accelerating the Amazon’s deforestation, the dramatic implications that these politics can have on the environmental crisis is not a priority for OMA. Koolhaas’ Rural Sublime article from last October in Frieze, which when republished in its newsletter was six days after the press conference, said: “This neglect [of the countryside] had devastating 76

oper and a brothel owner in Nevada, where apparently prostitution is not illegal in all the counties of the State. Perhaps this is Koolhaas’ version of ‘professional survival’.

After all, at the press conference he said that the corporate sheds of Gilman’s properties is where he saw opportunity for architects, and he also wrote that this is “perhaps [again] more exciting than anything we have seen since the birth of modernism in the early 20th century: a new sublime”.

Let’s read in Gilman’s website what this new sublime is: Called the Horse Oasis, this 20 +/acre site currently has active construction of a 30,000 SF, divisible, three-storey, multi-tenant office building. Offering a central location

within TRI and abundant parking, this new facility will be the perfect home for an expanding firm within the park or a new company wanting to connect to this hot bed of technology, manufacturing and distribution.

It doesn’t sound very visionary…

And of course the State of Nevada has no state income tax and has also relatively low property taxes making it a deal for corporations.

When Scoones was interviewed

by David Hubers on populism and rural politics he said: “Solidarity economies, a counter to authoritarian populism, can be facilitated by architecture and design, linked to new forms of open source information technologies, radical urban planning and so on.”

For Scoones it is necessary “to think about design in this political way, about creating spaces for emancipation, confronting authoritarian forms of populism, bringing spaces and economies back to people in a transformative way”. Which begs the question, why is the show at the Guggenheim not about this?

Rephrasing Otero-Pailos’ words, this exhibition does more to conceal, rather than reveal, the contemporary changes in the nature of the relationship between architecture and the countryside and it is very badly timed, although I guess some corporate sponsors at the Guggenheim might think differently. /

Countryside, The Future, Guggenheim Museum, New York, guggenheim.org (At the time of going to press the Museum is still closed and had not announced dates for when it will reopen.) oma.eu iss.nl / oteropailos.com / arch.columbia.edu toyo-ito.co.jp / bow-wow.jp / cca.qc.ca

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These days, it seems all the British royals really achieve is creating sensational fodder for the media, specifically right-wing UK tabloids. In 2019, 97-year-old Prince Phillip collided with a car carrying two women and a baby, injuring both women. No charges pressed. Prince Andrew recently ‘stood down’ from royal duties for his alleged role in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Contrary to his disastrous interview on the BBC at the end of 2019 in which Andrew addressed the story and said he was "willing to help any appropriate law enforcement agency", US investigators claim he is not cooperating at all.

But aside from Epstein’s victims, who really cares? The royals don’t affect us in our day-today lives, right? They are at best entertainment, dividing and enthralling audiences across the globe, creating a moment of escapism from the real life crises that are affecting us. Yet, we mustn’t forget, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, Queen Elizabeth is on our $20 note. The Union Jack, not for lack of trying, is still imprinted onto our national flag. Between 1948 and 1977, passports in Aotearoa New Zealand bore the words ‘New Zealand citizen and British subject.’ This royal blue runs deep.

The most recent hit-and-run is the fleeing of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (which we can still call them formally) to Los Angeles. Inevitably dubbed ‘Mexit’, it has seen the sudden departure of what are considered senior royals to form a new “progressive role” within the monarchy on the other side of the world. Although, within the family but outside of the official business of monarchy looks to be more the way things are going to play out. The media coverage has been extreme and unavoidable. Meghan Markle, a successful American actress who also happened to have an African-American mother, marrying into The Firm proved too much for the aforementioned tabloids. For four years through dating, engagement, wedding and pregnancy, Markle has been bullied, harassed, and attacked. Writing in the Daily Mail before the couple married, Rachel Johnson, sister of British prime minister Boris Johnson, went so far as to describe the addition of Markle’s “rich and exotic DNA” as thickening the Windsor’s “watery thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair”. Despite all this, some thought a new multiracial monarchy in the face of a polarized country in the thick of Brexit turmoil was a sign of positive change.

Yet we mustn’t forget that behind the pomp and circumstance, the sex scandals and abdications, the corgis and the fairy-tale weddings, what the British royal family really symbolizes.

At its heart, it reinforces the structures of racial and classist inequality upon which insular notions of British identity thrive. Not to mention the historical colonization and dominion over foreign nations under the auspices of the Commonwealth. Meghan and Harry, who had branded themselves cleverly through their social media and a website, can be forgiven for wanting to leave. In giving the middle finger to the institution, have they started an unravelling which will be difficult to stop? What would a world without the British monarchy look like? Can we finally start to imagine this as a possibility? /

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Kelly LeBrock in The Woman in Red, 1984 Š Photo Agency

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall (his wife, Camilla) Photo: source unknown

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80 WORKWEAR

by SARA KAUFMAN

Decoding

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Unifrom 1, from the Germans in Uniform series, 1974, Timm Rautert

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Clothing

Lookbook, fall/winter 200, Fabio Quaranta

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WORKWEAR Sara Kaufman

At a time when morals, mores and customs are in a state of flux and uncertainty, when we as individuals have lost faith in systems, structures and institutions that traditionally formed the fabric of society, fashion is stepping up with the spread of uniforms as an inspiration and dress code. Reliable and even conservative, does the predictability of uniform dressing make people feel safe?

W

A photographic exhibition, curated

by Urs Stahel, exploring the functionality, symbolism and fashion statements of uniforms and workwear, it features the work of 44 artists including Oliver Sieber and Rineke Dijkstra, and a solo exhibition by Walead Beshty. What is the purpose of discussing uniforms and workwear today?

“With workwear form follows function, while the uniform has, first and foremost a symbolic meaning, explains Stahel. “It symbolizes a status within an association and within society: it should shine and unite. It should develop in so-called esprit de corps. It can be noted that, while the number of participants in associations (for example the mili82

From the Traces series, Weronika Gęsicka

hen Bologna’s Fondazione Mast opened Uniform: Into the work /Out of the work in January it had no idea how relevant its images of protective workwear would be. The now familiar acronym PPE – or lack of – would make no sense outside of a hospital, and wearing face masks on streets across the world an unimaginable sight.

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tary) is constantly decreasing, and the individualization of life and society is constantly increasing, we feel increasingly lost. We are beginning to miss the social structures and thus also the social symbols.”

While workwear is mainly conceived in order to protect the worker's body, uniforms traditionally have the purpose of conforming employees within a company. Companies and organizations which do not require employees to wear a specific uniform, might still ask workers to conform to a certain dress code – and legally they can unless it’s discriminatory or places an ‘undue burden’ on the employer. Generally this should guarantee an adequate standard in terms of smartness and elegance while at the same time allowing all workers to feel comfortable.

When it was first introduced, dress-down Friday even in the most corporate of corporate companies allowed employees to feel able to express more personal style.

However, just like rigid company policies in general, uniform and dress-code policies have their own flaws. The most common one is given by the different dress codes for men and women. While it is only fair that men and women should wear clothes that better suits their – diverse – bodies, these should not enhance gender stereotypes.

For example, women are frequently asked to wear high heels, which automatically prevent a good part of them from feeling comfortable, and the same goes for skirts. After much campaigning, female flight attendants working for Japan Airlines scored a big victory earlier this year when the company said they would no longer be obliged to wear high heels and skirts.

While in general uniforms and dress codes should prevent work-

ers, especially women, from feeling objectified, the standards set by so many companies still actually require women to look ultra-feminine and glamorous, without any additional requests for their male counterparts. Religion also plays a rather important part in the discrimination – there have been countless cases of women being asked to remove their veil or hijab during work.

Besides openly stated dress codes, there are also more subtle ones and, once again, women tend to get the raw deal. One example is given by make-up and grooming. While men in certain work environments are

Uniforms and dress codes should prevent workers, especially women, from feeling objectified. increasingly under pressure regarding their appearance and wax and thread, women are expected to wear make-up and style their hair every day no matter what kind of work they do. An example was recently given when the Italian satirical TV programme Striscia La Notizia repeatedly made fun of reporter Giovanna Botteri – who, during her career, has been a war reporter in Kosovo and Iran and has been in China covering Covid-19 – addressing her “untamed” hair and her recurring outfit, apparently ignoring the contribution that she has given to the spreading of important news by risking her life in dangerous zones.

Another – fashionable – example is given by the trouser suit. Today they are used by men and women alike in any kind of situation which requires a formal outfit. However, women in power originally started

wearing it in order to project some kind of masculine vibe and justify their position: I am a woman but I don't act like one. This was before high-end designers such as Armani and Yves Saint Laurent produced more gentle versions of the trouser suit, but it still left its mark – more often than not, women in power (or seeking power) find themselves mimicking masculine attitudes in order to gain respect. The makeup, the grooming and the power dress, they are also examples of how workplace dress codes cross boundaries, not always in a good way, with social stereotypes.

Workplace is currently in the spotlight and not just because of all the people who for the first time find themselves working from home, dressing in a worky wear from the waist up for their online meetings. The new generations have changed their attitude towards work; for many their job doesn't define them. Finding a job is hard, but on the other hand a company is now expected to offer more than just a decent salary. There are newish concepts – work-life balance, smart working, and flexibility. There are previously unheard of professions. But there isn't a clearly defined alternative model to the one we've always known. In a world that depends on labour, these transformations are bound to generate confusion and, ultimately, identity crisis. Who are we? And what is it that we do? And, not a secondary matter, how should we dress accordingly to a role that isn't clearly defined?

“We live in a world in which uniform work clothes are an anathema,” says Stahel, “as a sign of a highly individualized and differentiated social group, there is a kind of anti-uniform codex. On no account should you look like the next person, on no account should you appear 'uniformed'. Yet this negative 83

WORKWEAR Sara Kaufman

Lookbook, fall/winter 200, Fabio Quaranta

definition risks achieving the opposite, it risks becoming also a uniform, a standardized attitude.”

Before lockdown and before catwalks were compelled to go online, the fashion crowd had barely digested Christmas dinner before the menswear shows began – first London, then Milan, then Paris.

A smaller crowd compared to the womenswear ones, but also more attentive: trends are first and foremost presented with menswear.

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Lookbook, fall/winter 200, Fabio Quaranta

Workwear was one of the main trends of spring/summer 2020 and, as the January kermesse kicked off, it became clear that it would still be with us in fall/winter.

“Fashion is characterized by the deliberate creation of variance and diversity, says Stahel, “it is ephemeral in the best sense, constantly changing, while uniforms aim for consistency and precision. And that is exactly why fashion is always flirting with the severity of the uniform.”

The reinterpretations of technical wear and traditional work-suits that we see on the runways are metaphorical uniforms for new identities: your job might not define you anymore, but what you wear still does. The good news is that we can choose what to wear; we can choose our own uniforms.

A pioneer of fashion's take on workwear is the Italian brand gr10k.

The label originates from a factory that has been producing work-

BLUE Woman in a Hay Field (Dalliendorf Portaits, 1997, Albrecht TĂźbke

wear and military uniforms since 1925; gr10k uses its deadstock to create expertly crafted functional garments, elevating uniforms to fashion staples by combining them with streetwear elements. Bonded microfibres, flame-retardant aramid blends, and three-layer certified GORE-TEXÂŽ hit the fashion showrooms. gr10k investigates the idea of uniform as something strictly personal, connected to one's body and actions: no uniform is the same because no person is

the same. Having to wear a certain outfit every day can be seen as oppression, but in times of identity crisis, choosing to wear one is an act of freedom, especially if you can create your own.

Italy's capital of tech style, Milan, is located just a few kilometres from Bologna's working-class and industrial heritage. However, presenting a contemporary concept of workwear in Milan today is paradoxical: in Italy employment ranges from

underpaid to non-existent. The country's big players are mostly old businesses with rigid hierarchies and find it extremely hard to adapt to new mentalities. Was this what Miuccia Prada had in mind as she sent models in power-suits parading around a bi-dimensional equestrian statue by Rem Koolhaas?

In the fashion industry, designers are more and more being replaced by creative directors, an example of how new rules and new roles 85

WORKWEAR Sara Kaufman

are gaining momentum. Although Mrs Prada might not be directly involved in workplace changes, she is likely to be aware of how these changes are causing people to doubt themselves. Especially men, whose role as patriarchs is falling apart from within. A perfect collection of classic tailored suits with a modern twist offers people a chance to rethink themselves, while also bringing some rigour in an overwhelming society.

Since Milan fashion shows usually take place in 19th-century Palazzis in the city centre, trekking all the way to Bovisa to see Han Kjøbenhavn’s show felt like revolution.

The Danish fashion brand chose a concrete storage building in a former industrial neighbourhood as a location for its Milanese debut, with factory chimneys as a backdrop. People were welcomed to the label's raw and unapologetic vision by a creative installation resembling flesh, ideally celebrating human interaction.

Han Kjøbenhavn already explored workwear in its spring/summer ‘working class couple’ collection; for fall/winter 2020 the brand took the concept to the next level: oversized suits with distinctive shoulder constructions, tight jumpsuits, acid-washed denim jeans, custom artwork on classic shirting, and steel-chain necklaces. Contrasts and duality, the walking contradiction of a society that undergoes change without being ready for it.

Denmark has not experienced the economic crisis of recent years like other Western countries have; nonetheless its inhabitants experience loneliness, alienation, and depression – the side effects of the digital world enhanced by the darkness of Danish winters. The brand responds with a radical, sensory sartorial identity – a reminder to touch, smell and feel things on your skin.

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How did the fashion crowd feel about sitting in a dusty warehouse in front of a pile of rotting flesh?

No doubt a few were taken aback.

But the fashion world is changing: Instagram, streetwear, and the new ‘democratic luxury’, have taken it off the pedestal. Less art perhaps, but more authenticity. Consequently several shows (perhaps not the aforementioned Prada one) today host a tribe, which has no interest in the glamour: they are actually there for the clothes. And they're open to any message that comes with them.

Workwear is traditionally blue.

Pantone has named blue this year's colour. Quaranta's show was one of the last ones in Milan, in Paris the fashion crowd was greeted by fiery demonstrations against Macron's proposed pensions reform.

Amid police charges and tear gas, Heron Preston and Louis Vuitton brought more workwear on the catwalks. Fashion mirrors society by responding to people's demands. A collection is never ‘good’ or ‘bad’; it's either ‘contemporary’ or ‘irrelevant’. Naturally not everything contemporary is also beautiful.

Still industrial, but more on the intellectual side, was Fabio Quaranta's presentation. The Italian designer also showcased his work in a former factory, but instead of the city's outskirts he chose the hipster neighbourhood Isola. The show felt like a gathering of the fashion intelligentsia, with the likes of critic and fashion curator Maria Luisa Frisa gracing the front row. Quaranta is an eclectic designer whose projects develop in time and space. During Milan Fashion Week he presented the latest chapter of Urania, an interdisciplinary research combining clothes, art, and music. Urania defies the codes of fashion by deconstructing attitudes and habits, transcending gender, and ambiguously combining formal and informal. It is mostly made out of second-hand items that come with a story. There are uniforms made from the bedspreads of a former ENI (an Italian oil and gas company) employee vacation resort. There's a never collected jacket made by Sartoria Caraceni for Edoardo Agnelli (son of the patron of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli).

There are silk carré produced with artists Nathalie Du Pasquier, Miltos Manetas, and Salvo. A dimension of memory which doesn't lead to nostalgia but to imagination and potential. The best is yet to come.

Maybe.

In times of crisis we keep a low profile, focusing less on self-expression and more on more meaningful matters. For this reason in the last few years we have seen very contemporary collections which were also extremely blunt. But isn't the world today also, to put it mildly, rather blunt?

The challenge of a fashion designer is to respond to crisis with creativity – not a simple matter, especially since clothes also have to be sold and in times like these people are not likely to splurge on anything flashy. But fashion is reality, not escapism, and a fashion designer's response to a crisis is usually its depiction. But there's also another way: offering solutions. We live in confusing times and confusion requires processing; after a lot of processing the fashion world will be ready to offer its own solutions. /

Uniform: Into the work /Out of the work, Fondazione Mast, Bologna, until September, mast.org gr10k.com prada.com hankjobenhavn.com fabioquaranta.it heronpreston.com louisvuitton.com tuebke.info weronikagesicka.com

BLUE RS20, Han Kjobenhavn

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Vitrum: research , process and model Photo: Studio Plastique

88 STUDIO PLASTIQUE

The Life

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by SOPHIE RZEPECKY

Force of Things 89

STUDIO PLASTIQUE Sophie Rzepecky

Unlike food labels, many of the objects we use day to day have no list of ingredients, and intentionally or not, their material recipes remain a mystery. Studio Plastique unlocks and reuses these secrets, and in a recent investigation into the origin of the colour blue produced an installation that reveals the history of the pigment through a material timeline in glass.

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he objects that surround us in our daily life contain hidden material worlds: cobalt, silica and lithium in our smartphones, laptops and electric cars; silica sand, used in the production of everyday water glasses; cotton in tampons, diapers, q-tips and paper money. We are so far removed from the actual production processes of these objects, it can be easy to overlook the true origins of the often-virgin materials mined and harvested to make them.

For Belgium-based designers Archibald Godts and Theresa Bastek, wealth is all around us, trapped in unsuspecting objects. The practice of design for them is a complex one, which requires investigating every aspect of the life cycle of objects, from material to production, through to their multiple life cycles.

Graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2015, they founded 90

Studio Plastique immediately after their studies, to examine the ways in which design impacts on more than just style, form, and aesthetic. The duo’s central motivation is to look for material solutions which are outside the norm to, as Godts puts it, “look at the impact of the past, and to not make the same mistakes again”. Collaborating with industry and moving between self-initiated projects and client-based work, means their work is firmly rooted in reality.

BLUE Vitrum, installation view Photo: Filip Dujardin, © Design Museum Gent

Their self-initiated research-based projects, such as Common Sands and Linen Lab, are often triggered by problematic situations within industry, or daily life contexts. By putting these under a microscope, they find ways to give discarded natural materials value. Their collaborations with scientists “drive us forwards everyday in our practice.

They enrich us, not only with knowledge, but also how we as designers can really make a difference by coming up with short- and long term

solutions.” At a time when global politics seem to be lagging behind addressing things like climate crisis, they feel “we live in a society, especially in Europe and other parts of the Western world, where it feels like we don’t know what we stand for anymore. Design can definitely help to create new contexts, new visions and new scenarios for what we can do, and for whom we do this for.” Their project Common Sands thinks about reuse on a micro scale. A long-term investiga-

tion, the project uses sand-based material from discarded household appliances to make new glass objects. Commissioned for the 2019 exhibition, GEO–DESIGN: Junk. All That Is Solid Melts into Trash at the Van Abbe Museum in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, the designers first asked themselves: where can we find sand hidden in our daily life?

They found it in silicates present in most household objects, their origins being the finite resource silicate sand – under threat and often 91

Colour Library, TU Dresden

STUDIO PLASTIQUE Sophie Rzepecky

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Blue Room at Schloss Hollenegg Photo: Studio Plastique

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STUDIO PLASTIQUE Sophie Rzepecky

dredged from seabeds in dangerous and illegal situations. Why would such a finite resource like silica sand not be considered as one of the world’s most precious substances?

The answer is largely because the properties of reused silica are hard to control, resulting in glass that is muddy, coloured blue, brown, black or grey, and not up to the industry standard clarity. Collaborating with scientists, they found a way to extract silicates from appliances such as fridges, kitchen scales and microwaves, and transformed the material into glass. The application for this new glass is varied, but as Bastek says, “the larger vision long term, is to reduce the waste material that we have right in front of our faces”. So far the duo have designed a series of glass-blown tableware, but are looking for ways that industry would be able to use the glass to manufacture more affordable objects.

in The Institute for Natural Sciences and Technology in the Arts, to find the material origin of the colour. Their research revealed the tapestries and wallpaper were coloured with artificial ultramarine, or French ultramarine, developed

by French chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet in 1824 after the Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale in France offered a 6,000 franc reward. Before this, natural ultramarine – ground from the precious stone lapis lazuli – was considered as precious as gold, and was usually saved for royalty or religious symbolism. The 17th-century painter Vermeer infamously bankrupted his family due to his

in response to a commission from the Design Museum Gent for its KleurEyck exhibition. Vitrum is a material material timeline in glass, each panel is coloured with a different blue. Inscribed with information, the installation sees the panels suspended together.

By taking a critical eye to objects and phenomena of daily life, Studio Plastique reveals the hidden depths in overlooked materials, and how they relate to social and political events in history. Their work is at once a research and a problem-solving mission, to bring awareness to the precious materials that make up daily life, and look for ways to reuse them, or create new value and meanings. Through their process of material investigation they look for concrete solutions, but also reveal to us the life force of things. /

“They enrich us, not only with knowledge, but also how we as designers can really make a difference by coming up with short- and long term solutions.”

Recently, Studio Plastique did a residency at Schloss Hollenegg, a design incubator. Schloss Hollenegg, a castle located in the south of Austria, dates back to the middle of the 12th century. Owner and curator Alice Stori Liechtenstein invites emerging designers with critical practices for residencies, using the castle’s changing architecture and long history as a starting point for projects.

Both of the designers were drawn to the castle’s Blue Room, originally a bedroom coloured blue to create an atmosphere of relaxation and peacefulness. Over the centuries the blue pigment in the textiles and wall hangings in the room had faded from blue to green, and it was only when they moved paintings and pictures that the true colour was revealed.

Fascinated by the process of fading, they set out to test fibres at the University of Applied Arts Vienna 94

obsession with the pigment. The invention of artificial ultramarine saw the use of the colour diversity to more common uses, essentially democratizing the colour.

Investigating the material origins of artificial ultramarine led Godts and Bastek to study the provenance of blue pigments over time, to understand the predecessors to synthetic blue today. Through six colours, from Egyptian blue dating back to 3285 BC to Prussian blue, developed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, they traced the social history of the pigments and how they intersect with industry, religion, war, and even nuclear disaster.

studioplastique.be

After the residency, Lichtenenstein brought Studio Plastique together with Italian company Wonderglass

KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent, Belgium, until 21 February 2021 designmuseumgent.be

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Vitrum, installation, details Photos: Studio Plastique

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Black envelops an entire spectrum of meaning: sinister, malignant, wicked, disease(d), disgrace(d), death, mourning, sexy, stylish, glamorous, practical, magical. Black is also the colour of chastity and strict self-control. Priests and nuns wear black to demonstrate their rejection of the carnal life. Yet, black is also bound up with attire and accoutrements that signal sexual transgression, in particular sadomasochism. Black is able to reconcile, with ease, extreme and self-contradictory forces. Black seems to colour almost every corner of our moral and political universe.

In pre-Christian colour symbolism, black was associated with non-humanness and the terrifying realms outside of the human world. For instance, Jacob Grimm writes in Deutsche Mythologie (1835) that Hel, the goddess of the underworld in Norse mythology, is “half black and half human-coloured”. Often when blackness surfaces in the works of European authors and artists, it is used to dramatic effect. Macbeth addresses the weird sisters – three witches – as “secret, black, and midnight hags”, hinting at their covenant with Satan, the Prince of Darkness. Witches, usually single elderly women outside patriarchal power or women considered too sexual, who practised black magic were said to unleash their unnatural and unholy powers for evil purposes.

The abstract idea of evil itself became synonymous with black. Hence, in the Bible, black is the colour of bad omens and sin. The blackness of demons, which was a sign of their moral nature, was easily transferred to the Ethiope (an archaic word for a dark-skinned person) who were depicted in early Christian texts as devils and demons. Early Christian ideas of the Ethiope facilitated understandings of black Africans as ‘immoral and sinful’ and their enslavement as a ‘just punishment’. Europeans perceived the dark skin of the African as a manifestation of Noah’s curse. Black skin was thus a mark of an immutable and immoral nature. The symbolic pairing of black and degeneracy was firmly entrenched before dark-skinned African peoples came into the Western historical view. Sander L. Gilman described this phenomenon in his book On Blackness Without Blacks (1982).

Even though blackness and disease have been conflated in Western thought (black plague), blackness was simultaneously, and perhaps counter-intuitively, endowed with medicinal and magical significance. Blackness was thought to have powerful curative effects. “‘Pretu ta kura’ (Black cures) used to be a common expression” among Dutch colonizers. And Curaçaoan anthropologist Rose Mary Allen goes on to tells us “sexual intercourse with black women was generally believed to have curative effects on certain diseases”. The myth of blackness as a medicinal agent has a long history, dating back to the Renaissance when, as the late Imtiaz Habib noted in his contribution to Disease, Diagnosis, Cure on the Modern Stage (2004),“one of the recommended Renaissance cures for venereal disease may have been sexual intercourse with a black woman”.

So, what is black? Black is like no other colour. Black is simultaneously a colour and not a colour. Black is… and black ain’t.* True black is a very rare thing, and it might be more figurative space than an optical phenomenon. /

EGBERT ALEJANDRO

* The title of the 1995 documentary film by Marion Riggs

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Murmuran que el cabello es la memoria, 2017, detail of installation, Minia Biabiany.

Black-and-white digital photograph Courtesy of the artist Š Minia Biabiany

98 MINIA BIABIANY

by GABRIELLE KENNEDY

Blue Spelling, a change of perspective is a change of temporality, 2017, still from the video, 2.22 min Courtesy of the artist © Minia Biabiany

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Everything is Woven Minia Biabiany draws her audience in, quietly pressuring them to participate in her personal effort to remove the silence surrounding the post-colonial narrative in Guadeloupe. Her work is there to guide, but ultimately she expects us all to recognize our place in the prevailing system and to collaborate on a different type of future.

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he latest instalment of the Matters of Concern series at Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’ La Verrière gallery in Brussels is a show by French-Guadeloupean artist Minia Biabiany. The title Musa Nuit is a reference to the flower of the banana tree, renowned for its medicinal properties and as a healing agent for the uterus.

Biabiany’s sculptural drawings, objects and weavings fuse traditional skills with local and organic materials to evoke Caribbean women’s bodies as witnesses to her country’s colonial past.

It’s a difficult and complex narrative that she fragments and recomposes – both politically yet directly personal and intimate. Guadeloupe

is a matrifocal society. “And one of the hypotheses to understand that organization is that many enslaved people came from matrifocal societies,” she says. This puts into question how women today relate to their past and raises questions that are all entangled. “Everything is woven together.”

For La Verrière, Biabiany presents a series of woven sheds that house curved basket plinths made from wicker resembling the long and maternal arms of an embrace. On the plinths are sculptures made from wood she found in her own garden after a recent hurricane. The whole exhibition structure is made locally. “It’s about not just exploring ecological ideas in my work, but actually acting on that in how I practice and exhibit,” she says.

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MINIA BIABIANY Gabrielle Kennedy

One of the exhibited sculptural video installations is Toli Toli, which explores Biabiany’s more personal relationship with her homeland.

The title refers to a song sang by children there in the 1950s about finding a toli toli – the chrysalid of a small night butterfly. Children would hold one tip of it with their fingers, letting the other end wiggle and point in all directions, asking it to show them the way to all the places they know, and dream about.

Wooden sculpture, 2020 Courtesy of the artist © Minia Biabiany

For this exhibition she started with drawings based on female sexual organs. “I begin with one part of the body, which really enhances my feeling there,” she says. “I explore the perception of the body and its space. I connect it to my heritage, my lineage and how what happened in the past exists through my own physicality.”

It’s a past that’s impossible to grapple with. “Fifty years ago we had an independence movement that failed,” Biabiany says. “And since then the critics of the very specific colonial situation of Guadeloupe have been shy. It’s only very recently that this has slowly started to change. But silence can be so complex.”

“For me this is about a double gaze,” she says. “Both on space and politics that has been silenced. I think looking at the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement it is clear that what we need now are new ways of communicating the pain and discrimination of the past that shape our present and the will for a different type of future.”

It’s an important point and characteristically humble but wise.

Semiotics in language can often reveal its problematic core. “I question how language is a system that shape us and how my thinking can really contribute back to it,” she says. “We need to think about and

Each of the exhibited wooden sculptures captures this feeling in a narrative. One is an elongated object that begins as if travelling through time. The journey starts with bumps, the fingers moving through a hilly terrain that ends in a sudden void –a gap in the carved wood that leaves the fingers unstable and insecure. Across the narrow void a different rough and uneven sensation begins.

The tactile journey explores Guadeloupe’s history and specifically the start of the European invasion of the Caribbean in 1493 – some of the islands still have the official status of a British Overseas Territory – and the strangely timed volcano that erupted shortly after.

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Installation The unity is submarine from the exhibition “In the Belly of the Whale”, 2016, Witte de With, Rotterdam (Netherlands).

Courtesy of the artist © Minia Biabiany

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work on an actualized and enriched system reviewing how we label our realities.”

In another installation, sea debris is coated and crusty with salt lines beneath suspended ropes.

It’s an allegory for a tragic 1962 Air France plane crash that killed everyone on board. The story was that the plane en route to Guadalupe then Paris crashed into a mountain, but fisherman below said they saw the plane explode in the air. The French Bureau of Investigation will not release official reports of its findings until 2029, but in Guadeloupe the talk has also considered it to be French state terrorism. “When memories are starved they can be erased very fast,” says Biabiany.

It’s this sort of intimacy with the past that all her work celebrates.

It captures attention than cleverly redirects it to a more complex and nuanced place. “I do think a lot about how to redirect the gaze and what that journey to a new place should entail,” she says.

And it was this focus on experimenting with the relationship between art and knowledge that convinced La Verrière’s curator Guillaume Desanges to invite Biabiany in his Matters of Concern series, which began in 2019 and borrows its name from part of the title of an essay by philosopher Bruno Latour – Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern (2003). “I am really interested in how everything over the past year starts to align,” he says. “Topics that were once points of departure are now the same perspective. The narrative around racism can connect with what is going on in feminism, ecology, and economics. It’s really all about domination and power, and the core of Minia’s work I feel is really is about this overlap.” /

Relation, 2014 Black-and-white analogue photograph, work document Courtesy of the artist © Minia Biabiany

Minia Biabiany: Musa Nuit, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’ La Verrière gallery, Brussels, until 5 September. fondationdentreprisehermes.org miniabiabiany.com 101

ONLINE CULTURE WARS — DISNOVATION.ORG

ONLINE CULTURE WARS — DISNOVATION.ORG

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A FLAG OF NORTH KOREA

FLAG OF NORTH KOREA

NORTH KOREAN CHEERLEADERS

AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (COMMUNIST)

ONE BELT, ONE ROAD

ONE BELT, ONE ROAD « I DON’T WANT 60 CENTS, 50 IS ENOUGH! »

NORTH KOREAN CHEERLEADERS

« I DON’T WANT 60 CENTS, 50 IS ENOUGH! » GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

N

CROSS & CROWN INTERNET WATER ARMY, CHINA

INTERNET W CH

B

WHITE POLO SHIR BEE

BEE

« I AM A FIFTY CENTER, AND PROUD OF IT! »

« I AM A FIFTY CENTER, AND PROUD OF IT! »

NUCLEAR WEAPON, NORTH KOREA

NUCLEAR WEAPON, NORTH KOREA

DONALD TRUMP WITH KIM JONG-UN

« UNHEALTHY INTERNET » COMIC STRIPS

« UNHEALTHY INTERNET » COMIC STRIPS

FLAG OF CHINA

C

KIM JONG-UN

KIM JONG-UN

RED STAR OS

FLAG OF CHINA

RED STAR OS

WECHAT APP

WECHAT APP JOSEPH STALIN (MEME)

SINA WEIBO

INTERNET CULTURE BUSINESS LICENSE

D

JAROSŁAW KACZYŃ

SINA WEIBO EXPRESSVPN

INTERNET CULTURE BUSINESS LICENSE SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

BAIDU, INC.

WINNIE-THE-POOH XI JINPING

BAIDU, INC. VLADIMIR PUTIN AS PEPE THE FROG

WINNIE-THE-POOH

XI JINPING TENCENT QQ

VLADISLAV SURKO

TENCENT QQ

PEPPA PIG

PEPPA PIG

E

NICOLÁS MADURO BIAOQING MEME

BIAOQING MEME

BIAOQING MEME

BIAOQING MEME

SOCKPUPPET (INTERNET)

WINNIE-THE-POOH MEME

SOCKPUPPET (

WINNIE-THE-POOH MEME

F

BIG YELLOW DUCK MEME

BIG YELLOW INTE

POPE FRANCIS

LEFTYPOL MEME (8CHAN)

“ECONOMIC-LEFT”

I

ANTIFA MOVEMENT (ANTIFASCHISTISCHE AKTION) ANTIFA MOVEMENT K1 (ANTIFASCHISTISCHE AKTION) GRITTY MASCOT / MEME K2 GRITTY MASCOT / MEME DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE PROTEST K4 DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE PROTEST NAOMI KLEIN, NO LOGO K5 NAOMI KLEIN, NO LOGO GENDER K6 GENDER L JUDITH BUTLER, GENDER TROUBLE K7 JUDITH BUTLER, GENDER TROUBLE NIKE (COLIN KAEPERNICK COMMERCIAL) K8NIKE (COLIN KAEPERNICK COMMERCIAL) CONSTRUCTION WORKER (EMOJI) K9 CONSTRUCTION WORKER (EMOJI) CABLE NEWS NETWORK (CNN) K9 CABLE NEWS NETWORK (CNN) BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION (BBC) BRITISH K10 BROADCASTING CORPORATION (BBC) GONDOLA / MEME L2 GONDOLA / MEME STUDENTS MOCKING NATIVE AMERICAN L4STUDENTS MOCKING NATIVE AMERICAN M GAY CLOWN PUTIN MEME L5 GAY CLOWN PUTIN MEME THE GUARDIAN L6 THE GUARDIAN CHOKER L10 CHOKER REFUGEES WELCOME M4 REFUGEES WELCOME SWJ (SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR) M5 SWJ (SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR) CONTRAPOINTS (YOUTUBER) M6 CONTRAPOINTS (YOUTUBER) COLIBRI (POLITICAL COMPASS MEME) M7 COLIBRI (POLITICAL COMPASS MEME) AVOCADO (MILLENNIAL FOOD TREND) M7 AVOCADO (MILLENNIAL FOOD TREND) N BLACK LIVES MATTER M8 BLACK LIVES MATTER ALICIA GARZA, PATRISSE CULLORS, OPAL TOMETI ALICIA GARZA, M9 PATRISSE CULLORS, OPAL TOMETI ANGELA NAGLE, KILL ALL NORMIES M10 ANGELA NAGLE, KILL ALL NORMIES PORKY (MAN OF THE BOURGEOISIE) PORKY (MAN OF THE BOURGEOISIE) N1 LEFTISTN2 POLITICALLY INCORRECT BOARD (8CHAN) LEFTIST POLITICALLY INCORRECT BOARD (8CHAN) N4 TUMBLR TUMBLR BUZZFEED (WEBSITE) N5 BUZZFEED (WEBSITE) O RAINBOW FLAG (LGBT MOVEMENT) N6 RAINBOW FLAG (LGBT MOVEMENT) GAY PRIDE PARADE N7 GAY PRIDE PARADE EMOJI VERSION 12.0 (POLITICALLY CORRECT) EMOJI N8 VERSION 12.0 (POLITICALLY CORRECT) PUSSY RIOT N10 PUSSY RIOT 8CHAN (/LEFTYPOL/) O1 8CHAN (/LEFTYPOL/) OCCUPY WALL STREET O3 OCCUPY WALL STREET WOJAK / FEELS GUY (MEME) O4 WOJAK / FEELS GUY (MEME) P PEPE THE FROG / BOY’S CLUB COMIC O5 PEPE THE FROG / BOY’S CLUB COMIC GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON O6 GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SPOONIES (DISABILITY OR CHRONIC ILLNESS) SPOONIES O6 (DISABILITY OR CHRONIC ILLNESS) STANFORD UNIVERSITY O7 STANFORD UNIVERSITY SNOWFLAKE GENERATION O7 SNOWFLAKE GENERATION REDDIT O9 REDDIT EMMA GOLDMAN (ANARCHIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY) P1 (ANARCHIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY) EMMA GOLDMAN LIVEJOURNAL (WEBSITE) P6 LIVEJOURNAL (WEBSITE) Q MULTIGENDER OTHERKIN P7 MULTIGENDER OTHERKIN CHRISTOPHER WYLIE P8 CHRISTOPHER WYLIE COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA RESEARCH PROJECT P9 COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA RESEARCH PROJECT FEMEN P10 FEMEN DALAI LAMA Q3 DALAI LAMA PACIFISM Q4 PACIFISM A DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE Q5OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE A DECLARATION R THE PIRATE BAY Q6 THE PIRATE BAY SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL Q7 SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL LYSERGIC ACID DIETHYLAMIDE (LSD) Q8 LYSERGIC ACID DIETHYLAMIDE (LSD) BLACK HOODIE Q9 BLACK HOODIE CANNABIS Q10 CANNABIS YELLOW VESTS MOVEMENT R1 YELLOW VESTS MOVEMENT NOAM CHOMSKY R2 NOAM CHOMSKY S DONNA HARAWAY, A CYBORG MANIFESTO R4 DONNA HARAWAY, A CYBORG MANIFESTO ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) R5 ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) JOHN PERRY BARLOW R6 JOHN PERRY BARLOW WIKIPEDIA R7 WIKIPEDIA EDWARD SNOWDEN R10 EDWARD SNOWDEN BLACK FLAG (EMOJI) S1 BLACK FLAG (EMOJI) VNS MATRIX, CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO S3 VNS MATRIX, CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO DONNA HARAWAY S4 DONNA HARAWAY T CHAOS COMPUTER CLUB (CCC) S5 CHAOS COMPUTER CLUB (CCC) CHELSEA MANNING S7 CHELSEA MANNING PAMELA ANDERSON S7 PAMELA ANDERSON JULIAN ASSANGE S8 JULIAN ASSANGE AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (ANARCHIST) T1 AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (ANARCHIST) WILLIAM POWELL, THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOKWILLIAM T2 POWELL, THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK BLACK HAT HACKER T3 BLACK HAT HACKER LOYD BLANKENSHIP, THE HACKER MANIFESTO LOYD T5BLANKENSHIP, THE HACKER MANIFESTO THEODORE KACZYNSKI (A.K.A. THE UNABOMBER) T6 KACZYNSKI (A.K.A. THE UNABOMBER) THEODORE TOR BROWSER T8 TOR BROWSER WIKILEAKS T9 WIKILEAKS MOLOTOV COCKTAIL T10 MOLOTOV COCKTAIL

y Shades Archive, 2017 – ongoing ibition view: Preis der Nationalgalerie, mburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2019 urtesy the artist; Dvir Gallery, Brussels & Tel Aviv; Marconi, Milan; TARO NASU, Tokyo; her Schipper, Berlin to © Andrea Rossetti

102

“ECONOMIC-LEFT”

AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (COMMUNIST) AUTISTIC A1 SCREECHING MEME (COMMUNIST) A1 FORMER SOVIET UNION NATIONAL & POLITICALFORMER SYMBOLSOVIET A2 UNION NATIONAL & POLITICAL SYMBOL A2 FLAG OF NORTH KOREA A3 FLAG OF NORTH KOREA A3 NORTH KOREAN CHEERLEADERS A5 NORTH KOREAN CHEERLEADERS A5 THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE (BRI) A6 THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE (BRI) A6 « I DON’T WANT 60 CENTS, 50 IS ENOUGH! » «A8 I DON’T WANT 60 CENTS, 50 IS ENOUGH! » A8 INTERNET WATER ARMY, CHINA A9 INTERNET WATER ARMY, CHINA A9 CROSS & CROWN A10 CROSS & CROWN A10 01 RED FLAG (EMOJI) B1 RED FLAG (EMOJI) B1 NUCLEAR WEAPON, NORTH KOREA B2 NUCLEAR WEAPON, NORTH KOREA B2 KIM JONG-UN B4 KIM JONG-UN B4 BEE (EMOJI) B5 BEE (EMOJI) B5 « UNHEALTHY INTERNET » COMIC STRIPS, CHINA « UNHEALTHY B6 INTERNET » COMIC STRIPS, CHINA B6 A « I AM A FIFTY CENTER, AND PROUD OF IT! » « IB7 AM A FIFTY CENTER, AND PROUD OF IT! » B7 FLAG OF CHINA B9 FLAG OF CHINA B9 SCREECHING DONALD TRUMP WITH KIM JONG-UN B10 DONALD TRUMP WITH KIM JONG-UNAUTISTICB10 MEME (COMMUNIST) JOSEPH STALIN (MEME) C1 JOSEPH STALIN (MEME) C1

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK (MEME)

C3 SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK (MEME) C3 RED STAR OS C5 RED STAR OS C5 SINA WEIBO C7 SINA WEIBO C7 B WECHAT APP C8 WECHAT APP C8 EXPRESSVPN C9 EXPRESSVPN C9 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA C10 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA C10 VLADIMIR PUTIN AS PEPE THE FROG C10 VLADIMIR PUTIN AS PEPE THE FROG C10 NICOLÁS MADURO D1 NICOLÁS MADURO D1 INTERNET CULTURE BUSINESS LICENSE D4INTERNET CULTURE BUSINESS LICENSE D4 XI JINPING D5 XI JINPING D5 C WINNIE-THE-POOH D6 WINNIE-THE-POOH D6 TENCENT QQ D7 TENCENT QQ D7 BAIDU, INC. D8 BAIDU, INC. D8 PEPPA PIG (CARTOON) E3 PEPPA PIG (CARTOON) E3 BIAOQING MEME E4 BIAOQING MEME E4 JOSEPH STALIN (MEME) BIAOQING MEME E5 BIAOQING MEME E5 WINNIE-THE-POOH MEME E6 WINNIE-THE-POOH MEME E6 SOCKPUPPET (INTERNET) E9 SOCKPUPPET (INTERNET) E9 D POLITICS AS THEATRE E10 POLITICS AS THEATRE E10 HUGO CHÁVEZ F1 HUGO CHÁVEZ F1 LEFTYPOL MEME (8CHAN) F3 LEFTYPOL MEME (8CHAN) F3 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA F4 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA F4 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA F6 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA F6 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA F7 THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA F7 EXTINCTION REBELLION MOVEMENT F8 EXTINCTION REBELLION MOVEMENT F8 NICOLÁS MADURO E BIG YELLOW DUCK MEME F9 BIG YELLOW DUCK MEME F9 POPE FRANCIS F10 POPE FRANCIS F10 K. MARX AND F. ENGELS, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO K. MARX ANDG1 F. ENGELS, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO G1 SMART WOJAK G2 SMART WOJAK G2 ILHAN OMAR G3 ILHAN OMAR G3 YELLOW VESTS MOVEMENT G5 YELLOW VESTS MOVEMENT G5 GUERRILLA GIRLS G7 GUERRILLA GIRLS G7 F GRETA THUNBERG G9 GRETA THUNBERG G9 JACK MA G10 JACK MA G10 LEFTYPOL SOVIET SKELLINGTON H1 LEFTYPOL SOVIET SKELLINGTON H1 ANONYMOUS (GROUP) H3 ANONYMOUS (GROUP) H3 ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ H4 ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ H4 HUGO CHÁVEZ SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE SECOND SEX H6 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE SECOND SEX H6 GREENPEACE H7 GREENPEACE H7 JUAN GUAIDÓ H10 JUAN GUAIDÓ H10 G SLUTWALK I9 SLUTWALK I9 #METOO MOVEMENT I9 #METOO MOVEMENT I9 FAKE IPHONES I10 FAKE IPHONES I10 JACOBIN (MAGAZINE) J1 JACOBIN (MAGAZINE) K. MARXJ1AND F. ENGELS, JEREMY CORBIN J3 JEREMY CORBINTHE COMMUNIST J3 MANIFESTO YANIS VAROUFAKIS J4 YANIS VAROUFAKIS J4 DIEM25 (DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE MOVEMENT 2025) DIEM25 (DEMOCRACY J5 IN EUROPE MOVEMENT 2025) J5 H BERNIE SANDERS J5 BERNIE SANDERS J5 TARANA BURKE (#METOO) J7 TARANA BURKE (#METOO) J7 ALYSSA MILANO (#METOO) J8 ALYSSA MILANO (#METOO) J8 HOLLYWOOD J9 HOLLYWOOD J9 ORDINARY PEOPLE (AKA. NORMIES) J10 ORDINARY PEOPLE (AKA. NORMIES) J10

HUGO CHÁVEZ

LEFTYPOL MEME (8CHAN)

SPUTNIK (NEWS AGENCY)

G

EXTINCTION REBELLION

EXTINCTION REBELLION

JACK MA K. MARX AND F. ENGELS, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

H

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ ILHAN OMAR

ILHAN OMAR

BEYONCÉ GRETA THUNBERG

GRETA THUNBERG GUERRILLA GIRLS

GUERRILLA GIRLS

BAR

SMART WOJAK

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE SECOND SEX

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE SECOND SEX

SMART WOJAK

JUAN GUAIDÓ

SHEPARD FAIREY, HOPE

I

STARB SLUTWALK

SLUTWALK

FAKE IPHONES

LEFTYPOL SOVIET SKELLINGTON

ARAB SPRING

J

JACOBIN (MAGAZINE) JEREMY CORBYN

JEREMY CORBYN

TARANA BURKE

BERNIE SANDERS

ALYSSA MILANO

YANIS VAROUFAKIS

YANIS VAROUFAKIS

K

ALYSSABERNIE MILANOSANDERS

TARANA BURKE

NIKE NAOMI KLEIN, NO LOGO

NIKE

NAOMI KLEIN, NO LOGO MAINSTREAM MEDIA (MSM)

JUDITH BUTLER, JUDITH BUTLER, K1 GENDER TROUBLE GENDER TROUBLE GENDER GENDER DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE K2 PROTEST PROTEST K4 ANTIFA K5 ANTIFA GRITTY GRITTY K6 L CHOKER GAY CLOWN PUTIN GAY CLOWN PUTIN K7 MEME MEME K8 K9 CONTROVERSY OVER STUDENTS CONTROVERSY OVER STUDENTS MOCKING NATIVE AMERICAN MOCKING NATIVE AMERICAN K9 K10 COLIBRI COLIBRI FAST FOOD L2 L4 M “SOCIAL JUSTICE “SOCIAL JUSTICE L5 WARRIORˮ WARRIORˮ CONTRAPOINTS CONTRAPOINTS L6 (YOUTUBER) (YOUTUBER) ANGELA NAGLE, L10 ALICIA GARZA, PATRISSE ALICIA GARZA, PATRISSE KILL ALL NORMIES CULLORS, & OPAL TOMETI CULLORS, & OPAL TOMET M4 M5 LEFTIST POLITICALLY LEFTIST POLITICALLY INCORRECT BOARD INCORRECT BOARD JEZEBEL (WEBSITE) JEZEBEL (WEBSITE) M6 (8CHAN) (8CHAN) M7 M7 N GONDOLA GONDOLA INSTAGRAM BUZZFEED (WEBSITE) BUZZFEED (WEBSITE) M8 RAINBOW FLAG RAINBOW FLAG PORKY PORKY (LGBT MOVEMENT) (LGBT MOVEMENT) (MAN OF THE BOURGEOISIE) (MAN OF THE BOURGEOISIE) M9 TUMBLR TUMBLR EMOJI VERSION 12.0 EMOJI VERSION 12.0 M10 N1 GAY PRIDE PARADE GAY PRIDE PARADE N2 VICE (MAGAZINE) N4 SNOWFLAKE GENERATION SNOWFLAKE GENERATION N5 PUSSY RIOT O N6 8CHAN 8CHAN N7 /LEFTYPOL/ /LEFTYPOL/ N8 PEPE THE FROG / PEPE THE FROG / SPOONIES SPOONIES OCCUPY WALL STREET OCCUPY BOY’S CLUB COMIC WALL STREET BOY’S CLUB COMIC N10 (OWS) (OWS) WOJAK / FEELS GUY WOJAK / FEELS GUY REDDIT REDDIT (MEME) (MEME) O1 O3 O4 YELLOW VESTS P O5 MOVEMENT MULTIGENDER OTHERKIN MULTIGENDER OTHERKIN O6 LIVEJOURNAL (WEBSITE) LIVEJOURNAL (WEBSITE) O6 CHRISTOPHER WYLIE CHRISTOPHER WYLIE FEMEN O7 COMPUTATIONAL COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA RESEARCH PROPAGANDA RESEARCH O7 PROJECT PROJECT O9 P1 P6 EMMA GOLDMAN Q EMMA GOLDMAN P7 THE PIRATE BAY THE PIRATE BAY SOY PACIFISM PACIFISM P8 (MEAL REP BURNING MAN P9 SITUATIONIST SITUATIONIST P10 INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL A DECLARATION OFDALAI THE LAMA A DECLARATION OF THE DALAI LAMA LYSERGIC ACID LYSERGIC ACID Q3 INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE DIETHYLAMIDE (LSD) DIETHYLAMIDE (LSD) Q4 Q5 R Q6 DONNA HARAWAY, DONNA HARAWAY, A CYBORG MANIFESTO A CYBORG MANIFESTO Q7 BLACK HOODIE BLACK HOODIE Q8 Q9 ELECTRONIC FRONTIER ELECTRONIC FRONTIER WIKIPEDIA WIKIPEDIA FOUNDATION (EFF) FOUNDATION (EFF) JOHN PERRY BARLOW JOHN PERRY BARLOW Q10 R1 NOAM CHOMSKY NOAM CHOMSKY R2 EDWARD SNOWDEN S R4 CHAOS COMPUTER CLUB CHAOS COMPUTER CLUB R5 (CCC) (CCC) JULIAN ASSANGE JULIAN ASSANGE R6 PIZZAGAT PAMELA PAMELA T VNS MATRIX, VNS MATRIX, ANDERSON ANDERSON R7 CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO R10 DONNA HARAWAY DONNA HARAWAY S1 S3 S4 T WILLIAM POWELL, THE WILLIAM POWELL, THE S5 ANARCHIST COOKBOOK ANARCHIST COOKBOOK CHELSEA MANNING CHELSEA MANNING ANARCHY (SYMBOL) S7 BLACK HAT HACKER BLACK HAT HACKER THE MENTOR, THE MENTOR, AUTISTIC SCREECHING THEODORE KACZYNSKI THEODORE KACZYNSKI AUTISTIC SCREECHING WIKILEAKS WIKILEAKS THE HACKER MANIFESTO THE HACKER MANIFESTO MEME (ANARCHIST) (A.K.A. THE UNABOMBER) (A.K.A. THE UNABOMBER) MEME (ANARCHIST) MOLOTOV COCKTAIL S7 TOR BROWSER TOR BROWSER S8 01 02 03 01 04 02 05 03 06 04 07 05 08 06 09 07 10 08 11 09 T1 T2 T3 T5 T6 T8 T9 T10

“LIBERTAR “LIBE

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A GÉNÉRATION IDENTITAIRE GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA)

CODE FOR « FOURTEEN WORDS / HEIL HITLER »

BOSTON DYNAMICS DOG

JARED TAYLOR RODRIGO DUTERTE

PEPE THE FROG / NAZI PEPE

CROSS & CROWN

WATER ARMY, HINA

AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (WHITE SUPREMACIST)

DISCORD EMOTE

B WHITE POLO SHIRT

BREITBART NEWS NETWORK

AUGUSTO PINOCHET

DONALD TRUMP WITH KIM JONG-UN THE DAILY STORMER (WEBSITE)

RICHARD SPENCER

C

FOX NEWS CHANNEL

JÁNOS ÁDER PEPE THE FROG / ANGRY PEPE

FREE SPEECH CONCEPT WEAPONIZED BY ALT-RIGHT

JAROSŁAW KACZYŃSKI

STEVE BANNON

THE REBEL MEDIA (WEBSITE)

EXPRESSVPN

MIKE PENCE

/POL/ POLITICALLY INCORRECT BOARD (4CHAN)

HARAMBE MEME INTERNET TROLL

ARMY OF JESUS (COMMUNITY)

VLADIMIR PUTIN AS PEPE THE FROG

NECKBEARDS

VLADISLAV SURKOV

ABC NEWS (FAKE NEWS WEBSITE) DONALD TUSK

INTERNET)

PEPE THE FROG / SMUG FROG

POLICE OFFICER

TOPKEK (CAKE)

E

SILDENAFIL (VIAGRA) GAB (SOCIAL NETWORK) JAIR BOLSONARO

W DUCK MEME

DONALD TRUMP

F

INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY

POPE FRANCIS

HOLY BIBLE

MITT ROMNEY

JEB BUSH

SPUTNIK (NEWS AGENCY)

G

SHOTGUNS

COWBOYS

PATRICK J. BUCHANAN, THE DEATH OF THE WEST

INARTICULATE YELLING

JACK MA CHRISTIAN FAMILY BEYONCÉ

KING KONG

BORIS JOHNSON

BARACK OBAMA

H

ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENTS

PICKUP TRUCK

JUAN GUAIDÓ SPURDO SPÄRDE

PARIS HILTON & NICOLE RICHIE

SOUTH PARK BODYBUILDING

SHEPARD FAIREY, HOPE

RUSSIAN TROLLS ON REDDIT STARBUCKS CORPORATION

I

STOP TRUMP MOVEMENT

FAKE IPHONES MICROSOFT CORPORATION (MS) ARAB SPRING

ANGELA MERKEL KIM KARDASHIAN

HILLARY CLINTON

CHAD STACY

MONSTER ENERGY (ENERGY DRINK)

FIGHT CLUB (TYLER DURDEN)

J

JAMES BOND (LITERARY CHARACTER)

CLICKHOLE (WEBSITE)

K MAINSTREAM MEDIA (MSM)

FREE BSD AYN RAND, ATLAS SHRUGGED EMMANUEL MACRON CHOKER

LAUREN SOUTHERN

L

MILO YIANNOPOULOS

FAST FOOD GOOGLE LLC

M

AIRBNB, I NC. APPLE, INC. ANGELA NAGLE, KILL ALL NORMIES

JORDAN PETERSON

MARK ZUCKERBERG

FACEBOOK

N

INSTAGRAM

« RED PILL » (MATRIX MOVIE)

AMAZON ECHO (ALEXA SPEAKER)

CGI INFLUENCERS (LIL MIQUELA) VICE (MAGAZINE)

O

PUSSY RIOT SPIDER

NON PLAYABLE CHARACTER (NPC)

MARS (PLANET)

RED PILL REDDIT

8CHAN

NEIL STRAUSS, THE GAME

YELLOW VESTS MOVEMENT

P

FEMEN

H AMERICAN PSYCHO (MOVIE)

SINGULARITY UNIVERSITY

4CHAN

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Q

TRANSHUMANISM (H+)

BURNING MAN

SOYLENT (MEAL REPLACEMENT)

ELON MUSK COCAINE

PINK WOJAK

PETER THIEL

R

DARYUSH VALIZADEH (ROOSH V) SEASTEADING MEN GOING THEIR OWN WAY (MGTOW)

BITCOIN

UFO (UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT)

GAVIN MCINNES

S

EDWARD SNOWDEN

MEAL READY TO EAT

PIZZAGATE CONSPIRACY THEORY

PROUD BOY TATTOO NOTRE DAME FIRE CONSPIRACY THEORIES QANON

T TIN FOIL HAT ANARCHY (SYMBOL) ILLUMINATI

MOLOTOV COCKTAIL

10

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PREPPERS REPTILIANS

13

ERTARIAN”

ALEX JONES

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AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (ANARCHO-CAPITALIST)

20

“ECONOMIC-RIGHT”

E TI

D

4 CHAN /POL/

PEPE THE FROG / DONALD TRUMP

A11 A12 A13 A14 A15 A16 A17 A19 A20 B11 B12 B17 B18 B19 B20 C11 C14 C15 C16 C17 C18 C19 C20 D11 D12 D13 D14 D15 D16 D17 D18 E13 E13 E14 E15 E16 E16 E17 E18 E20 F11 F12 F17 F18 F19 G13 G14 G16 G17 G17 G18 G19 G20 H11 H12 H13 H14 H15 H16 H18 H18 H19 H20 I11 I11 I12 I13 I14 I17 J12 J14 J16 J17 J18 J18 J19 J20

GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA) PEPE THE FROG / NAZI PEPE BOSTON DYNAMICS DOG DISCORD EMOTE (EMOJI) 14/88 (CODE FOR « FOURTEEN WORDS / HEIL HITLER ») JARED TAYLOR GÉNÉRATION IDENTITAIRE AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (WHITE SUPREMACIST) WHITE POLO SHIRT JÁNOS ÁDER RODRIGO DUTERTE BREITBART NEWS NETWORK RICHARD SPENCER AUGUSTO PINOCHET JAROSŁAW KACZYŃSKI PEPE THE FROG / ANGRY PEPE FOX NEWS CHANNEL THE DAILY STORMER (WEBSITE) FREE SPEECH CONCEPT WEAPONIZED BY ALT-RIGHT STEVE BANNON THE REBEL MEDIA (WEBSITE) MIKE PENCE VLADISLAV SURKOV ARMY OF JESUS (COMMUNITY) INTERNET TROLL NECKBEARDS HARAMBE MEME PEPE THE FROG / DONALD TRUMP 4CHAN /POL/ POLITICALLY INCORRECT BOARD (4CHAN) ABC NEWS (FAKE NEWS WEBSITE) DONALD TUSK PEPE THE FROG / SMUG PEPE TOPKEK (CAKE) POLICE OFFICER SILDENAFIL (VIAGRA) GAB (SOCIAL NETWORK) JAIR BOLSONARO DONALD TRUMP SPUTNIK (NEWS AGENCY) INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY HOLY BIBLE JEB BUSH MITT ROMNEY BORIS JOHNSON FNN (FAKE NEWS NETWORK) SHOTGUNS CHRISTIAN FAMILY COWBOYS PATRICK J. BUCHANAN, THE DEATH OF THE WEST INARTICULATE YELLING KING KONG BEYONCÉ BARACK OBAMA RUSSIAN TROLLS ON REDDIT SPURDO SPÄRDE PICKUP TRUCK SOUTH PARK ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENTS TEA PARTY BODYBUILDING PARIS HILTON & NICOLE RICHIE SHEPARD FAIREY, HOPE ARAB SPRING STARBUCKS CORPORATION MICROSOFT CORPORATION (MS) ANGELA MERKEL STOP TRUMP MOVEMENT CHAD & STACY AMAZON, INC. HILLARY CLINTON MONSTER ENERGY (ENERGY DRINK) KIM KARDASHIAN CLICKHOLE (WEBSITE) JAMES BOND (LITERARY CHARACTER) FIGHT CLUB (TYLER DURDEN)

K11 K12 K13 K16 K17 K18 K20 L11 L11 L15 L18 L19 M11 M12 M13 M14 M16 M17 M20 N12 N13 N19 O11 O12 O14 O16 O16 O17 O18 O19 O20 P11 P13 P15 P17 P18 P19 P19 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q19 Q19 R11 R12 R14 R14 R15 R17 R18 R19 S12 S13 S14 S16 S17 S20 T11 T12 T13 T14 T15 T18 T19 T20

MAINSTREAM MEDIA (MSM) FREE BSD EMMANUEL MACRON ALEXANDRE BENALLA UBER TECHNOLOGIES, INC. AYN RAND, ATLAS SHRUGGED LAUREN SOUTHERN ALIBABA GROUP FAST FOOD GOOGLE LLC LIBRA (CRYPTOCURRENCY BY FACEBOOK) MILO YIANNOPOULOS INSTAGRAM AIRBNB, INC. APPLE, INC. FACEBOOK, INC. MARK ZUCKERBERG DOLLARS JORDAN PETERSON CGI INFLUENCERS (LIL MIQUELA) AMAZON ECHO (ALEXA SPEAKER) « RED PILL » (MATRIX MOVIE) VICE (MAGAZINE) DORITOS (TORTILLA CHIP CRISP) MARS (PLANET) 8CHAN (IMAGEBOARD WEBSITE) SPIDER (EMOJI) REDDIT (WEBSITE) NON PLAYABLE CHARACTER (NPC) RED PILL NEIL STRAUSS, THE GAME YELLOW VESTS MOVEMENT ELON MUSK SINGULARITY UNIVERSITY AMERICAN PSYCHO (MOVIE) 4CHAN (IMAGEBOARD WEBSITE) FIGHT CLUB (MOVIE) FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL SOYLENT (MEAL REPLACEMENT) COCAINE TRANSHUMANISM (H+) PINK WOJAK SNOWFLAKE GENERATION (RIGHT WING) INCELS (INVOLUNTARY CELIBATES) DARYUSH VALIZADEH (ROOSH V) YOUTUBE FANTASYLAND PETER THIEL UFO (UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT) THE SEASTEADING INSTITUTE BITCOIN GAVIN MCINNES MEN GOING THEIR OWN WAY (MGTOW) PIZZAGATE CONSPIRACY THEORY NOTRE DAME FIRE CONSPIRACY THEORIES INFOWARS (FAKE NEWS WEBSITE) QANON (FAR-RIGHT CONSPIRACY THEORY) PROUD BOY TATTOO MEAL READY TO EAT ANARCHY (SYMBOL) ILLUMINATI (CONSPIRACY THEORY) REPTILIANS (CONSPIRACY THEORY) ALEX JONES TIN FOIL HAT THE CATHEDRAL (NEOREACTIONARY MOVEMENT) DOOMSDAY PREPPERS AUTISTIC SCREECHING MEME (ANARCHO-CAPITALIST)

PROJECTS & PERSONALITIES BLACK

HORITARIAN”

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104 DISNOVATION.ORG

by EMMA SINGLETON

The Orientation of Opinions It’s no wonder that Disnovation.org called the video element of their Online Culture Wars project The Persuadables. When it comes to opinion making of any kind, persuade can seem to be the sheep’s clothing of the manipulative wolf in online cultures. Creating and plotting their own version of a Political Compass, we see how closely they map Donald Trump, King Kong, and Paris Hilton.

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ultures and socio-political thinking can often be swayed by the psychological influences of a cool Nike campaign, a social media celebrity or even the charged chants from a local football team. More and more these days, the online world is playing an important role in the way many people choose to understand civil society.

Instead of policies and trade we are more fixated with understanding the political and social positioning of Barbie, our childhood coolgirl influences, or the endearingly slow-witted opinions of Winnie the Pooh. We end up forming our own social and political bubbles depending on how good the skinny-mocha-decaf Frappuccino from Starbucks we just ordered is. There is a slow burning, yet highly flammable “over-politicization of seemingly mundane topics, products, practices, and cultural elements”.

In Online Culture Wars, shown this year at the BIO 26 biennial of design in Ljubljana, Disnovation. org navigate this convoluted world of “ubiquitous social networks” through the lens of a “Political Compass meme.”

This work was initiated by Disnovation.org’s founders Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska, who work with a number of collaborators including media artist Baruch Gottlieb for this project. An existing type of meme, it allows its creator to arrange their own political views on a diagram in two dimensions (Authoritarian <—> Libertarian and Economic-Left <—> Economic-Right).

Sometimes these memes are created as a joke and other times they provide a more authentic portrait of their creator and contemporary society.

The single compass that Disnovation.org has developed is, in their own words, “the result of an overlay, an average and the collation of hundreds of existing memes”.

Maigret and Roszkowska don’t go into much explanation about how they chose to compose their compass. From the outside, it seems they scraped their resources from a range of existing online sources in order to create a visual discussion point, showcasing how almost everything from politicians to cartoon characters have become a point polarization. “The result is not supposed to be a scientific truth. It is rather a way to offer a visual representation of the ongoing frictions, and the culture wars that are going on online.”

Disnovation.org are aware of the fact that the placement of each element is derived from the orientations of the Political Compass meme creators’ own political and social alignments. This means that every placement is based on a certain bias and therefore is open to debate. They explain that the structure of such a compass “also reveals some type of dissatisfaction with the two classical directions of this compass that are not able to fully represent contemporary political frictions and challenges”.

Studying the compass map of Online Culture Wars, a viewer may be prompted to try and understand why certain characters are where they are. Is King Kong (G20) presumed more economically right because he is iconic for the billionaires of Manhattan, or do his shackles represent the shackles of the workers bound to big businesses? Then a viewer might also wonder why someone

would place Vice magazine (O11) as a libertarian leaning company – is this because they themselves believe in maximizing personal freedom or is this placement justified by the company’s own social standpoint? It is also interesting to think about why #metoo founder Tarana Burke (J7) is positioned (right next to Bernie Sanders, but a good distance from Stalin) in the quadrant for The Party, and then move on to debate black hoodies (Q9) close placement to both cannabis (Q10) and Edward Snowden (R10).

Each inquiry into understanding an element’s placement seems to come with two main branches of questioning, one into the orientations of the creator and the other into the background of the element.

Understanding this cartography of Online Culture Wars and the placements of recognizable online phenomenon permits a pondering of the map that is both nuanced and basic: who are the winners and who are the losers? It exposes how social media affects the ecosystems that keep our societies functioning and, in some respects, exposes a manipulation of public opinion by platform biases. Disnovation.org themselves have said: “The work graphically interprets how brands, celebrities, and symbols become linked along an ideological spectrum.” / You can download a PDF version of Online Culture Wars at disnovation.org Video link: disnovation.org/ocw.php#video 105

106 THE RIGHTS OF COLOUR

Hella Jongerius for Dezeen, 2020

E

ven if you are unfamiliar with the work of Anish Kapoor or Stuart Semple, chances are that you’re familiar with their names – possibly due to the feud that had the art world polarized for a while and rumbles on. The black-pinkSemple-Kapoor story has been told countless times, but it still doesn’t have a closing chapter of conciliation.

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by EMMA LUCEK

A quick recap. In 2016, Kapoor posted a photo to Instagram of his middle finger swathed in the “World’s Pinkest Pink” paint pigment with the caption “Up yours #pink.” The photo was a pointed reply to fellow artist Semple, who had expressly banned Kapoor from acquiring the pink pigment he had created and requiring online purchasers of the colour to sign a legal declaration that they were not affil-

BLACK

Polarized Palettes “You say eether and I say eyether, You say neether and I say nyther”…

You say pinker, I say blacker.

There is a nuts and bolts aspect to colour. From the past to the present, the rights to use certain colours have been a matter of decree, law or the commercial market. But when those rights become about artistic ownership it opens a can of controversy. iated with Kapoor in any way. Why? Because in the same year Kapoor had been granted exclusive rights for the artistic use of Vantablack.

Developed by Surrey NanoSystems, the patented material (purportedly the darkest in existence) – not colour – absorbs 99.65% of light. Kapoor’s monopoly was openly condemned. Semple was not having an indulgent one-man hissy fit, many other artists in various shades of

pissed off also wanted to use Vantablack in their own works, or simply and sincerely believed that colours should be freely accessible to all artists. Even now, Semple’s sentiments couldn’t be clearer.

“Personally, I just think it's dirty rotten behaviour to try and use power and wealth to control a colour.

We are all going to die, nobody ever owns anything, you look after it for

a bit. That's the big thing about art – the good stuff outlives us. That's why art wins. You can’t really own a colour, yeah maybe legally you can trademark its use for some specific purposes and you can argue about who can reproduce it, but you can’t really own it because rights can’t be held in your hand. You can buy a tube of paint, you can own that, but there's nothing to stop another artist buying a very similar tube... you 107

THE RIGHTS OF COLOUR Emma Luceck

know it's kind of a waste of time.

Really what matters is what you do with colour. What you want to say with it, what you'll create out of it."

After four years, it’s perhaps interesting to note that it wasn’t until this March that Kapoor announced his first artwork using Vantablack would have its public premiere at next year's Venice Art Biennale.

Quite aside from this continued dispute but directly as a result of the material exclusivity, artist-in-residence at the MIT Centre for Art, Science and Technology, Diemut Strebe, pushed the proverbial envelope by presenting The Redemption of Vanity last year. A culmination of five years of research, she made a 16.78 natural carat yellow diamond 'disappear' by covering it with a material. Strebe, with the support of MIT scientists and necstlab had created the blackest black ever – blacker even than Vantablack – that absorbed a whopping 99.995% of incoming light. And in case you were wondering, it is available to use.

This blackest-black arms race got me thinking about colour ownership and how one can define – let alone own – a colour. There is historical precedent to this effect, of course – Julius Caesar claimed exclusive rights to purple robes to himself and his family. In Renaissance Italy, a law was passed by which brides were not allowed to wear crimson cloth (and ditch the fur and gold).

And in France, the 1960s artist Yves Klein was granted a patent for the paint that he called International Klein Blue.

Klein said: “I seek to put the spectator in front of the fact that colour is an individual, a character, a personality,” conceiving his paintings as living presences, not material things, suggesting also that colours are not static. This is in line with the perspective of designer Hella 108

Colourful Blacks, 2010, Hella Jongerius, a series of 16 paints in collaboration with artisan paint manufacturer kt.COLOR

Jongerius who, drawing on 15 years of experience with colour, had designed an exhibition at London’s Design Museum in 2017 entitled Breathing Colour. The aim of the exhibition was to expose us to the possibilities of “unstable” colours, suggesting that there is so much to be gained from embracing colours – pigment and textile – that change based on their environment, on their surrounding colours, and changing light conditions.

It’s been an ongoing research. Back in 2010 Jongerius had developed Colourful Blacks, a series of 16 paints (together with artisan paint

manufacturer kt.COLOR), all in varying tones of black. Speaking to her today, she has her own take on how and can designers use black.

“My relation with the colour black comes from the fact that I work for industries and have to work with colour recipes from the big print industries. My role as a designer is to keep track of the quality, things that we miss because of standardization. There is only one colour black in industry: carbon black, which is a very poor black. There are many whites but only one black. That’s a shame; we (industrial designers) that need to work from this – for

Jongerius, whose use of colour is so nuanced, also has a strong opinion on the issue of colour ownership.

“My opinion about owning a colour is very clear; if someone wants to own a colour, it always has an economic/commercial reason behind it. And in art or in science, ideas, topics and materials are fluid; they are from all of us. A colour is part of our common culture, and the knowledge of a recipe of a colour can be ‘secret’ but I don’t believe in a world where you can own – read: buy – a colour.”

peals concluded that Louboutin’s trademarked glossy red-lacquered outsoles were only protectable where the red outer sole contrasts with rest of the shoe, and YSL’s shoes, which were entirely red, did not violate Louboutin’s trademark.

Ah, the joy of the loophole.

If the above examples teach us anything, it’s that any attempt to regulate or claim ownership of particular colours called into question the nature of colour itself: what exactly is it that is to be regulated or owned?

And in what context? Reaching out to Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property

mark will protect a colour only for the goods/services for which it is registered. Trademark law does not confer ‘ownership’ of the colour that would enable the trademark owner to prevent use on all items.”

If a colour is to be subject to discussion or registered as a trademark, the most appropriate kind of colour to register is one that has been identified from a standard range like RAL, Pantone, Focoltone, NCS, CMYK or RGB. The last two examples deal with problems of their own, namely the inconsistencies of computer monitors and the ways in which colours are displayed. At a congress of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property held in Geneva in 2004, it was resolved that a colour per se can be capable of registration as a trademark. Interestingly, no definition of ‘colour per se’ seems to have been considered necessary.

“A colour is part of our common culture, and the knowledge of a recipe of a colour can be ‘secret’ but I don’t believe in a world where you can own – read: buy – a colour.”

Examples of colour ownership and master self-promotion naturally exist in the world of the market, often with the threat of legal or financial consequences. Trademark protection of colours, luckily, is often limited to very specific commercial purposes and uses. We are all familiar with Tiffany & Co.’s distinctive ‘Tiffany Blue,’ but its trademark rights only apply to boxes, handbags, and catalogue covers. ‘U.P.S. Brown’ applies only to its delivery services, and 3M’s canary yellow colour is trademarked only for its ubiquitous Post-its.

One of the most famous cases involving the limitations of trademark ownership of a specific colour was the dispute between shoe designer Christian Louboutin and Yves Saint Laurent, which kicked-off after YSL launched a line of shoes that included a red shoe with a red sole.

In 2012, the New York Court of Ap-

at the University of Cambridge, he pointed out some clear loopholes in this area.

“Copyright protects works – most obviously literary works (poems, prose), artistic works (paintings, sculptures) and musical works.

But in the EU there is not a closed list of works. Nevertheless, I very much doubt there could be copyright in a colour – the CJEU [Court of Justice of the European Union] recently clarified there could be no copyright in a taste (a case concerning the taste of a cheese).” He also clarifies that patents protect inventions but excludes “aesthetic creations”; trademarks protect signs – usually words or images – used to indicate the origin of goods and services. Mostly importantly, though, he underlines that “a trade-

And let’s face it, defining a colour other than by a standard range is actually very difficult.

How would you describe the green of a specific plant to someone who has never seen green before? Perhaps this is why, by and large, attempts to regulate or claim ownership of particular colours have met limited success – just as well. I side with the idea that colours should be available to everyone. Although I will say that the ‘rivalry’ between Semple and Kapoor, while on the surface seemingly infantile, has in fact spurred artists and scientists alike into action. Competition leads to innovation, experimentation and exploration – all of which bubble at the core of the artistic and design practice. / jongeriuslab.com stuartsemple.com anishkapoor.com the-redemption-of-vanity.com 109

PROJECTS & PERSONALITIES BLACK

plastic granulates, for lacquers, for all finishes, etc. – have a very poor palette because of this. If we would have one other black it will be a revolution for the whole grey palette, and for all the dark shades in the colour palette. That’s why I like to show the variety of the colour black.”

110 JUDITH SENG

by JOSH PLOUGH

Colours of Becoming, 2020 Performative installation | In collaboration with the City of Gentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department of Social Economy, Polar Paints, created for KleurEyck Photo: Filip Dujardin, Š Design Museum Gent

The Tensions of Expanded Design

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Judith Seng is defiantly determined to drag design into a broader and more in-depth place. To her the discipline should focus more on revealing connections which when given more attention can alter perspectives, change habits and pave the way to a more responsible designed environment. Her latest work celebrates layers and process, a link to her way of thinking that these should take pre-eminence over the finished product.

111 BLACK

JUDITH SENG Josh Plough

D

esign is an industry so used to problem solving and producing solid answers; so used to consumer target groups, to the efficiency of the workforce-machine, and to a belief in infinite resources that when looked at from the outside, seems completely at odds with the precarity of the systems and planet it works for. So it’s little wonder that people – in collaboration with each other and things – are starting to make a case for vulnerability and questioning.

The inclination to peer in from the outside is as historically predictable as the discipline itself. Designers are reacting to this by focusing on in-depth approaches that call for lasting and systemic adaption to current and future conditions.

Judith Seng, the process enmeshed practitioner, understands design “as shaping the way how we live and work together by means of artefacts, spatial structures and procedures in interplay”. Her practice puts an emphasis on going deep into a situation and experiencing it in a way that develops another means of understanding it.

Seng, when using the term ‘expanded design’ also refers to an expanded perspective. It’s one that takes a detailed look at artefacts and their situations, while asking what their roles are in such a scenario. And more often than not, according to the designer, the situations these things find themselves in are much more complex than the artefacts themselves.

Maybe the Dutch term vormgever is more appropriate? As it seems that to give a form or structure, into which ideas can be explored, is where the more critical parts of the profession are heading. Even though her work isn’t explicitly labelled as critical, Seng’s decision to not focus on producing tangible

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things, but to use choreography and performativity to explore hidden lives, allows it to be read as so.

But the terms choreography and performance shouldn't be thought of in the disciplinary sense, as they’re used to describe the interactions connecting different elements, materials, and people. Through these approaches the expanded practice “can actually address the form of the situation or interplay. And because choreography addresses a situation… it’s not just about the single elements but the whole thing.

And then through doing this… it can alter the specific form or shape of the situation by including the rhythm, the dynamics, the power structures, and relations.”

Since 2011 – when Seng accidentally came across the traditional Bavarian folk dance of Bandltanz – the designer has been exploring performativity through her ongoing project ACTING THINGS. However it was before then, during the research project Design Reaktor, that Seng observed how the profession was sliding into more managerial and organizational roles. Her reaction to both those events was to pose the question: “Is there an artistic-designerly way to work with immateriality and processes?”

For ACTING THINGS III, the material become the “main rhythm giver” and was put into a relationship with the dancer Barbara Berti. Over 12 hours people were invited to watch a working station that “had all the different elements equally united in space”. Wax was melted, formed into a ball and then placed on the concrete floor. The performer worked the material close to her body, forming it, but allowing the shapes to then influence her next moves. The content of this work meant that the people watching became just as involved with the melting of the wax as they did with the dancer, effectively

BLACK ACTING THINGS VI - Material Flow has been commissioned for Design Miami/ Basel as the fourth in a series of experiments which investigates the making of objects through the performing arts in order to unveil the aesthetic, energetic and social dimensions of production processes. By looking at production as a dance, a play, a social ritual, ACTING THINGS explores means of making beyond efficiency and result orientation.

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JUDITH SENG Josh Plough

levelling the hierarchy between material and manipulator through the exposure of process. Seng posits that making such processes visible and understandable allows for a time and space that questions the existing preconditions that underpin our daily lives.

The fourth interaction of the research, ACTING THINGS IV – Material Flow, was commissioned by Design Miami/Basel to investigate the making of objects through the performing arts so as to unveil the aesthetic, energetic and social dimensions of production processes.

An approach like this questions “the means of making beyond efficiency and result orientation by looking at production as a dance, a play, and a social ritual”.

Once again, time became a tool, as for one week, eight hours a day, the dancers Berti and Julian Weber interacted with mounds of the same waxy material. At points in the video you can catch the performers circling the almost helpless looking blob on the floor; or at other times you see them caressing it with the length of their forearm only to jab it with their elbows. You can feel the energy exerted on the material as you watch the dancers bearing down. They then role over passively, leaving it all alone with its shape. Watching it on Vimeo you end up feeling quite some empathy towards these things, as they’re welcomed close to human bodies only to be manipulated. The results of each day’s work were a series of objects that existed for a finite amount of time before they were melted down the next day and used as another body of work, “enabling new moments of creation again and again”.

As the process is opened up it’s inevitably exposed to those things that could infect it, and equally, 114

things are more prone to being infected by it. This disciplinary attitude welcomes vulnerability and questioning into the often die-cast opinions of industry. But creating the right conditions in which this approach to design and research can exist is also something to be carefully considered. We can never fully control ideas, but we should try and mitigate the chances of them being appropriated. As with any form of existing critique or questioning, its mere functioning exposes it to being subsumed. It runs the risk of becoming yet another tool used by the industry. Potentially, and unironically, steadying itself on the

We can never fully control ideas, but we should try and mitigate the chances of them being appropriated. shoulders of those trying to reshape it. A specific sensitivity to context is important when the majority of the discipline is explicitly looking to ‘innovate’ its way out of stagnation and obsolescence.

When discussing and researching Seng’s practice the term tension comes up a lot. With a participant in her latest expansion of ACTING THINGS – School of Fluid Measures, saying: “You said… you need tension to create anything interesting.” This tension, defined as forces acting in opposition to each other, is where the expanded practice is most effective: bridging the established industry with a more open-ended and abstract approach.

The emblematic question posed by the designer being: How do you design something where you don’t control the end result?

This approach of regulated chaos produces a different kind of tension too, a more Hitchcockian and dramatic one. One where the industry trundles banally along and expanded practice simultaneously creates situations in which tensions are made visible, building an anticipation for change. The bomb under the table is already there: it’s all the aforementioned points and more.* Held in suspense, those who follow the discipline are forced to wait knowing that the industry must change, that the tools are at hand, but that these things take time. And this attitude towards the discipline, when combined with the training of a new generation of designers (or vormgevers) shows us that tension is necessary, as the shock of the new doesn’t last. And it’s while being guided by materiality and process that we need to keep asking and proposing new conditions that will allow ideas to form in the right direction.

Seng’s latest work Colours of Becoming can be witnessed during the KleurEyck exhibition at the Design Museum Gent. Seng responds with her process-based approach that will continuously layer paint on the walls and floors of one of the Museum’s rooms. Every week, for an hour, workers will be part of a ritual creating unfinished situations; questioning the difference between results-driven endeavours and more open-ended approaches. /

judithseng.de KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent, Belgium, until 21 February 2021 designmuseumgent.be * Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s On Mastering Cinematic Tension on YouTube

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MILANO PARIS LONDON NEW YORK ATHENS BARCELONA BEIJING BUDAPEST CHENGDU CHICAGO DUBAI GENEVA HONG KONG ISTANBUL JAKARTA LOS ANGELES MADRID MANILA MEXICO CITY MIAMI MOSCOW NANJING OSAKA SEOUL SHANGHAI SINGAPORE TEHERAN TOKYO TORONTO

116

PINK

Pink is the defining colour of our times. From the iconic Acne Studios tote bag, to the ‘rose gold’ iPhone, to the revivals of Memphis Milano and rosé wine, the history of the millennial generation will surely be written in pink ink. Yet, for all its ubiquity, perhaps the strangest thing about pink is that it doesn’t really exist. Culturally, of course, it emphatically asserts itself, but it occupies no place on the colour spectrum. Pink, after all, is just a tint of red. There are very few other tints that we recognize with their own word. Maroon springs to mind, but we have no particular English word for ‘light blue’ or ‘dark green’. So what makes pink special?

Perhaps pink’s allure lies in the fact that it’s one of the rarest colours in nature. In my time working in a carpet shop in Istanbul, one of my first (and easiest) lessons was distinguishing a chemical pink dye from a natural pink. Once you worked it out, it was impossible to unsee. The natural pink was as pale as the centre of a rose petal. By comparison, the chemical pink was a lurid intrusion. Pink’s contemporary appeal, however, lies not in a vestigial yearning for some sacred relic of the natural world. Central to the colour’s sudden explosion in popularity are its intimate associations with gender and sexuality.

Pink’s connotations in the West with women and gay men are a potent, albeit relatively recent, phenomenon. Until the Second World War, pink’s status as a ‘feminine’ colour was not a matter of consensus. Indeed, among children, pink was traditionally a boy’s colour because it was a lighter shade of military red. It wasn’t until the 1940s that pink was declared a ‘girl’s colour’ by arguably the most powerful force of the 20th century – American advertising. Very quickly, the notion of pink as effeminate took hold and the sales of previously gender-neutral baby clothes and paraphernalia soared. We still live with the consequences. Much has been made, for instance, of the supposed androgyny of ‘millennial pink’. Yet even this gender neutrality asserts itself in self-conscious opposition to existing constructs and is, therefore, entirely predicated on those terms. This is why, despite all our excited talk about the collapse of gender differences (especially in America), a guy in a blue suit is just a guy in a blue suit, but a guy in a pink suit is A GUY IN A PINK SUIT. When Lil Nas X turned up to this year’s Grammys in head-to-toe pink Versace leather, he didn’t just choose pink because it looks nice on dark skin. He did it because his homosexuality is now part of his brand. The spectre of Nazism still haunts pink. Why they chose the pink triangle to identify homosexuals is unclear. Still, one’s instinct is that the Nazis didn’t leave much to chance. Whatever the case, the eventual co-option of pink by the gay rights movement has profoundly affected Western associations with the colour. Even red, with its deep political history, has not been as strongly bound to its social signifiers. Whether the West will ever free pink of these cultural constraints remains to be seen. Either way, the pink trend now invades every imaginable consumer product. In a world with everything from pink furniture to pink kitchen mixers, are we finally entering an era of peak pink? /

BRENDAN SHANAHAN 116

GREEN Pink Chicken Project, Nonhuman Nonsense, (Leo Fidjeland and Linnea VĂĽglund), pinkchickenproject.com + nonhuman-nonsense.com

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118 MATHIEU MEIJERS ON PINK

by EDO DIJKSTERHUIS

The Most Abstract of All Colours Pink is the chameleon amongst colours.

That may sound like a paradox but then again: so is pink. It can be both feminine and masculine, high and low, vulgar and refined, physical and spiritual. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what makes it the most expressive of all colours, but also the most enigmatic.

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PINK Resurrection (1463-1465) by Piero della Francesca

or Ludwig Wittgenstein: nothing. Curiously enough, pink has not been written about since the Enlightenment.”

“

There’s nothing compared to the feeling you get when opening a can of pink paint. It’s different from all other colours. Pink is beyond any order. All colours have an optical, a material and a cultural component, but pink has all three in abundance, even in excess. That’s what makes it so immediately appealing. It grabs your attention and you can’t ignore it, you have to relate to it. You’re forced to define your position towards it and it rubs off on you.”

As lecturer at the Design Academy Eindhoven, painter Mathieu Meijers taught students about colour over a period of four decades. His world is defined by colour and he in turn defines the world in colourful terms.

His home and studio are crammed with books about the subject, but when going through his library after being asked to reflect on the colour pink he is surprised to come up empty-handed. “Derek Jarman mentions pink only fleetingly in his Chroma: A Book of Colour but none of the great modern colour theorists have given it any attention. Josef Albers

The reason for this is probably pink’s elusive nature. It doesn’t allow itself to be pinned down or narrowly defined. “When you Google ‘pink’ you’re presented with a wide range of hues,” says Meijers. “It starts with English red and goes via purple and violet to pink, magenta and a whitish skin colour. There is no natural pigment for pink and it’s only vaguely present in the rainbow, as a kind of glow. Before the invention of chemical pigments pink was made by mixing alizarin or vermillion with white. Burned sienna was also an option, resulting in English red.

“But although being a derivative of red, pink is not a warm colour but rather cold. And the more white you add, the more pinkish it becomes and the colder it gets. It’s apparent in Picasso’s so-called pink period, which is almost as cold as his preceding blue period.

The lack of warmth is also visible in frescos

by Italian Renaissance painters. The lime in the water washed out the earth tones of the red. Masaccio’s frescos in the Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence are an example of that.”

The painters of the olden days reserved pink for very specific purposes. The colour is closely associated with religious figures or royalty.

“Especially purple,” Meijers specifies. “It was one of the most expensive colours, its pigment was made from larva. It could be made lighter by mixing it with lead but painters would rather use it undiluted. Piero della Francesca used a more pinkish pink for the mantle of Christ in 119

MATHIEU MEIJERS ON PINK Edo Dijksterhuis

When talking about the Renaissance Meijers can’t skip the Sistine Chapel, the artistic pinnacle of the time, and another example of expressive use of pink. This fully became clear after the restoration that started in 1979 and took all of 20 years. Layers of varnish and later over-painting were removed to unveil very bright, to historically conditioned eyes maybe even garish colours. “Michelangelo’s genius is in applying green underneath and around the

Dorit, 2002, Franz West

his Resurrection (1463-1465). The same colour can be seen in medieval book illuminations that have suffered much less from direct sunlight and still look the way they were intended seven, eight hundred years ago. Pink is often used for the borders of the picture. It frames the reality within but is itself immaterial and spiritual – something you see returning in 20th century surrealist painting. The pink glows, it radiates. It is luminous but has no substance of its own.”

windows. This influences the light falling onto the bodies and makes them appear fleshy and more lifelike.”

To illustrate his point, Meijers takes out a reproduction of Mary Heilmann’s Save the Last Dance for Me. The painting was made in 1979, when abstract art was on its last legs, and quaintly strikes a balance between abstract expressionism and pop art. It consists of three rectangular pink shapes in a black field. Or does it? “An old painter once taught me how to produce a special kind of black,” 120

Nathalie Portman as Jackie, 2016 / © Netflix

With this remark Meijers touches upon a basic characteristic of all colours: they only come into themselves when combined with another colour. And once again, pink presents an extreme case. “You can see it in the designs

by Hella Jongerius or Scholten & Baijings,” says the colour specialist. “They use pink as a context colour. It’s almost like the contemporary equivalent of grey. But the difference is: grey is a real colour and pink isn’t. It’s rather a visual phenomenon.”

PINK

recounts Meijers. “You first cover the canvas in pink before applying the black. And that’s what Heilmann did. The pink behind the black makes it radiate, invigorates it, and the splashes on the black add action and drama to the picture. As always the pink grabs our attention. So much so we hardly even see the black.

This is something you also see in architecture.

Luis Barragán designed a lot of pink buildings, especially in his native Mexico. He had large surfaces painted pink and offset them with reddish volumes or even darker colours.

The pink highlights the adjacent hues, stresses their qualities, but in the end overrules them. Pink doesn’t mix, it always stands out.

It always wants to manifest itself with other colours but in the end you only see the pink on its own.”

Pink oil tanker, Conti Reederei, Germany

So pink is both a facilitator and a prima donna at the same time. Ambivalence and ambiguity are at the heart of this colour, admits Meijers.

“It’s its most defining characteristic. Pink is experienced as a thing, an object open to all associations. Anything can be projected upon it but it doesn’t lose its inherent power, although when you try to define its essence it eludes you. In that sense, pink is the most abstract of all colours.”

takes a lot of courage to use pink in art since it can easily become nauseating because of its pretentions. Francis Bacon was the first modern artist to take a chance. His use of pink is aggressive but it has a spiritual ring to it. He rubbed his paint into the canvas so it became surface and substance at the same time.”

In pop culture the use of pink is much less complicated. Drawing on its bright almost naïve openness, the colour is often used to pimp things up. Tellingly, being ‘in the pink’ means enjoying perfect health and high spirits. Pink zoot suits were a hot item in the Pachuco subculture of 1940s California, which has been described as “wavering between tangibility and crapola”.

“With pink it’s very easy to end up on the wrong side of good taste,” Meijers admits.

“Applied to artificial leather it becomes kitsch but combined with a high-quality material it’s

Much depends on how pink is used, to what material it is applied and with which intention. “When you see a pink iPhone cover you automatically identify the owner as female. In Japanese kawaii culture, pink, is used extensively to indicate cuteness of an almost unhuman nature. But when pink hardens a bit, it turns masculine. When applied to a glossy surface the colour becomes completely hermetic and your eye bounces off it. In painting, however, pink tends to gravitate towards skin tone and it becomes much more inviting.

It appeals to our physicality, our humanity.

It almost becomes autobiographical. Still, it 121

“Philip Guston’s paintings of himself lying in bed smoking cigarettes contain a range of pinks. From this lazy figure it’s only one step to the luxury goods of Louis Vuitton, especially the Vivienne picture holder, a nearly useless piece of decadence that poses as a mascot of nobody knows what exactly. Subsequently, going back to the arts we end up at Jeff Koons’ Balloon Venus (2008-12), which is all surface and cliché.”

With his shiny interpretation of the ancient fertility fetish known as the Venus of Willendorf, Koons latches onto the sexual power attributed to pink. Before it was appropriated by the breast cancer society, the phrase ‘think pink’ was used to wink at bombshells like

Marilyn Monroe. In Japan ‘pink cinema’ is the euphemism for soft porn. And the pink triangle – introduced by the Nazis, mind you – was reclaimed by LGBTQ+ community: a badge of pride rather than one of shame.

“The sexual side of pink is abundantly present in art and design”, says Meijers. “Franz West made a number of sculptures out of pink plate steel, most notably the four stacked balls that stood temporarily near the phallic obelisk in Paris. And Louise Bourgeois produced almost exclusively pink works, often depicting breasts or otherwise referring to the female body. Aldo Bakker sublimated that same theme in his side table from the Urushi series.

It looks like a giant breast with legs, bringing to mind Bourgeois’ spider sculptures.”

It took Jackie Kennedy to transform pink’s sexual expressive power into gendered empowerment. On the day her husband John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, she wore a pink, double-breasted Chanel suit with matching pillbox hat. It got splattered with blood when the president was fatally hit. Her assistants wanted her to take it off as soon as possible, but she insisted on wearing it during the swearing in of vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One, as is recounted in the 2016 Netflix series Jackie.

"That moment changed the perception of pink radically. It was still very feminine but the blood added a layer of gravity. Jackie turned the colour into an emancipatory force.”

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Vivienne picture holder, Louis Vuitton

aristocratic. Pink crosses boundaries between high and low culture, and often appeals to both at the same time. Bazooka bubble gum is pink and so is the Cadillac symbolizing American 1950s optimism. Pink Prada shoes are expensive but look cheap. In 1980s New York pink, combined with black and white, was the colour of post-punk. And applied to a massive oil tanker pink becomes somehow glorious.

Urishi side table, 2008, Aldo Bakker

MATHIEU MEIJERS ON PINK Edo Dijksterhuis

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Pink being such a versatile and adaptive colour, Meijers has a hard time giving a final and decisive verdict. “Pink is treacherous. You always have to distrust it, like the rose-fingered dawn that promises the future before dissolving into the day. It’s sometimes bright, it’s often precious, but you’re always left guessing where the substance is.

It makes you want to overpower it, control it, in order to see: is it really expressing what it’s pretending to be?

In American artist Will Cotton’s latest exhibition he uses the mythical role of the cowboy to make sense of his country’s political schizophrenia in the midst of the ongoing electoral campaign.

“The problem with Trump of course is that his character defects prevent him from being a good leader,” Cotton says. “Like the cowboy, he refuses to accept criticism, he’s essentially a loner who’s actions are impetuous. He’ll shoot first, and ask questions later, and lacks empathy.”

“In the end, pink is optimistic. It offers a window on tomorrow and thus embodies a projected future. The viewer wants to become one with it and only after having done so realizes they have to give it meaning, somewhere in the range between expression, autobiography or emptiness.” /

The work - currently showing at Galerie Templon in Brussels - offers a new take on the most iconic of American cultural symbols. Featured are a series of oil paintings as well as new drawings in oil, sanguine and pencil. “The paintings in this show present the possibility of transformation,” Cotton says. “The cowboy, in the presence of the unicorn evolves to overcome ignorance and to know empathy.

WILL COTTON

Flying Cowboy, 2020, Will Cotton / Courtesey of Templon, Paris – Brussels

Born in 1965, Will Cotton studied at the New York Academy of Art and fine arts school in Rouen and has worked across disciplines from patisserie to music and fashion. At first the large oil paintings appear to have a classical style, yet intrigue the viewer with an unanticipated twist on the expected - pink unicorns in lieu of horses.

The pink unicorn counters the virility and violence represented by the figure of the cowboy and also explore gender and queer issues.

So why pink? “The colors I use are usually most influenced by pop culture iconography,” he explains. “It’s our common language which evolves over time. A hundred years ago, pink was the color for baby boys.”

And as with all art the big questions remains, can Cotton’s work make a difference? “The difficulty is reaching an audience that doesn’t already agree with you,” he admits. “The art world is a relatively small bubble with fairly homogenous politics. I’ve seen more of this happening in the medium of television. There have been a few television shows in the U.S. that have been credited with having a profound influence on public views toward homosexuality. Will and Grace and Ellen are a few examples.” / GK mathieumeijers.com willcotton.com templon.com 123

Grace, 1996-97 A 10-year old Lena Dunham and her sister Grace were photographed by Scher Courtesy of Esther Schipper

124 JULIA SCHER

124

PINK

by CRISTINA GUADALUPE GALVร N

Think Punk

The way colour is socially coded shapes and limits identity and can create a lifetime of confusion and instability. Codes make us feel obliged and often unable to belong.

And it's only been more recently that culture has tried to address this suffering.

Here Cristina Guadalupe Galvรกn reflects on how her encounters with artist Julia Scher affected her being. Scher uses colour and specifically pink in a subversive way to position a universal knowledge of the gendered existence.

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JULIA SCHER Cristina Guadalupe Galván

W

hen I was 20, I discovered Jean Cocteau through his book Opium and I felt an instant deep connection to the point of saying half-jokingly I was his reincarnation; later I started defining myself as a gay boy inside a woman’s body. What was my surprise reading Olivia Laing’s book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone and finding a similar definition of herself.

“I’d never been comfortable with the demands of femininity, had always felt more like a boy, a gay boy, that I inhabited a gender position between binaries of male and female, some impossible other, some impossible both. Trans.

I was starting to realize, (…) that I inhabited a space in the centre, which didn’t exist, except that I was.”

I guess, ultimately, my question is, are all aspects of the feminine the same? Obviously not. So what kind of feminine does the colour pink stand for? And are all pinks the same?

Blue for boys and pink for girls represent a very binary worldview – almost immature. As they tell us growing up things are not black & white (or pink and blue for that matter). I actually like a lot the more recent non-binary term to define gender as a spectrum. Gender fluid is another term I like and which implies as well a continuum where Olivia and I (and millions of other people) might feel included.

Isn’t it beautiful that language is starting not to divide masculine and feminine anymore? I see this as the future. After all we all carry masculine and feminine inside of us. To what extent one or the other is going to dominate depends on many factors, not only biology.

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You see, when you divide people, you are always excluding someone. Ask any black person if Jim Crow laws were meant to preserve a black world or separate them and exclude them from the white wide world? No wonder sentiment in favour of women's rights was strong within the radical wing of the abolitionist movement. It’s the same story of segregation, only more covert.

This division of men and women at birth with the pink and blue was implemented again at a very precise moment in time – when men came back from Second World War to the US to find a country almost run by women! A whole media campaign then started to send them back to the kitchen under the control of men.

This is the time when Hollywood movies – which in the 1930s and 40s had such strong, deep and rich women characters – started to portray women as these dumb bimbos with Marilyn Monroe as the epitome of the 1950s feminine. She hated that role she was cast in and died depressed, overdosing on sleeping pills. No one likes to be objectified.

The famous scene of her singing in her pink dress “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” is a very low point for the feminine, yet we all love it. It’s very campy. Madonna in the 80s restaged that scene in a music video, giving it an ironic twist – dressed in pink as well – and singing, “I am a material girl living in a material world.”

In 2016, I was invited to participate in the Barbie exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris curated by Anne Monier. My contribution, One Day My Prince Will Come, was a series of human scale Barbie shoes that were cast in glass and in seven colours (as a girl, my Barbie’s pink was never girly but punk). Mixing in Miles Davis with Cinderella, it gave lightness to a

project that was borne out of my own childhood emotional abuse and neglect.

Two years ago, during my brief stint as Dan Graham’s assistant, I met his friend the artist Julia Scher.

She’d come over to his place to say hello and gave him a very funny work – a 3D printed but distorted small pink microwave. So much humour and irony about the feminine condition in that little object.

But it wasn’t until I saw her show American Promises at Ortuzar Projects last spring that I got a deeper understanding of her work and discovered that she actually uses pink a lot, as a device to create meaning and a certain atmosphere by perverting or distorting the colour’s ethos. What feminine is Scher’s pink tapping into?

For over three decades, Scher has explored the relationship between surveillance, authority, and exhibitionism through performance, video installation, and sculpture.

But what I realized in her show – through the nearly four-hour confessional video Discipline Masters, filmed in the artist’s New York studio in 1988, where she recounts traumatic memories from her early life – was that a lot of her work stems from a childhood of emotional and sexual abuse, where the themes of authority, surveillance and exhibitionism might have been first generated. I really connected with it, despite our different experiences.

As any good artist, she transmutes her personal experience into universal knowledge. I absolutely believe that the political starts in the domestic sphere.

As a friend of Julia, I asked Dan about her: “There was no return to normalcy in lower middle-class or working-class southern California after the war.

Julia grew up during that period,

PINK From the Ameratherm Microwave series

What I found very interesting is the controversy the pink pussyhats generated among several communities. Elle Hearns, a black transgender activist and the former organizing director of Black Lives Matter, criticized the hat for dividing people on the basis of sex and gender.

“Anything that is not elevating the conversation around the many identities of people in this country is not one that services [sic] the equality or the liberation or the freedom that people are pursuing.”

which may have been a somewhat dysfunctional family situation.

Looking at her work about security, she sees it as sociological critique, but I think her work is very personal and ambivalent. When I look at her overuse of pink – it’s amazing.

I remember being frightened by De Kooning’s colours; too much pink – a dash of misogyny there. Pink was associated with being female after the Second World War. Julia’s work brings up issues with the idea of femininity and somehow I think the work has something to do with the American household – the use of microwaves. I’m going to go so far as to say she’s challenging the patriarchy but she’s just too academic.”

ArtNews described Scher’s female-centric installation at Ortuzar, as drawing reference both to a brothel and a teenage girl’s bedroom, conflating a surveillance society with the male gaze. Her baby-pink security blankets, pink guard uniforms, and photographs of children in pink uniforms, who are portrayed as safekeepers, stir up tension between the realities of women, who tend to be over-observed in both public and private spaces.

Scher’s choice of pink according to ArtNews comes from its history as the colour attached to homosexuals in the Nazi death camps and later as the symbol of resistance and empowerment in the AIDS coalition ACT UP – a now common Gay Pride symbol rehabilitated from its persecution purposes. The central ambiguity of Scher’s work is dependent upon how we understand our relationship to existing structures of power, control and surveillance, combining an analysis of control mechanisms with feminist critique.

It seems as if this imposition of the docile pink has been contested by many women who have appropriated the colour in a stronger shade – from Schiaparelli to Scher – to empower themselves, challenging the existing patriarchal structures of power so violent against women.

The pink pussyhats that became a symbol of support and solidarity for women's rights and political resistance, after Trump’s derogatory comments on women genitalia, might be the last episode of this pink story.

I believe we are in a threshold of evolution. Binary narratives are being contested and white patriarchal modern ideals are something of the past. I truly think that all this hate and fascist governments suddenly coming back from the dead are the last sigh of an obsolete system.

Like a fish out of the water jumping up and down, these are their last minutes and they are making a lot of noise. Rest assured, they are on the way out, but we have to actively work towards a solidary and inclusive society all together. The future is not female. The future is a rainbow. /

juliascher.com olivialaing.co.uk ellehearns.com pussyhatproject.com 127

128 VIRGIL ABLOH

by EARLWYN COVINGTON

Some call him crass and commercial, others see him more as the millennial Karl Lagerfeld, but whatever your viewpoint, Virgil Abloh has managed to revolutionize streetwear borrowing tactics and an intelligence that speaks across generations. His passion for merchandise and fusing high with low might offend the stodgiest of us, but it also broadens the cultural public, spreading a new word to a maximum audience.

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Efllorescence, graffiti session Photo Š Marie Canciani, courtesy of Galerie kreo

Pinking Virgil: the B-side

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VIRGIL ABLOH Earlwyn Covington

P

ure unadulterated wanderlust on loop, Virgil Abloh is the art director for Louis Vuitton menswear in Paris, where it just so happens his favourite building is located. I read that somewhere. There is always something somewhere to read about Virgil.

The building is the Pantheon, which is an 18th century architectural exploit that generously and magnanimously appropriates the original in Rome, and, interestingly enough whose initial purpose was radically switched through a chasm of revolution from church to mausoleum.

Virgil, hailing from the American Midwest, was also meant for something else, an engineer or interior architect, with the suitable middle-class values and skill-set in which that societal construct implies. But somewhere between his undergrad and masters, he met Kanye West and began stretching and swerving, to see where cultural appropriation, unmitigated energy, and multilevel dissemination could eventually shape his own path. Music, fashion, youth and any cityscape would set the stage for an enviable life-defining arc for Virgil.

When there are cultural uncertainties, economic priorities or social responsibilities, will we have space for such a personality, or does Virgil reach beyond the current confinement, or critical cultural sterilization, that at least Vuitton had been facing since the ‘thanks anyway’ departure of a personality like Marc Jacobs? Maybe Virgil’s a temporary cure, or might he just be a much-needed inoculation for the luxury industry?

One must begin with Virgil himself.

A few years ago a friend in Milan told me that her eldest son was going hyphy, or bat-shit crazy, for Virgil. “Who is he?” I asked. “Well he’s a black American, super famous,

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PINK Efllorescence, round table Photo © Sylvie Chan-Liat , courtesy of Galerie kreo Off-White, "WALKING BOOTS", Cowboy Boots, Resort collection 2020

you really should know him,” she replied. Apparently her kid, who for some reason calls everyone over the age of 30 a ‘boomer’, had started ordering Virgil’s products online then stockpiling the merch, to eventually sell to the highest bidder on digital streams.

Virgil had not yet taken the helm of LV’s menswear, but his brand Off-White, which he had created in 2013, had fast become a coveted treasure trove of teenage closet-spaced entrepreneurship, while Virgil himself was unwittingly preparing himself for a highly coveted position, one that would give the French luxury goods industry a much-needed pause for is the first African-American not only to steer a division of LV through the 21st century, but also a welcome cry-out to the vapid homogeneity, creative or otherwise, of the entire sector, and Vuitton in particular.

Virgil has creatives at his behest in London and Milan where his brand Off-White is stationed, and then there is Paris for LV. One must wonder where home really is for Virgil, even if he maintains that all roads lead to Chicago. However there is another question of equal significance, which is why whenever the hell his name is mentioned there is such a divisive draw from praise to disquiet?

I talked with him in Paris right after his first major gallery opening of limited-edition design and just before the global quarantine to find out what he thought about the colour pink, but I really just wanted to figure out why everyone I talked to that had ever worked with him or refer to him as just simply the nicest guy in the world.

Virgil Abloh: ‘I'm super colour sensitive. Colour is at the root of art and design. Colour immediately gives you an emotion and it's no

coincidence that one of my major projects is called, Off-White.

When it comes to the colour pink, it reaches back to what you possessed in childhood when your brain becomes programmed that pink is feminine and blue masculine. I think in that short narrative, there lies the root of my artistic practice, which is to sort out these preconceived notions based on adopted truths, which as you get older you realize is not found on anything factual, just consensus.’

According to a study in 2017 by the global luxury goods consulting firm Bain & Company, millennials already represented 30% of global luxury sales. Ever since his debut for LV at a Tokyo pop-up store in January 2018, his designs had a substantial impact in ready-towear sales even before hitting the immense network of LV stores.

Virgil's self-made talent to generate media coverage on any of his projects does create a far-reaching socio-economic demographic. This factor cannot be ignored when confronted with the accepted but whispered murmur that luxury houses have not been in the clothes business for ages. All eyes must look deferentially, digital or otherwise, to the global brand image.

What better way to illustrate and execute this definition of luxury as something awe-inspiring and yet attainable through the imagination of all that can glimmer in the digital realm. The industry has been searching fervently for someone like Virgil, who reaches out to inaccessible market segmentations.

This is not your grandmother or even your mother’s Vuitton.

VA: “As I moved through my practice and analysed the things that I conceived or was taught while I was young, [I can now] produce workthat has the ability to let the viewer sort of reset their own calibrations

(...) So, you know, the colour pink to me is at the hue of any colour.

You can use it for the conceived notions of what it means, but then you could also play against that very much, and to me that is the freedom I find within my own work.”

Galerie kreo in Paris, founded by Didier and Clémence Krzentowski, is known for embracing designer-slash-artist A-listers, and celebrated its 20-year anniversary this year. Virgil was given centre stage in January for his first exhibition dedicated to contemporary design with 20 commissioned pieces, including benches, consoles, seats, vases, and mirrors. Entitled (in lower-case e), efflorescence, the show set off to fervent acclaim. When I arrived at rue Dauphine for the opening, I couldn’t believe the hundreds of people that were queuing up outside. This fandom ranged from the unmistakably hip to the not yet fashionable crowd. It felt like a like a trend forecaster's wet dream, but somehow not. There was too much innocence in the air.

No matter what project he is attached to it is always Virgil the character that comes twinkling into the foreground. This guy’s a star and like all stars he has an inexplicable but potently palpable appeal.

After looking at the work one is left wondering, does the afterglow come from seeing the work or him?

Or maybe it’s just both.

In most of the kreo exhibition it is easy to see the fragmentary memory of Brutalist architecture, which, at least in the States, took firm root in Chicago. This architectural movement grew out of the early-20th century modernist phase, emerging from a post-war construction renewal in the 1950s and characterized by a monolithic form and a severe geometric style accomplished by the use of large-scale, poured concrete. Across the States these 131

VIRGIL ABLOH Earlwyn Covington

Virgil’s kreo collection echoes the city pavements, graffitied concrete walls or columns, those very ones that you would find underneath a highway overpass or an elevated railway. And that’s just it. The work reiterates any city, not just Chicago, and not even Brutalism per se. He has figured out how to singularly individualize the collective, or universal idea, of what the remnants or extractions of a latter-day 20th city could or should look like.

VA: “These buildings were very much a part of my growing up, and even if those structures proved to be less-than-humane, you can still look at the form-work, techniques and history to the extent of the experiment of public housing. All of that definitely has had a lasting impression on me, and is still an aesthetic that I can appreciate.”

It’s about a hour-and-a-half drive from Chicago to Rockford, Illinois, where he went to a private Catholic high school till he left to study civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, before 132

VA: “Having an understanding of where we are in the world, both in an art history timeline and in the political sense, my art education started with the Renaissance where I immediately drew parallels to now. Like the spread of information through the internet today, a whole new cultural movement can be engaged, and so many people with diverse opportunity can find themselves at the root of a culture advancing forward. My practice today is about engaging within this new demographic where the world of art, fashion, and music can meet.”

True enough. When scrolling though his IG or any #virgilabloh there is a very young and not-soyoung(er) generation that does find in him their mentor and guide.

There is an infatuation with the man and his medium, and all of his followers seem to speak of him in their own feeds with a certain intimacy of acquaintance. Virgil himself says that his success is not due to any nepotism or particular adoption into the family of fashion or art, because “the genesis of the work is to be in dialogue with the kids you were talking about in Milan, I don’t have to come from the typical background, I let the work show that I just come from a different place”.

What I think he is trying to say is that his work, meaning a coupled vision of ideas and execution, murmurs and roars in an arena that he appropriated and then cultivates for his output. One might scoff at such a positioning; after all he was born in 1980. Yet never before has an outsider said more to an entire generation of the ever-awake-and-

aware global millennial. And certainly Bernard Arnault of LVMH was waiting for just that worldly hyper-sound in a fashionable scream, making Virgil artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear in March of 2018.

VA: “As you can imagine my place within the art or fashion world is not something that I was immediately adopted into. The body of work doesn't come from the typical art or fashion background, you know, I come from a different place. So I think my work is about a dialogue with a new demographic, so that's why the kreo Paris opening looks like it does or that's why my practice does. And I think that the young kid in Milan, or anywhere, and I speak the same language, and that’s about communicating my ideas on a peer-to-peer basis with him, or her or anyone, rather than speaking from a place of hierarchy.”

It is no surprise that his academic degrees in civil engineering and architecture lend itself to a pluridisciplinary methodology, and that many great creative endeavours begin on the routes of cross-fertilization – something that is hardly new within design discourse. Bauhaus was founded on those same values, and its first director Walter Gropius who ended up chairing the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1937, and last director Mies Van der Rohe brought the very same values to Virgil’s alma mater in Chicago. And at any rate this is a methodology that has been around for a hundred years, and scattered across the globe because of the Second World War, which brought the Bauhaus ideals from these two German expats to the American pond. Yet to put those principles into practice in a world of academic specialization or digitally embedded growth obligation is something altogether different. And honestly does anybody really get it right?

12-INCH-VOICES, 2019 © Martin Argyroglo, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

VA: “I've always had an affinity for Brutalism, you know, I love the materiality and formal expressions, and Brutalism at its high point could be subconsciously implied.

It wasn't a direct comparison more what was the direct emotion that is bestowed when coming in contact with an urban environment. You know, very similar to your question about the colour pink and what it means and what you believe it means is also like this style of architectural impact on the viewer and when it comes to dealing with different modes of design that have pre-existed.”

returning to Chicago for a masters in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He talked a bit about what has informed his practice and what shaped his studies.

Off-White collection

buildings have been destroyed to local and national outcry, including Chicago with the 2014 demolition of the Prentice Women’s Hospital.

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VIRGIL ABLOH Earlwyn Covington

VA: “I think there is no right or wrong way in this new era to build a creative practice. The only thing I advocate is that there needs to be a well-calculated split in learning. It is important that young people are not just immersed in the history, or the way things have been done before, but what that means to what is happening now in contemporary culture.”

There is an A-side to this vinyl beginning with his creative collaborations and his first connection with English graphic designer, Peter Saville, who co-founded Factory Records in Manchester in 1978 and designed some of the most epic album covers (Joy Division, New Order…) of the century. And remember Virgil’s side-hustle is as a DJ. Well, Virgil reached out to Peter to do the music for one of the Off-White shows, and Peter did it.

Chief curator, Michael Darling, who co-curated, Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, would highlight over 20 years of Virgil’s work in fashion, music, art, furniture and graphic design in partnership with Samir Bantal, the director of the research wing of Rem Koolhaas’ OMA. (Not bad for a 38-year-old Virgil.) The exhibition then went to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and is due at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Europe is scheduled for sometime too, but apart from Atlanta all dates have been affected by Covid-19. From what I glean

because of what he sells and how he does it, which reaches far beyond the glam-fam or super-rich. It’s a story about making and making it.

About collaboration and kindness.

The not so simple task of carving a path with help from the like-minded, a solid education, and a pretty happy outlook at a world that tends to shy away from such a reflective resonating force on viewers and the parlayers that devise the current modes of cultural production.

I blush to think of what comes next... In June, there was a backlash on social media and retracting of what he originally posted about looting and the right to rage during the ongoing protests in America. It all ended a bit confusingly because he stated the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were in the same week they weren't. He finished the post talking about the merits of Bar Basso, Dumbo, the Mercer, and I believe the Mondrian. I'm not really sure because he, or his PR, has since deleted the post.

“I think there is no right or wrong way in this new era to build a creative practice.

The only thing I advocate is that there needs to be a well-calculated split in learning.”

Time magazine (whether we or his followers for that matter read it) named Virgil one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In the spring of 2019 he did a powerful (and pink) performative sound installation and sculpture for the three-day multidisciplinary festival, Kaleidoscope Manifesto, at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris. Last December during Miami Art Basel he launched a limited-edition collection for Baccarat, and there’s the collection for Ikea, the collaborations with high-power artists from Takashi Murakami at the Gagosian to a T-shirt with neo-conceptual extraordinaire Jenny Holzer for Planned Parenthood, and the wall of 999 consecutively numbered orange bricks – doubling as storage objects – that sold for €140 a pop at a summer exhibition on the Vitra Campus Fire Station.

His first museum retrospective would be that very same summer.

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from the press it deals with guns, glamour, shoes, product, image, socio-economic bias, the black gaze, luxury, and so on. At each exhibition both Samir and Virgil reconsider the museum space, recontextualizing the show in collaborations with local curators and partner frameworks, and ends with the much lauded or disdained, popup, Church & State, where there is merch. Needless to say the guy knows how to get people in a room that will give his vision light.

What can he possibly do next?

Those that are most unconvinced from the Guardian newspaper to Frieze magazine might say: oh fuck me, not him again? One thing’s for sure, it’s pretty safe to say that he is here to stay. Not just because of what he says or how he says it, but

Admittedly, even with such an uninformed or comprehensible back-paddle, his voice resounds high and low in any and every discernible dataset as long as you are keeping up with Virgil Abloh. /

off---white.com louisvuitton.com galeriekreo.com Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, 4 July-18 October (dates stc), icaboston.org

exhibition cid-grand-hornu.be npo CID - centre for innovation and design at Grand-Hornu 82 rue Sainte-Louise 7301 Hornu, Belgium â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Tuesday - Sunday : 10am - 6pm The CID is a npo of the Province of Hainaut. With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Visual Arts Sector.

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136 FERNANDO LAPOSSE

Off the spectrum

Fernando Laposse and his Pink Beasts Photo: Pepe Molina

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PINK

by GABRIELLE KENNEDY

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The making of the Pink Beasts / Photos: Pepe Molina and Fernando Laposse

FERNANDO LAPOSSE Gabrielle Kennedy

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PINK

Sloths are not creatures that fall into the category of blink-and-you’ll-missthem, sluggish is just the way they are. The ones that Fernando Laposse created for Pink Beasts may still have a hanging repose, but visually they are dynamic. In many ways the project is an origin story, one that not only celebrates the natural world in its fibres and dyes but also harnesses the local skills and knowledge of Mexican artisans that having been using them for generations.

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ith the advent of synthetic dyes, the origin of colour has been widely forgotten, but in 2018 an Australian paleobiogeochemist, Nur Gueneli, discovered what she thinks is the world’s oldest colour – bright pink.

Gueneli extracted coloured molecules from rocks found in a marine shale deposit beneath the Sahara desert in Africa. The molecules were estimated to be just over a billion years old, the earliest in the geological record and 600 million years older than previous findings.

In a statement Gueneli said that they must have come from microscopic organisms because animals didn’t exist then.

“The bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting an ancient ocean that has long since vanished,” she explained.

It wasn’t until 40,000 years ago that artists started making the first pigments from soil, animal fat, burnt charcoal and chalk, creating a basic palette of five colours: red, yellow, brown, black, and white.

And though anchored in the primary colour red, pink isn’t part of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that other colours must be mixed to generate it. The diversity of pink hues is the result of adding or subtracting yellow and blue tones.

Product designer Fernando Laposse, who trained at London’s Central 139

FERNANDO LAPOSSE Gabrielle Kennedy

Saint Martins, likes to work on transforming natural and unheralded materials into refined design pieces. He calls what he does “endemic design”, where the origin of materials and their historical and cultural connotations take centre stage. He prefers his objects to be sustainable, embrace biodiversity and community.

Pink Beasts is a celebration of the natural world. It aims to reconnect a wide public to how an extremely rare and little known organic colour, sourced locally from a tiny insect, can be rendered on natural materials. Cochineals are insects native to Mexico and produce the world’s brightest natural red dye, while a sisal plant is an excellent substitute for plastic threads and has been used for centuries to create durable pieces such as ropes and hard-wearing carpets.

The odd thing is that the cochineal grows on an Opuntia cactus, commonly known as the prickly pear, but every time someone has tried to take the plant with its little critters elsewhere, the cochineal has never survived. Still today, only a few regions in Mexico, the Canary Islands and Peru can sustain the farming of inter-reliant coupling.

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The making of the Pink Beasts / Photos: Pepe Molina and Fernando Laposse

It makes sense then that he often looks to sustainable craft traditions, best exemplified in the research he presented at Miami Design District last year in collaboration with Mexico-based textile designer Angela Damman as well as artisan women from Sacaba, Yucatán. Commissioned by the event to create a public installation that responded to the concept of colour, Pink Beasts featured hairy sloths, hanging tassels, and hammocks. The latter is currently on show at the Design Museum Gent, along with the project’s film that includes interviews with the artisans.

For exhibiting this work in Miami, Laposse wanted to mimic the famous hues of the local deco architecture. To achieve the perfect dusty pink he exposed the cochineal to a specific recipe of acidic lemon juice and baking soda to get the pH level just right. He then worked to make sure that the colour stayed vibrant after being exposed to sunlight and rain, first boiling the sisal fibres with a natural mordant called alum stone that helps fix the dye into the fibre.

not lost on Laposse. He thinks that many environmental challenges might be solved by looking backwards not forwards to a more natural, sustainable and scalable ways of existing. /

These materials were originally used by Aztecs, who used cochineals to showcase luxury – a point

KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent, Belgium, until 21 February 2021 designmuseumgent.be

fernandolaposse.com angeladamman.com

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Hammock and Pink Beast / Photo: Pepe Molina

PINK

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YELLOW

On the longest night of the year, I painted my bedroom wall the colour of the sun. The colour of light being diffracted by the Earth’s atmosphere; the colour that makes luminous the hue of piss, puss, boogers, and bees. “Yellow [nature] affords / Only scantly and selectly, / Like a lover’s words,” rhymed Emily Dickinson on the colour of cigarette butts, classic Post-its, half of the Biafra sun, and the Bill-killing Bruce-copying tracksuit — the you’ve been warned, the mellow before there will be blood. The colour of daffodils, dandelions, vested protests, and big city taxis. Of the cheeky architectural accent and the little book that asks if design is human. It is the card for almost putting a foot wrong. Not red, not green, the in-between; after the beginning, before the ending. It is the jerry can and the peroxided brunette. The line where the road becomes the wild; is it the edge of the edge? The liminal. The submarine.

The colour of the middling mediocrity and Coldplay. It’s the solar plexus, the seat of the will and personal attachments. It’s the liver in decline; the hangover or the detox, depending on whether the glass is half full or empty. The gender-neutral baby room and nouveau riche Monopoly properties. The stock-standard hard hat, sailor’s anorak, and student highlighter. The McDonald’s arch and anarcho-capitalist gold. The indecisive emoji and battery save mode. It’s corny and cheesy; the passé sports car. The lumpy custard pumped by my indifferent heart. The jaundice and bile; the snapchat ghost and the desert of the real. You ol’ yellow dog! It’s sensationalist journalism, retro crime paperbacks and the business directory to everything. It’s fake news, clickbait and very-violent-very-pornographic. The colour pages of old books turn as their facts become fables in the autumn before ignorance. It’s controversy and contradiction. It’s the ripening banana but the rotting grape; the sun-protecting carotenoids that remain behind as the green chlorophyll dies. The same carotenoids that make us see in the dark. The most stressful colour on the human eye. It’s the colour of maddening wallpaper, the hyperactive food dye Tartrazine, and the national railway of the Netherlands. It’s the sulphur of rot, nicotined teeth, and old toenails. Decay and change; the alchemical transition of Jung’s self from interiority to exteriority. It’s Van Gogh’s sunflowers and Rothko’s luminescence. It’s the predominant colour in the Otolith Group’s African liberation stamp collection. It’s the brick road that leads to the Emerald City. Is it the colour of time passing? Can it be both the egg and the chick that came before or after the chicken?

It’s Pokemon, the Simpsons; it’s despicable me. It’s Buddhist monks’ turmeric and saffron stained robes. It’s what bruises turn after purple. Black and yellow, black and yellow, black and yellow rapped by Wiz Khalifa. It’s streetlamps, mistily diffusing into empty streets; the flame that draws the moths. Stains and old whites laundry. Is it the oldest artistic pigment that shines ochres caves from Borneo to Cape Point? The canary in the coalmine. It’s Rihanna’s love in a hopeless place: yellow diamonds in the light. The bat signal and a Volkswagen bus full of miss-fit sunshines. It’s the beached truth and making of hay; the moon traversed by the cow. It’s the colour of hope in the dark. Can the stroke of a brush transform a limit to the liminal and luminous? /

NADINE BOTHA

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The Weather Project, 2003, Olafur Eliasson

144 CAMBRIDGE CENTRAL MOSQUE

by

GIOVANNA DUNMALL

Lifting Spirits

It may be topped by a golden dome, but the new Cambridge Central Mosque derives much of its warmth from the way sunlight floods the building. Designed by Marks Barfield and also taking architectural cues and hues from the city, it is more than a place of worship: an open symbol of not only conviviality but to the centuries-old creative interaction between cultures.

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Brick tile cladding, crenulations & dome, photo: Morley von Sternberg

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CAMBRIDGE CENTRAL MOSQUE Giovanna Dunmall

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“

Prayer Hall, photo: Morley von Sternberg

It’s a fantastic building isn’t it?” says a man on the street after he spots me taking a photo of the new mosque across the road. Cambridge Central Mosque opened last year in a residential neighbourhood of the British city and locals, both Muslim and not, have taken to it with enthusiasm and pride. A lot of this is down to the project’s distinctive but accessible design by London-based architects Marks Barfield. Its recognisably Islamic spatial arrangement, patterns, symbols and golden dome combine with contemporary and context-specific touches, such as brick tiles the same light hue of Cambridge’s famous gault bricks, multiple eco features, and a front portico and atrium that are low-rise and set back to fit the local context.

Mosques have always adapted to local environments and “taken on the vernacular of their time and place”, says Julia Barfield, co-founder of Marks Barfield Architects. “A mosque in India will look very different from a mosque in North Africa or China. The question we asked ourselves is what would a British mosque look like in the 21st century in Cambridge?” A bus stop in front of the mosque, a peaceful garden, a cafe and outdoor tables and chairs all add to the feeling that this is an oasis and hub destined for all in the local community.

“It is very permeable and this is refreshing,” agrees Shahed Saleem,

author of The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History.

“Not many mosques achieve this, partly as a result of not having the space but perhaps also feeling that they need to be private or hide their interiors to avoid unwanted attention.”

This lack of space is something many mosques in the UK suffer from and was a big factor in the decision to build this one. “There are around 5,000 Muslims in the Cambridge area, but the existing small mosques in the city overflow on to the streets at prayer time causing traffic congestion and parking issues,” explains Tim Winter, an academic at Cambridge University and one of Europe’s most prominent Muslim scholars. “It became clear that as the community grows it needs a larger dedicated space.”

From the beginning Winter, who converted to Islam in 1979 and was the driving force behind the project, was clear that the mosque should be more than a sacred building. “We decided that the space would not simply provide a worship facility, but would try and be a symbol of cultural conviviality and mutual respect and enjoyment that everyone in the city could find encouraging,” he says. And there’s a lot to encourage and lift the spirits as you roam around this engaging building and site. The garden with benches, the sound of the water from the octagonal fountain, 147

CAMBRIDGE CENTRAL MOSQUE Giovanna Dunmall

the kids running around the prayer hall in fits of giggles (on my visit), but, above all, the 30 tree-like columns dotted around the building and visible from the outside. Made out of sustainably sourced British spruce, they draw you in with their undulating geometries and generous skylights, which bring daylight into every part of the building and create shimmering shadows and effects as the sun moves through the ‘branches’.

“Our inspiration came from the idea of a Garden of Paradise, which incorporates a glade of trees and water as the source of life,” says Barfield. The ‘trees’ are based on the ‘breath of the compassionate’ and “one of the fundamental patterns in Islamic geometry,” she continues. In the deft hands of Keith Critchlow (a leading expert on sacred architecture and geometry) and the architectural team, it was converted here into a continuous structural pattern of repeating octagons and projected on to a fan vaulting ceiling using computer software.

Alternate octagons became structural columns or ‘tree trunks’.

The ceiling also takes its cues from the fan vaulting that can be seen in the famous 15th century Kings College Chapel just down the road. Fan vaulting was an English innovation based on the ribbed vault introduced into Europe from the Islamic world during the Middle Ages.

“Our mosque tries to move beyond ‘east meets west’ clichés, to reference the fact that the two cultures have always interacted creatively with each other,” says Winter.

“The pointed arch for instance, which in a sense defines the shift from the Romanesque to the Gothic, existed in Muslim sacred buildings, such as the Mosque of Ibn 148

Tulun in Cairo or the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, centuries before Crusaders and merchants brought these styles and techniques to the West.”

In the same vein, the small museum to the left of the entrance highlights and celebrates Islamic medical, astronomical and philosophical knowledge brought to Europe in the medieval period. “Until two centuries ago medical textbooks

by Muslims were routinely used in British hospitals,” says Winter. But the exhibition also seeks to show something more: “Science as it was

“In an age of tension and negative imaging on all sides, this is architecture with a real therapeutic mission.” cultivated in a sacred civilization, which valued a sense of balance between humanity and nature. A vision of the material world which is hospitable to contemplation and sustainability.”

“Taking care of the planet and nature is a strong trait in Islam,” agrees Barfield, “so there was a very strong bent towards sustainability, which is something we have always cared about as a practice.”

The public areas were designed so that they could be naturally lit (during the day) and ventilated.

“All of the rainwater is captured and used to flush toilets and water the garden, and the heat and cooling comes from an air source heat pump so there are no fossil fuels on site at all,” she continues. The system works so well that even on the hottest day last summer, which in Cambridge was the hottest day in England on record, “they didn’t have any problems”.

Like all mosques the Cambridge Central Mosque expects men and women to occupy different spaces.

The way this is expressed architecturally varies enormously but with a growing number of women attending mosques around the world, here the decision was taken to use a movable Mashrabiya screen of varying heights. It is an element that Winter feels can make all women, with different expectations of privacy, comfortable in the building. Saleem says this is a notable move. “It is more gender inclusive than any other mosque I have visited in the UK. For me this is its greatest potential and success: if it can change the script of gender organization and access in mosques.”

Its other great potential and success is undoubtedly the understated but powerful way it promotes coexistence through its contemporary, approachable and uplifting design, helping dispel some of the fear and Islamophobia sadly so prevalent in Western society today. “Cambridge itself is an enlightened city,” says Winter, “a global hub which has achieved its greatness by welcoming scholars and students from all over the world.” Nevertheless, the far-right has in the past marched against the mosque but, as Winter points out, the marchers were bussed in from other parts of the country and “there is no local sympathy for their views”.

He believes, “In an age of tension and negative imaging on all sides, this is architecture with a real therapeutic mission.” And it really is. You feel better and calmer just for being in this space. That’s not something that can be said about enough religious buildings. / cambridgecentralmosque.org marksbarfield.com

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150 THE COLOUR OF PROTEST

Are You Yellow?

Yellowing, 2016, still

by NADINE BOTHA

A sign of optimism and danger, yellow has a complicated history and meaning, a death sentence for European Jews during the Holocaust.

But for centuries it has also been a sign of defiance, adopted in recent times by groups like the suffragettes to todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gilet jaunes.

Here, film-maker Tze Woon Chan talks about its significance in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

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YELLOW

T

riggered by a bill that could see criminal suspects – and what many feared, political activists – extradited to mainland China, it’s nearly a year since the people of Hong Kong began protesting against various aspects of increasing Chinese control (that bill may have been withdrawn but others have been drafted). The year 2019 now joins 1989’s Tiananmen Square protest and massacre, and 1997’s handover of sovereignty from the British to China, as a third crucial date through which to understand all Hong Kong cinema according to Shelly Kraicer, who curated a special programme of Hong Kong film for the 2020 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

“I'm always fascinated by how Hong Kong cinema is a tool that Hong Kong people use to work out who they are, because Hong Kong identity is complicated. Viewing Hong Kong's current political crisis through its older cinema, and cinema being made on the ground right now, is a natural way to open up and contextualize a deeper understanding. Western audiences get certain exposure through the media, but cinema gives Hong Kong voices priority, which I think is the essential way to understand this incredibly important moment in world, politics and cinema history,” explains Kraicer.

One of the films on the programme was Yellowing (2016) by Tze Woon Chan, which is 151

TZE WOON CHAN Nadine Botha

about the Occupy Central or Umbrella Movement of 2014. Currently working on his next film, which contextualizes the 2019 protests in 50 years of protest, Chan talks to us about how yellow has gone from a ribbon in 2014 to represent a political position and economy in 2020.

Nadine Botha: One of the most powerful moments in Yellowing is when you see the line of protestors standing a few centimetres in front of the line of police. The two sides just stand there; no violence. How do you understand this stark difference from the situation today?

Tze Woon Chan: In general, the Umbrella Movement was a very peaceful protest, with some civil disobedience, but we tried not to fight back. Those moments in Yellowing are special, because you see the police and students still trying to communicate and present different views to each other. For today’s protestors – it’s sad to say – we don’t believe in just talking anymore. We believe we need to fight for democracy. Now we are trying to use different ways, including strikes – which might be common in Europe but not in Hong Kong – and even violence, in terms of the protestors fighting back. Protest and disobedience is very uncharacteristic for Chinese people, so my new documentary explores the emergence of this since the first protests against British colonial rule in 1967.

NB: What are some of the other changes that you have noticed?

TC: The biggest is perhaps how important film has become. Recently I spoke to a reporter who was at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and he said he estimated [there were] 40 to 50 video cameras. Now everyone has one, and not only are they recording, but they are live sharing 152

on Facebook where 10,000 more people are watching. Live media is essential, especially since businessmen from mainland China bought the Hong Kong TV station, radio and newspapers. With only one camera there’s no truth, but with so many cameras, it becomes a puzzle we can use to put together our own truth. For documentary film-makers like myself however, it’s about reflecting and turning timely events into a timeless story that people can still get something from in 20 or 30 years’ time. Since 2014 most protestors mask themselves because they’re worried about getting filmed. This makes it harder for me to tell stories – in Yellowing you can still see faces. Now I’m thinking about other ways to tell the story of today’s Hong Kong.

NB: If the Chinese government owns all the media outlets in Hong Kong, does that make it difficult for you to show your films there?

TC: The cinemas are also mostly owned by businessmen from mainland China and don’t show political films. But in Hong Kong we organize our own private screenings, and even set up screens on the street. For now, these screenings are still possible, but we are worried because freedom of speech is getting more and more difficult. Getting to show our films outside Hong Kong is also important to speak to international audiences and media, because besides protesting in the streets and getting our representatives into the legislative council, it is important for the movement to gain international support. For me as a film-maker, showing at film festivals also then helps with getting funding and producers, which is very difficult inside Hong Kong.

NB: You should run for legislative council – isn’t that what you studied before you became a film-maker?

YELLOW

TC: I studied policy and administration, but once I graduated I realized that the career of a politician is very difficult in Hong Kong, especially if you believe in democracy. It is not a fair system. And anyway, I’m not very good at public speaking! I had to think of another way to tell my story. At first I made love stories and comedies, but then after making a documentary I realized that the political situation in Hong Kong is what I am really interested in.

NB: How has the significance of yellow – referred to in the title – evolved since the Umbrella Movement?

TC: It came out of 2014, when university students organized to boycott class and wore yellow ribbons. It was just before the Umbrella Movement occupied the streets, where the umbrellas were used as protection from the police’s pepper spray. Later all the symbols merged together – yellow ribbons and umbrellas – and now, identifying as yellow means that you are pro-democracy and support the protestors. Saying: “Are you yellow?” has become a way of asking your political stance. Blue represents the police, and red represents money from mainland China businessmen who come and buy up Hong Kong.

Since the 2019 protests started, we’ve also started building up the yellow economic circle, which is a way to identify businesses that support the movement. There are apps that protestors use to find restaurants, bookshops and other small businesses, and then we spend our money there.

It’s a good way to sustain our movement and support each other. Some businesses also display something yellow – like a poster, Post-its or curtains – to indicate their support.

NB: In Yellowing, we already see this nascent community spirit that seems to be testing new ways of living together. Now you’re saying that this is becoming fortified through digital platforms?

TC: Yes, to me we are practising ways of democracy. For instance, in Yellowing you see how protestors meet in groups to discuss different protest strategies, and how to build a better Hong Kong. You also see people from different levels of education and society talking and working together. It was not always very efficient, and we could keep talking and talking, without reaching a conclusion. Today, I see that online forums like Telegram are giving new ways for discussion and open decision-making. We’ve learnt how to form groups to represent different positions in the strategy discussions, which is much more efficient.

NB: In one of the news clips in Yellowing, an older protestor says that everyone always wants to be the last protester, and not to be dispirited by the fact that it’s an ongoing struggle. The 50 years that your new film Blue City covers seems to be a testament to this.

TC: In Yellowing, most of the protagonists are in their twenties and they’re very idealistic.

They think that they will achieve something directly, and I also believed that at that moment. We really thought that the occupation was very strong in 2014, but even in 2003 with half a million people, we already thought it was very good. Yet today we are still here.

In this moment, I believe it again. I didn’t expect the 2019 protests to be so big. I think that to be part of the protests you have to be idealistic and optimistic, otherwise you would feel so depressed when facing such a big dictatorship as China. The last few years have been very depressing, but the protests give us a new kind of identity and togetherness. It is a marathon with a very long way to go. / @ChanTzeWoon1 International Film Festival Rotterdam iffr.com 153

154 NIENKE HOOGVLIET

by

RAJESH PUNJ

Photo: HannahBraeken

Ideas as

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Photo: HannahBraeken

Ecosystem

155 YELLOW

NIENKE HOOGVLIET Rajesh Punj

Studio Nienke Hoogvliet’s disruption of the textile trade modestly explores how we might change the industrial system to exist more naturally with colour. The aim is to avoid the harsh chemicals of synthetic dyes that pollute rivers, and ultimately end up as fast fashion in landfills.

The thinking is about finding a more transparent supply chain for fashion.

U

nder the stewardship of Dutch designer and founder Nienke Hoogvliet, and associate architect Tim Jongerius, the concept and culture of Studio Nienke Hoogvliet is less profit-driven than the norm and more environmentally involved. The duo sees every element as integral to how to create more consciously.

Growing up close to the coast, Hoogvliet’s work is intended as a reminder of the sensation and sensitivity that holds everything together. Of water, earth, the atmosphere, and her enterprising ideas, being integral to one another.

Graduates of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, and the faculty of Architecture, Delft, respectively, Hoogvliet and Jongerius want to create ‘neutral spaces' that allow for objects and an audience to come into contact with one another. Forensic like, Hoogvliet's work makes for a morally more measured approach. Instead of man-made elements that deplete or damage planetary resources, she consciously considers and operates in a way to add to the earth. With interests that are born of the natural and elemental, Hoogvliet’s has consideration for the environmental impact

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of everything. Intending in her way, of halting the senseless and very ceaseless culture for the new. “I see my role as opening the eyes of the consumer, and at the same time I hope to give the industry a jolt,” she says.

The work of the Studio has been exhibited extensively in a short space of time – at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Textielmuseum, Tilburg, the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, and Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, New York, among others. For the current KleurEyck exhibition at the Design Museum Gent, Hoogvliet wanted to think afresh about pigment and an earthly palette. Showing her project H.E. R. B. S (Healthier Environment, Remedy for Body and Skin), it is a pointed criticism against the chemicals used by multinational clothing companies and a connection to how Jan van Eyck himself might have been discovering the vibrancy of coloured pigments centuries ago.

The H.E. R. B. S installation creates a laboratory-like setting to investigate what actually is in clothes. “I want people to be aware that they can wear textiles dyed with natural herbs as well as synthetic colours,” Hoogvliet says.

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Nienke Hoogvliet, photo: HannahBraeken

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Testing the dyeing with natural colours / photo: Hannah Braeken

NIENKE HOOGVLIET Rajesh Punj

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Shown are a string of upturned herbs and potted plants surrounding a recycled bath full of garments being mixed with a wooden stick.

By replacing the artificial with the earthly, Hoogvliet physically shows how her newly coloured clothing is more sensitive to our skin, and sustainable for the environment.

And as with Van Eyck in his day, Hoogvliet illustrates in her modus operandi, that a more rudimentary way of working makes us more aware of our actions.

Hoogvliet talks of “unburdening our bodies of synthetic dyed textiles”, in favour of more natural cured fabrics, “that relieve”, possibly even revive our skin of the menagerie of chemical pesticides, preservatives and pollutants, which invade our bodies, inside and out.

H.E.R.B.S Quilt (detail) / photo: Hannah Braeken

At KleurEyck there is a film of the process, with the bath installation planned for sometime in the exhibition’s run, but the overall project has other elements. H.E.R.B.S Quilt has the appearance of an unravelled cocoon, which Hoogvliet handstitched together to reveal different fragments of fabric. It is a tapestry of tender slips of material that combine to create a second skin, a shelter, and source for salvation. And as a choice of furnishing, it becomes incredibly symbolic of the kind of care and consideration Hoogvliet bestows upon her work, in a way that touches our human sensitivities, rather than challenging us to buy an alternative brand.

fossils, Hoogvliet again practically demonstrated that the composite ash of the bones of industrial animals is more fragile and so returns to their compound form very easily.

Whereas the organically cultured creatures have more reliant skeletal skins that can confidently be reinvented to create bone china. Industrial versus organic, Hoogvliet investigates the residual effect of humankind’s treatment of the animal kingdom, and its collateral consequences. Citing how the quality of a fragment of bone can explain the living conditions of an animal, and how its ‘bone body’ holds all of the information of how much light and living space it has had in its lifetime.

Rooting for the elemental, another of Hoogvliet's research projects entitled Bare Bones, looks at the brittleness of animal bones kept in quarantine-like conditions and those able to roam more freely, and how these environments impact the quality of individual bones within the production of bone china.

Photographing and filing them as

Another work, Waterschatten or water treasures, recalls the mineral wealth of water, in a way that the Bare Bones project takes us into the anatomy of an animal.

Water treasures has Hoogvliet focus on the waste products that litter our reservoirs and require a vast amount of energy and industry to turn back into clean water.

One leading element is used toilet paper that amassed makes up to 180,000 tonnes, equivalent as is explained, to the same number of trees. And in collaboration with the Dutch water authorities Aa & Maas and Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier, Hoogvliet reconstitutes some of that excess into creating everyday objects that can easily be integrated back into the home – a table, lighting and decorated bowls.

At a moment when the environment is 'front and centre', we need to be able to apply Studio Nienke Hoogvliet's investigative virtues to our understanding of our carbon footprint, and of what we bequeath to future generations. /

KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Ghent, Belgium, until 21 February 2021, designmuseumgent.be nienkehoogvliet.nl 159

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RESEARCH

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RESEARCH SEALITIES

ABOUT

The gulf between industrial design and cultural design has widened to the point of minimal contact. In this section we hunt down a renewed connect, looking to brands and designers committed to building this bridge; to those that invest in research and collaborations for products or systems that find a deeper understanding of the social and political role of design.

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ETERNAL LIGHT AND A SPOTLESS MIRROR

Jordan Söderberg Mills

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Fernando Laposse

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GREEN IN A BLUE WORLD

Candiani

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RED MUD THIS IS COPPER

Studio ThusThat

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FAMILIAR EMOTION IN A NEW MATERIAL

Ann Demeulemeester x Serax

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PRINTING MICROALGAE

María Boto Ordonez

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PRODUCTS

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Light can be many things to many people; it can be a symbol of enlightenment, it can provide a source of energy to help plants grow, and, clearly without it we cannot see.

The 14th century painter Jan Van Eyck was arguably one of the first master light designers; he used light in his works to produce an impressive rendering of Catholic mysticism. In his Ghent Altarpiece painting (also known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb), which is currently being restored at MSK Ghent, Van Eyck manages to harness the presence of light from outside of the frame of his painting in a way that casts a shadow over the figures within it. This intriguing presence of the effects of light from a seemingly invisible external source has become the starting point for Jordan Söderberg Mills’ latest site-specific installation, Eternal Light and a Spotless Mirror at Design Museum Gent.

Söderberg Mills was inspired by Van Eyck’s masterful use of light. The work encourages a viewer to think more about the unseen omnipresent source of life, but also makes an audience contemplate what happens to the images they project outside the frame. Both ask questions of a viewer’s acceptance of a light source they cannot see directly but can only experience in its refractions.

On the one hand, Van Eyck used light as a way to build upon the 14th century Christian society’s use of beautiful stained glass windows and ornate objects as an indication of God’s majesty and leadership. Whilst, on the other, Söderberg Mills uses light in a way to reflect back and challenge the viewer’s devotion to their hand-held stained -glass digital devices.

Eternal Light and a Spotless Mirror has allowed Söderberg Mills to frame his work around an idea rather

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than from an experience. It's a research-led process, which has made this specific project different from his previous light explorations. The project is driven from a desire to explore the meaning of light rather than focusing on what light can do. In other words, it becomes more about the effect and the refraction than it does about the source.

Söderberg Mills’ practice is about exploring the material qualities of light, scientifically understanding its behaviours and metaphorically uncovering its use in constructing society. With an education in both art history and architecture, plus the benefit of being a trained blacksmith, his studies have provided him with an insight into design, art and perception, which have culminated in a fascination of the physical nature of light. Söderberg Mills’ works use light within his installations to create optical effects and challenge the mechanics of vision. Testing a viewer’s understanding of the way they see, fascinates him “as once the piece is completed it becomes autonomous and the audience is free to independently interpret its existence in the space”.

In physics, observing the reactions of a system to an input is important to developing an understanding of the forces involved, this is also true for Söderberg Mills’ practice. The abundance of colours that are created as a result of his use of materials is just as important a reaction as the feedback he gets from an audience. Both aid in the development of his works and how they can be perceived.

Light from an external source does not go unnoticed; its power is seen in the art that is created from it.

Söderberg Mills explains the evidence of his thinking (the source) “often ends up in the physical object” (the outcome) refracting into an explosion of coloured light beams, interpretations, and personal experiences. The science of light supplies a plethora of coloured metaphors within Söderberg Mills’ work that results in a new perceptual experience for its audience.

External Light and a Spotless Mirror, KleurEyck, Van Eyck's Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent.

18.05.2020 – 21.02.2021

→ Text by Emma Singleton

1. Adam from the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, showing light and shadow. Yorck Pooject. License by Zenodot Verlaggesellschaft.

2. The Arnolifini Portrait, Convex Mirror. Wiki Commons, public domain. It is believed that Van Eyck painted himself in the convex mirror at the centre of the work – an interesting convergence of subject and object that Söderberg Mills' mirror sets out to achieve with the viewer.

3. Adoration of the Mysic Lamb with inscription. Wiki Commons, public domain. The inscription above the Madonna in the Gent Altarpiece comes from the Wisdom of Soloman, chapter 7 verse 26: "For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God..." which Söderberg Mills explored literally and metaphorically.

4. Glass testing prototype.

5. External Light and a Spotless Mirror, installation view, Design Museum Gent.

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TOTOMOXTLE Corn is one of the top three mostgrown plants in the world, however its main purpose is not to supply food for people but to be used to make biofuels, animal feed, ethanol, and bio-based plastics. As such, corn has largely lost its natural function and links to the land and communities it first emerged from.

TotoMoxtle is a new and precious material that is reconnecting corn back to its ancestry through collaboration with a small village in the south of Mexico. The material is a veneer made from the husks of ancient varieties of Mexican corn, producing a valuable and visually striking reminder of the native and natural colours of Mexico. What’s interesting is that the project thrives off of the diversity of colours from this native corn – corns that have made them unfit for a modern market obsessed with standardization.

The community of Tonahuixtla in the south of Mexico is the epicentre of the material’s production. The village is an undeniably significant place to be working with native corn; located in a valley where the farming of corn dates back for centuries. However, as Fernando Laposse – a product designer and a founder of the project – points out, the reintroduction of native seeds to be farmed once again in the village was no easy task. With some of the native seeds technically classed as extinct whilst lying dormant for years in the vault of a seed bank, it was no surprise that many in the village were sceptical of any success. It became clear to Laposse that it was a risk to ask farmers to plant these ancient seeds on a large scale due to the obvious fact that their land is where they make their living. Therefore, Laposse with the help of community leader Delfino Martínez, decided to reuse Martínez’s grandad’s old farming plot from the 1970s as a testing ground for the ancient corn to avoid jeopardizing the other villagers’ livelihoods.

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After trial, error, drought, advice from agricultural scientists and expertise given from the seed bank, Laposse and Martínez achieved a successful crop. The farmers in the village began to gain trust in the ancient seed varieties whilst also developing an understanding, through science, of why and how their traditional methods of farming worked so well.

From this moment production of the rare, valuable and precious new veneer material started. It began small and broke social traditions in the village by encouraging women to work; since most of the men had migrated to the United States in search of a better income to help support their families back in Mexico. Much like the growing of the native seeds the people of the village soon began to accept this shift in gender roles. They witnessed the project TotoMoxtle increase in yield, gain prestigious commissions and sustainably provide a salary five times the Mexican minimum wage.

The project works on two fronts: material development and social economic rejuvenation. Both of these are within an overarching philosophy to include the indigenous people in the world economy without sacrificing their core philosophies and vision of harmony with nature. In this respect, Laposse as an endemic designer, has become the Robin Hood of his field – taking money from wealthy and supportive collectors to give to those in the village who really need it.* In the future the project is looking to invest more into the development of an infrastructure within the

village, making the construction of the material more efficient to grow the output they produce.

TotoMoxtle, with its seasonal colour surprises, proves that diversity in native corn – opposed to that which is genetically modified – can and does provide a sustainable product, food, and a supportive income. It ensures that the material is intrinsically connected to the final product.

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* L aposse is keenly aware of how material is sourced; he questions its links to nature, its locality and fosters local relationships at its origin. Just like a chef is concerned with his ingredients so too is Laposse about the quality of his materials.

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Separating the corn from the husk Traditional farming bull plough Totmoxtle team of young mothers Saul, who lives in the village Fernando Laposse making the marquetry (Next page) Hanging corn

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When does a fad become fundamental? When it comes to the clothes we wear the answer is now – if not yesterday. We all know that fashion thrives on the next big trend; it’s the nature of the beast. But due to the fact that in the last few years the industry, under intense scrutiny, has had to reconcile itself to the harsh truth that it is heavily polluting, when it comes to cases like Candiani Denim – a family-run mill founded in 1938 and known for its eco-friendly product – one is allowed a little burst of hope.

In the landscape of the Ticino Park, 40 km north of Milan, the home of Candiani Denim is spread into two different plants that cover a total of some 170,000 sq m. Everything here looks as tidy as possible: perfectly groomed grass, boxwoods and bushes of geranium, the effect is like a set design for a Jacques Tati movie. And like all good old stories of Italian enterprises, you’ll find no discontinuity between family and business: the Candiani’s still cultivate a habit of taking a stroll around the headquarters, everyday, after breakfast and after dinner.

But what makes this a peculiar case is that much before the conversation on sustainability started, the company was there already. “We are obsessed with efficiency, and efficiency is the precursor of sustainability,” says Alberto Candiani via email. At 37 years old, Alberto is the fourth generation in the family business. As proof of the mentality that exemplifies Candiani, he often brings up a little story about his father, Gianluigi: “He will probably tell you [the mill] is never clean enough and would spot a spider web from 50 metres…”

Such attention to detail goes some way to explaining why, season after season it is pushing boundaries.

But even more crucial to its low-impact approach has been the environment where the mill is located. “You have to consider that all our investments were made in the town of Robecchetto, which is included in a national nature reserve. The region, the institutions, have given us severe restrictions in terms of environmental impact,” explains Alberto. Consequently, the production has been designed

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Candiani is the largest denim mill in Europe and one of the only vertically integrated. Starting off as a small producer of workwear fabrics for the local market, it began to focus on denim from the 60s. But it’s Candiani’s third generation, Gianluigi, which transformed the company into a premium denim mill. By at least the 90s, jeans have gone a long way from a durable workwear item to fashionable garment – passing through the hands of the likes of François Girbaud, Elio Fiorucci, and Giorgio Armani.

Gianluigi elaborated the formula for stretch denim, uniting performance and quality, which would make jeans more comfortable without becoming droopy and add a fit without losing the authentic denim look. This gave Candiani the advantage to stay in Italy when – around 2010 – many companies were pushed by the saturation of the market to outsource their production to countries like Bangladesh, India, and China. The lack of regulations in such places has been highlighted by documentaries The True Cost or River Blue, the latter focusing on “one iconic consumer product” that is considered the most impactful in the whole textile industry: blue jeans.

“The first time I visited big jeans manufacturing facilities in Asia, I understood that 21st century denim is still a commodity and not many would really care about it. It’s a ‘whatever item’, taken for granted by most of the global population,” says Alberto. “Here we only make ‘premium’ denim, which is certainly not related to the commodity one, but I had to investigate and find out what is happening with the billions of units that are currently flooding the market.”

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according to ‘reduce’, ‘reuse’ and ‘recycle’ concepts, and also implements closed-loop systems. It’s an ethos that includes, for instance, the reuse of water from the finishing department in the dyeing process; dyestuff and colour that are never discarded; and the recycling of 100% of cotton waste – 50% getting made into new yarns and 50% used for insulation and soundproofing for the construction and automotive industries.

A couple of years ago, Candiani's 80th anniversary came with the introduction of an ingenious fabric, named Re-Gen, which won the ITMA Sustainable Innovation Award in 2019. Labelled by the organization as a ‘circular denim’, its design makes full use of the company’s interpretation of a circular economy: 50% of the denim is made of RefibraTM branded lyocell fibres by Lenzing, which uses cotton-cutting scraps from garment production, while the other 50% comes from post-industrial recycled Candiani fibres.

It might sound intimidating, but that’s the thing with sustainability – it’s much more about research, engineering and innovation than it is about greenwashing. “Many in the fashion business have felt uncomfortable when the word infiltrated it, because it’s not about improvisation: first you need to know what is the real meaning of sustainable or green,” says Candiani’s marketing director, Simon Giuliani, when I met him in the showroom just outside the main plants. The showroom’s aim is to welcome clients and designers in the effort to carry out an educational mission that the company feels is not just much needed but urgent.

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in 2016 for the US market. Today, the clients Candiani supplies can be recognized by ‘Rivetto d’Oro’ (a golden rivet) and among them there are Atelier & Repairs, Ace Rivington, MATiAS, Benzak Denim Developers, Denham, Closed, Dondup, Care Label, C.O.F. Studio (Circle of Friends), and Blue of a Kind.

“Often the good thing [about] a family business is not being driven by numbers, but by long-terms goals,” adds Giuliani. “Our denim might cost three times the price than the one produced in Bangladesh, but the point is to make clients and final consumers understand the difference: some 30 years ago quality and price were directly correlated, but today the perception of values has been radically subverted. Nevertheless, what happened with food – we all know how to tell when it is good or not – can happen with clothing.”

Candiani Denim’s latest innovation is 100% biodegradable, stretch denim, which demonstrates that better denim can already be done. So, can a responsible response in the fashion industry definitely make a difference? “It will have to make a difference,” says Alberto. “Fashion – as it is – will no longer be sustainable for the simple reason it’s based on overproductions generating tonnes of landfill.

I might say something crazy, but I claim we shall first of all produce less and then produce it better.”

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T he materials, making and finished product of Candiani's low-impact approach to denim.

→ Text by Marta Galli

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At Candiani’s Ticino Park site, things look quite different. “Innovation and sustainability go hand in hand,’ muses Simon. Here they have developed dyeing technologies that allow them to save on water, energy, and chemical auxiliaries. “What we aim to teach our clients is that these technologies can help you reach the result you want, while saving on environmental costs,” he explains.

“We design our fabrics according to the final look they want to get.” So, for a no-fade or clean look they developed a nitrogen dyeing technology, called N-Denim, able to achieve a very deep penetration of the colour in the yarn, that reduces the number of dyeing baths from seven to two and avoids hydrosulphites and fixation agents. “But if you want the typically washed-denim look, the vintage vibe, there is an easy fade technology.” Simon is referring to Indigo Juice, which keeps the pigment very superficial on the yarn, so that when jeans are washed in the laundry it takes only a fraction of water, chemicals, and energy.

An additional technology used at Candiani is a patented one called Kitotex, which uses chitosan – a natural polymer obtained from the exoskeletons of crustacean – for the dyeing and finishing process. It allows for substantial reductions in chemicals (-70%), water (-50%) and energy (-30%), giving the opportunity to fully replace PVA and other harmful substances.

In 2013, Candiani’s headquarters created its own development centre, aiming to supply clients with tailor-made wash recipes in order for them to get the best from each fabric – one similar was opened in Los Angeles

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RED MUD Studio ThusThat has embarked on an exploration into finding new ways of transforming Red Mud – a waste of the alumina industry – into a series of ceramic objects. Red forms part of their work that is an ongoing investigation of industrial wastes and their uses.

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Studio ThusThat, also know individually as designers Kevin Rouff, Paco Böckelmann and Guillermo Whittembury, is a studio concerned with bridging the gap between academic research, scientific industry, and the everyday.

This project is a simply worded but very complex investigation: how many people question not only where the materials we use come from but also what wastes are left in their wake? Some do, but… Aluminium for instance, is ubiquitous to our world and is touted as a material of the future, yet behind it are vast landscapes of industrial waste invisible to the public eye.

Bauxite residue, alternatively known as ‘red mud’, is a by-product of refining bauxite ore into alumina, the precursor to aluminium. It is composed primarily of metal oxides that lend the material a vibrant red colour.

This waste packs an alkaline punch and is difficult to neutralize. Plus there’s a lot of it; for every part of aluminium made, up to 2.5 tonnes of red mud is created, totalling to over 150 million tonnes of red mud produced annually.

The residue is currently left in giant hazardous disposal sites visible from space.

In Red, Studio ThusThat has intriguingly managed to combine scientific research with traditional craft methods to create a range of red mud tableware and tiles.

The project was initiated when the team was enrolled on a joint master’s programme at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. They worked in collaboration with Grymsdyke Farm, a material architecture research and experimentation facility just outside of

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London, fellow student Joris Olde Rikkert, and also reached out to professor Yiannis Pontikes, who heads up the research group of Sustainable Resources for Engineered Materials (SREMat) in the Department of Materials Engineering at the KU Leuven University in Belgium – world experts in many materials. The designers worked out ways of using the waste much like common clay. Making use of the high oxide content, the glazes were also made with the material to showcase its aesthetic values.

“We hoped to show the muddier yet equally beautiful counterpart of aluminium, a material we usually see as immaculate,” notes Rouff. The material acts as a reminder that the sterile and clean shine of this metal originally came from the earth, and that there are always consequences to that process of extraction. “Inevitable consequences, sure, but not dead ends,” Rouff explains.

“These wastelands can also be seen as a space of abundant resources.”

The designers explain that the point of the project was not to propose a silver bullet solution that would remove all the red mud from the land – a gargantuan task that has been researched for decades – but rather to create a new narrative for a contentious ‘waste’ whose many proven methods of safe reuse are curbed by negative press and legislative measures. The obscured nature of the industrial process, its brute mechanisms, and its scale all run in opposition to the warmth, fragility, and finesse of ceramics. “Material culture takes time to shift,” says Böckelmann. “We wanted to surprise people

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with what the material could do, and to show it in an unexpected way.”

The designers continue to explore red mud with a new collection of larger vessels and tiles, as well as collaborations with mining companies and more recently with architects – they’ve just finished an experimental collaboration with Studio Olafur Eliasson. They are also exploring other uncommon material streams in a continued cross-disciplinary approach between science, craft, and industrial practices. Rouff explains: “We want to dig into our everyday material world, to reveal the hidden backstories and propose alternatives – to turn it inside out.”

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Red Mud, Pipes Red Mud, Plate stack Red Mud, Tea Pot stack Satellite Image of red mud, Google Earth Image captuing a part of the process that is undertaken when using the red Mud to produce new works.

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There is a problem within sustainable fuel industries whereby the main two factors that tend to effect change within them is either economic incentive or public perception. The difficulty is which one is the most relevant influence?

Studio ThusThat believes in the latter.

For this second project by the studio, they aim to show that the power of “designers to demonstrate, spark imagination and create a new material narrative”, will ultimately shift public perception and create a market pull for change within industry.

This is Copper showcases Studio ThusThat’s ability to use research and experimentation to develop an outcome that shifts waste into want. The project both exposes and proposes potential uses for the overlooked by-product of copper production. In particular, looking into the use of slag-based geopolymers.

The term geopolymer was coined in 1979 by the French material scientist Josef Davidovitz, and is used to describe a 3D molecular structure formed of inorganic compounds. Or in other words a geopolymer is a cross between a stone and a plastic. Its molecular structure means that it can withstand shock and highly compressive strength, is resistant to acid, has hydraulic stability, but perhaps most positively, it emits no CO2.

The incentive for Studio ThusThat to work with copper’s by-products stems from the fact that copper itself is used widely in the creation of renewable energy; for instance, the average wind turbine requires 5 tonnes of copper and for every 1 km of railway track there is 10 tonnes of copper cabling. It is then no wonder that society is still outpacing the rate at which it can recycle copper resulting in a continued need to mine for it. However, the slagbased geopolymer produced by the processes involved in copper mining and recycling requires little to no additional work to unlock its benefits. The material is then ready to be utilized.

While working on This is Copper, the studio recognized and experimented with all of the benefits of the slag-based geopolymer produced during the copper

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mining process. After Red Mud, this time they did a full on collaboration with professor Yiannis Pontikes and the SREMat research group. At the beginning of the project and for eight weeks at the end of 2019, the studio went to the KU Leuven University and worked with them and Metallo, a recycling and refining copper company in Beerse.

The aim of the stay was to collaborate with the company to create an outcome that showed the broader value of copper waste, showcasing the material's backstory and revealing its potential. Studio ThusThat became the alien designers within Metallo’s lab of scientists.

The importance of pigments within This is Copper derives from the simple observation that “scientists might not care so much about colour but for designers this is important”. It is due to this difference in approach that the studio is able to, through design, provide a shifted perspective on a material that was previously unexplored in this way - working from scientific recipes in research papers to create recipes for colour. It reinvigorated old techniques, adjusted formulas and manipulated methods to turn “a gross greenish brown into a beautiful sparkly black”. Working with various aggregates in the same way a potter works with different glazes.

The resulting objects are the physical outcomes of the team's holistic investigation into the aesthetic qualities of slag-based geopolymers. Studio ThusThat has used design to shift the public’s perception on how waste material can be used. It is mindfully displaying outcomes that tell the material’s story by linking the various stages of its

creation into one narrative. The value that these objects have in both a scientific and aesthetics sense provoke onlookers to think about new uses for a material otherwise hidden under a label of ‘waste’.

Studio ThusThat’s waste-not-want-not mantra reveals the invisible potentials of copper’s shiny black waste.

And both of the projects featured were named by the designers as they actually were: Wasteland to Furniture.

Red Mud + This is Mud feature in KleurEyck, Van Eyck's Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent.

18.05.2020 – 21.02.2021

→ Text by Emma Singleton

1. Sparkly Black Chair made using the slagbased geopolymers found in the production of copper.

2. Copper scrap pile 3. Column Chair made using the slagbased geopolymers found in the production of copper.

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Five years ago, Ann Demeulemeester left her fashion house. After 30 years of tireless creating at the fast pace that characterizes fashion, she decided it was time for a different kind of life.

In all silence, she started looking for a new way to shape her creativity. Silk and other noble fabrics left the stage and made room for porcelain, brought in a harmonious combination of light and shadow for Belgium company, Serax.

Ann Demeulemeester never saw fashion as her true calling. Fashion was a way to express her creativity and emotion, bringing her collections to a higher dimension.

To that extent, her collection of tableware and lighting for Serax is not a new start, but merely a narrative that continues in a new material.

“Back when I chose to start at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the ‘Fashion Academy’, I found fashion to be a modern and strong means of communication. I have never designed clothes just for the sake of it; I always wanted to add something that was missing. Visual language has always been important to me. By working primarily in black and white tones, I could always put emphasis on the essence: a shape that was conceived thanks to a combination of light and shadow, as well as fabrics with complex textures. I have always created according to my gut feeling.

“After I left the world of fashion, I did not really plan on releasing any other creations. I just wanted to create nice objects for myself. For me, the primary goal was to create happiness (…) Porcelain has fascinated me for a long time. It is a material with a rich history and a spectacular translucidity. I have been studying it for years, trying to master all the techniques. I have followed masterclasses in England where I learned the classic bone china techniques, I went to Germany and France to understand the entire production process of porcelain and I learned from the best ceramists. Even when I create just for myself, I aspire to reach absolute perfection.”

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As an art director, he has always been closely involved in my fashion collections and he also designed the flagship store in Antwerp.”

One of the windowsills is scattered with bits of porcelain, that appear in various shades of white and black, her iconic colours.

“There is not just one black, there are so many shades of this colour. It has to do with the material as such, with the glazing you apply and with the way in which light is reflected. I particularly like working with black porcelain.

It can have so many different hues; no two objects are exactly the same. I have also searched for a long time to find the warm, subtle white that I wanted. It all comes down to playing with light and shadow; that is why I started this collection in the first place.

“In the beginning, there was a shape. I experimented a long time to find the ideal plate and the perfect cup.

It is an exercise which humbles you and teaches you how to be patient and never give up. The real challenge lies in creating a simple utensil in a shape, which did not exist before, yet with such perfect proportions that it looks as if it had always existed. The next step is to create new objects. Will I ever make pure objects of art? Perhaps, but I do not want to pressure myself. At this stage, it felt that making utensils, useful objects, was the right thing to do.

I will not be happy unless the final result is exactly the one I had imagined. I want that my soul is present in the objects I make; I want to translate my emotions into something tangible. This has always been my obsession.

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FAMILIAR EMOTION IN A NEW MATERIAL

Research + Realities

For the first five years Demeulemeester worked on her tableware collection in silence. That silence can be taken quite literally. Ann’s atelier is situated on the lower floor of her elegant country home, surrounded by a 50-acre park with centuries-old trees, which she shares with her husband Patrick Robyn. In her kitchen, formerly a stately reception room, floor-to-ceiling cupboards store the tableware collection that she has been working on for Serax, along with countless plaster moulds of the designs.

Ann has meticulous technical descriptions of each prototype, to give the right instructions to the craftsmen in the Chinese workshop who produce her creations.

Serax started in 1986 as a small-scale flowerpot business and has grown into a multinational with a head office in Antwerp. Since 1990, Serax has entered into dozens of partnerships with upcoming and renowned designers, creating ceramics, porcelain, and furniture.

Ann Demeulemeester x Serax is now a brand within the Serax group, with a strong identity that is the product of the creativity and craftsmanship of not only Ann, but also of that her husband Patrick and their son Victor, who designed the packaging and the catalogues. The partnership begun is 2019 and has extended into lighting, cutlery and a wide collection of lead-free crystal glasses, in either a transparent or a light green version.

“Patrick and I are both creators: everything we needed for our house, we designed and created ourselves, in our own creative language. Patrick designs the furniture.

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1. Ann Demeulemeester in her atelier.

Photo: Julien Mignot 2. Luna L1 pendant lighting.

Photo: Victor Robyn 3. Porcelain plate collection in black. Photo: Marc Wouter

FAMILIAR EMOTION IN A NEW MATERIAL

→ Text by Lut Clincke

ANN DEMEULEMEESTER X SERAX

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“The big difference between designing fashion and doing what I do now is the fact that I now have the time I need. As a fashion designer, there are so many things you need to organize in just one season, that you have no other way but to delegate tasks and manage from a distance.

With what I do now, I create things from A to Z. There is no need for me to have to explain things to other people. I can discover objects, materials, and techniques. My creative language is still the same. In fact, I only have this one language in which I can express myself. It’s only the material which is different.”

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MARÍA BOTO ORDONEZ

PRINTING MICROALGAE

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LABORATORIUM.BIO

Research + Realities

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PRINTING MICROALGAE How sustainable is the colour dye in your top? Where did it come from and how long will its hue last in the wash before inevitably fading? We pick out colours for their shades and aesthetics, but it seems rare that we choose colours based on their pigment origins.

Since 2016, researcher María Boto Ordóñez has focused her practice on the development of new ways of creating colour. Working from her Colour Biolab, situated in the experimental laboratorium at KASK / School of Arts Ghent, Ordóñez has been able to develop and discover approximately 4000 new colour pigments. She has created a whole new database of colour possibilities through the cultivation of microorganisms, such as microalgae and bacteria. The knowledge Ordóñez generates is then transferred to others – her students, designers, artists and industries – for their own use.

With a background in nutrition, one of Ordóñez’s main objectives is to be able to apply her scientific knowledge into the arts through research. Her explorations often start from existing science found in pigment research, cosmetics, fashion, and even food industries.

The process of research to application begins through the sourcing of a material or organism that is ideally photosensitive or pigment orientated. Ordóñez will then grow and harvest the organisms to be able to extract its pigments and later experiment with application methods.

From microalgae to screen-print, bacteria to fabric dye, fungi to paint, ink or 3D modelling. The varied application of the colours obtained allows for a shift in understanding of what is possible in the world of colour.

It is the shifting perception of colour through Ordóñez’s work on Printing Microalgae that is important to be aware of. Simply because we take for granted the hues, shades and tones we observe every day, yet, we are

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Top: Bottom:

Cruentum Porphyridium purpureum

Microalgae colour: Pigment production: Growing conditions: Applications tested:

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Red/ Pink Phycoerithrin Marine medium Paper, fabric

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often unaware of where they come from. Ordóñez’s work invites us to consider the use of nature in colour, asking what colour is: dynamic or static?

One of the main discoveries of Printing Microalgae has actually been the loss of colour. Most of the colours obtained from algae are unstable and after hours or days they will begin to fade, leaving a shadow of the pigment that once was there. For instance, when you visit a natural history museum have you ever noticed how many of the previously living mammals, insects and reptiles have a brownish tinge to their complexion? This is because the melanin brownish colour pigment stays for a much longer time than the other pigments that fade away.

The case of the disappearing pigments was disheartening for Ordóñez to begin with, as she watched the outcomes of her research vanish. Whereas, for the designers and artists Ordóñez spoke with, this discovery was exciting and inspired new ideas for the potential uses for this instability within their work – uses that took advantage of a way to understand colour’s connection to time.

Printing Microalgae showcases how the dynamics of a pigment characteristic is yet to be fully explored.

The project’s exploration through research in science to art is opening up the possibilities of the application of living and sustainable colours. It is developing new pigments that are based on origin rather than tone.

For Ordóñez’s next research project she will be looking into structural colouration, focusing on the reflection not absorption of light. Asking how to transfer the

knowledge of what happens in wings, feathers and shells to another medium.

Colour is not stable, and instead of reacting with dismay at its gradual fading or shifting of hue, Ordóñez’s research argues we should embrace its dynamics as much as we do the shifting colours between seasons.

1–3. Linen Laboratorium 4. Arthrospira, Laboratorium.

5. Microalgae print, Laboratorium

→ Text by Emma Singleton

Research + Realities

Porphyridium purpureum is a red marine microalga that contains several pigments including phycocyanin (blue) and phycoerythrin (pink) in their phycobiliproteins. This unicellular round alga, distributed worldwide, is not only interesting for its pigments but also because of the possibilities of being used as biomass for biofuel.

MARĂ?A BOTO ORDONEZ

PRINTING MICROALGAE Top: Middle: Bottom:

Spirulina Spirulina biomass Spirulina pigment

Research + Realities

Spirulina is the common name for a food supplement made out of Arthrospira, another genus different to Spirulina with similar morphological structure (the division is from 1989). Spirulina is a cyanobacterium, which means that it can photosynthesize. First considered as a green-blue alga, Spirulina is widely distributed in South America, Africa and Asia in lakes with a high pH and carbonate concentration. The most important pigment extracted from spirulina is phycocyanin, responsible for its blue colour.

Microalgae colour: Blue/Green Pigment production: phycocyanin, chlorophyll Growing conditions: Basic medium Applications tested: Paper, fabric, wood

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AURA Established & Sons ' 7 ' Eric Croes Onka Allymayer-Beck 68 Ingo Maurer TUBULAR Maria Scarpulla CAMPI DI COLORE THE UNCOLLECTED COLLECTION Living Divani LIAISON Axolight Luceplan FIENILE Axor MYEDITIONS ORBITTU Ingo Maurer HACKER VASE DWA Studio Antonio Spoto VERTIGO Niko Koronis G COLLECTION WAFFLE Antrax Muller Van Severen ALL TUBES Zucchetti & Kos FARAWAY POOL SUPERSOFT Fogia LUCIO Established & Sons HELIA Kvadrat/Raf Simons Glas Italia BISEL Fogia SUPERSOLID OVO CHAIR Eric Jøergensen IGMAN MINI Zanat BEE HOME Space 10 ROLL CHAIR Sancal

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01 AURA

Established & Sons

Part of the new LIVE / WORK collection by Established & Sons, Aura Light by Sabine Marcelis is made from a bio-epoxy resin, formulated using by-products from the agricultural industry.

A replaceable glass LED tube is housed within the coloured resin case, with the light travelling through the material to create a warm glow.

establishedandsons.com

Photo: ©PimTop

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Eric Croes

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Onka Allmayer-Beck

Belgian artist Eric Croes presents his vision of the seven cardinal sins: seven unique sculptures, seven fantastical totems, seven unsettling presences. On show at the Sorry We're Closed Gallery, Brussels, 3 September 17 October.

Using a slab building technique, each piece is handmade with white burning clay before being hand glazed and fired twice for 24 hours. Custom-made for SEEDS Gallery by Onka Allmayer-Beck, the ceramics are numbered in the order they are made.

ericcroes.be

seedslondon.com

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Ingo Maurer

05 CAMPI DI COLORE Scarpulla

Free-floating, the glass tube luBelgian designer Maria Scarpulla minaire Tubular by Sebastian launches a series of handmade Hepting from the Ingo Maurer tables in primary colors, which can team has a puristic accent. be used both in- and outdoors. ingo-maurer.com mariascarpulla.com 06 THE UNCOLLECTED COLLECTION Living Divani

07 LIAISON

Axolight

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Luceplan

A limited-edition series by Piero Lissoni to celebrate and seal a double anniversary: Living Divani’s 50th anniversary and the architect’s 30 years as art director. Pictured, Tavolino 03 by Lissoni.

Liaison is a metal suspension that plays with three geometric archetypes — sphere, circle and cylinder — which combine themselves in a light and elegant structure. Designed by Sara Moroni, Liaison is made of matt gold and black metal elements, handcrafted, which can create a single pendant or articulated compositions.

First created as a table lamp, but then interpreted in suspension and floor models for outdoor use: Fienile is the new family of products generated by the longterm collaboration with Daniel Rybakken. The geometric forms are based on those of simple rural buildings.

livingdivani.it

axolight.it

luceplan.com

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Axor

The longing for something personal, unique and unmistakable drives us all. At the end of this development, the personalized product inspires. AXOR offers a neutral mounting plate for this purpose, which makes it possible to apply your own, individually selected material to the AXOR MyEdition tap.

Copyright: AXOR / Hansgrohe SE. Photo: Tom Hegen axor-design.com

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Ingo Maurer

Orbittu is a wall or ceiling lamp.

Its base can rotate on its own axis thanks to the Plug & Light technology of Insta GmbH. The hemispherical housing with lateral light emission reminds of a miniature observatory, to which a rotating mirror is attached via an asymmetrical mount.

ingo-maurer.com

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11 HACKER VASE

DWA Studio

Hacker is a collection of marble artefacts conceived by DWA Design Studio (Frederik De Wachter and Alberto Artesani) to give a new life to leftover stone slabs.

On the occasion of the KleurEyck exhibition in Gent, a special edition vase was made in Carrara marble and lapis lazuli, a precious stone Jan Van Eyck used to obtain the blue colour for his paintings.

Manufactured by Manuel Coltri. dw-a.it

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Antonio Spoto

This clay piece is made by a potter's wheel and baked in an electric oven; the enamels that cover it are copper-based. Its colours vary from blue to mauve. Spoto's forms are exclusively turned with absolute perfection. It is only the frustoconical or hemispherical typology of the bowl that serves as its formal starting point.

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GSD Console and GBC Bench by Niko Koronis, inspired by the work of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa and made in resin. Both Pieces can be made to measure with colours on request. The Niko Koronis Collection is avaliable through studiotwentyseven, New York.

Antrax IT radiators are made of 100% recyclable steel or aluminium and offer a wide range of choices and flexible uses.

A sustainable complement that allows significant energy savings.

Waffle is the iconic reinterpretation by Piero Lissoni of the historic cast-iron radiators.

The Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen launches ALLTUBES, a new series of objects consisting of the repetition of round aluminium tubes. The series includes several cabinets, a sofa and a chair, together forming a family with the same genes but different characters.

antrax.it

mullervanseveren.be

studiotwentyseven.com nikokoronis.com

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Zucchetti & Kos

Distinguished by a graphical motif on its inner bottom surface, the Faraway Pool, designed by Ludovica+Roberto Palomba, is a floor-level mini pool that completely integrates functionality and aesthetics.

Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani zucchettikos.it

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Fogia

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Established & Sons

Supersoft came about as a response to the preconceptions of what sofas in the Nordics are: hard-lined, compact and aimed at the contract sectors. Thus, Note Design Studio took the fuller-bodied sofas of Italy as an inspiration to make a modular sofa designed to be large and welcoming, without disregarding form.

Designed by Sebastian Wrong, the new Lucio Chair combines maximum comfort with minimum weight to create a super-supportive professional lounge chair that’s easy to move and offers a distinctive, graphic profile.

fogia.se

establishedandsons.com

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Kvadrat/Raf Simons

Kvadrat/Raf Simons continue their exploration of the limits of upholstery. For inspiration Simons returns to his love of haute couture. Looking at fur and luxurious knits, he interprets the textures and techniques used in this craft and translates them into fabrics: the new Helia and Silas, and the colour updated Sunniva 3.

Photo: Casper Sejersen kvadratrafsimons.com

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Glas Italia

Collection of high tables, low tables and console by Patricia Urquiola. Made in multilayered and multichromatic glass, created by laminating five slabs of 5mm extralight glass each with a different coloured film, the designs aim to create “furniture jewels.”

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Fogia

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Eric Jøergensen

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Zanat

Designed by Note Design Studio at the same time as the Supersoft sofa, Supersolid was developed as a point of contrast to the softness of Supersoft. A range of design objects that enhance Supersoft’s function as a central part of a space.

Designed by British designer Damian Williamson, Ovo is a refined easy chair with curves resting on a rigid squared steel frame. The same steel is also used to connect the back and the front of the chair, thus achieving a playful integration between the leather and the steel, while hiding the stitched seam at the same time.

Bosnian brand ZANAT, specialized in wooden furnishing components and carving art, presents Igman Mini by Harri Koskinen. zanat.org 25 ROLL CHAIR

fogia.se

erik-joergensen.com

sancal.com

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Space 10

Ikea's SPACE10 lab have teamed up with Bakken & Bæck and designer Tanita Klein to launch an open-source Bee Home. space10.com Sancal

Designed by MUT for Sancal, Roll chair was inspired by the leg presses that can be found in gyms. The Valencian studio reduced the conventional shape of a chair to two pure elements: steel tubes and two cylindrical pads for back and seat.

Research + Realities

EALITIES

A FULL EXPERIENCE

OUR LARGEST AND MOST COLOURFUL EXHIBITION EVER

T H E PA I N T E R S PA L E T T E PA L E T T E R U G â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2 0 1 5 AT E L I E R L A C H A E R T D H A N I S

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194 KLEUREYCK. VAN EYCK’S COLOURS IN DESIGN

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Time Rock Stack, 2019-20, Dawn Bendick.

Bendick was inspired by the way in which Van Eyck painted the reflection of light, especially in gemstones. The lighting changes the colour of her sculptures – from warm orange or pink to dramatic neon green and - blue. The shape references cairns, stones stacked on top of each other that mark a path or a special place. Time Rock Stack shows how subtle changes in the angle of the light indicate time slipping away. Produced by Max Jacquard, photos: Filip Dujardin, © Design Museum Gent

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KLEUREYCK. VAN EYCK’S COLOURS IN DESIGN Anna Winston

The relationship between art and colour is so close that the demands of one have come to define the limitations of the other. In a new exhibition at Design Museum Gent, curator and DAMN°'s own Siegrid Demyttenaere, explores how Belgium artist Jan van Eyck experimented and applied his colour research and how design now benefits and strives to contribute to that knowledge.

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Nowadays we seem to be able to make any material in any colour, but tend to forget that colour comes from material and has material properties that you can work with. Painters like Van Eyck and Rembrandt understood this like no other and were able to excel because of it,” says Guus Kusters. Together with his partner in design Maarten Kolk, Kusters is part of a new, ambitious exhibition exploring the connection between the colours of the past and how designers use colour today.

memory and features the newly restored Gent Altarpiece – also known as The Adoration Of The Mystic Lamb – the most significant Flemish painting of its time.

Staged at Design Museum Gent in Belgium, KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design is a contemporary response to Van Eyck. An Optical Revolution, an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Gent (MSK) that charts the remarkable impact of 15th-century painter and local hero Jan Van Eyck. Van Eyck revolutionized oil painting, harnessing new techniques that helped speed up the drying process of the oils to transform the process of layering and applying colour, creating minutely detailed scenes and figures and using light and shadow to bring his images to life. Likely to be a major blockbuster, the MSK exhibition is the largest of his work in living

“The modernity of Van Eyck lies in the mastery of the Arab optics of Alhazen (the first true scientist in the world from the 11th century). The light reflected from the objects provides all information about the texture of their surface,” explains KleurEyck curator Siegrid Demyttenaere. “Van Eyck’s lively colour palette is a direct result of this knowledge – he painted with light. When you look at the work of some contemporary artists and designers you notice some parallel thinking and processes. The research of how and why colour is seen, the variety of light playing and reflecting in one colour results in beautiful palettes.”

The exhibition at the Design Museum takes this starting point and runs amok with it, using Van Eyck’s nuanced and technical appreciation for colour and light as a device to collect together contemporary design and research projects along with new commissions, spitting them out in a new, curatorial triptych.

KLEUREYCK

The exhibition is divided into three parts. One section showcases design and artistic research projects around colour, which in some ways can be compared to Van Eyck’s knowledge of optics, architecture, botany and other fields. The Pigment Walk presents 100 contemporary objects selected by Demyttenaere and co-curated by Sofie Lachaert.

Featuring established and emerging designers, in addition to 20 works from the Museum’s collection, they zoom in and out on 13 details from Van Eyck’s Mystic Lamb and are gathered into ensembles based on colour groups. Then there are the Experience Rooms, set inside a series of historic rooms in the former Hotel De Coninck building that currently houses the Museum. This part of the exhibition is populated with installations commissioned for the exhibition that are often tactile and interactive, bringing together colour and the senses in playful and thoughtful projects.

falls on cairns (and is used in Van Eyck’s paintings) that shifts colour and space, the artificial lighting I use shifts the colour of Time Rock Stack from warm pinks and oranges to cool blues and greens,” explains Bendick.

Nick Verstand’s ANIMA (III) performs a similar act, albeit from a more technological viewpoint. Humming menacingly, a psychedelic orb immerses the viewer into a relationship with colour that shifts and changes as it is observed. “We use an algorithm [in this case based on the colours of the Mystic Lamb] to create fluid dynamics morphing multiple colour layers in real-time over the surface of the three-dimensional sphere.”

Colour impacts our mood, and light gives us information about the world around us.

“All the designers in the Experience Rooms have something to do with light and colour, but all in totally different ways,” says Demyttenaere of her exhibition concept. The exhibition’s intent is firmly established with the opening work, an installation of artist Dawn Bendick’s Time Rock Stack. Referencing cairns, the totem-like stacks of rocks that are left as markers by walkers along the UK’s public footpaths and trails, Time Rock Stack is formed by stacks of dichroic glass blocks, roughly cut to look like stone, that glint and glisten as light passes through them.

Set in a dark space, the sculpture featured in the exhibition brings to mind both Van Eyck’s paintings of gems and his use of light

What unites the seemingly disparate practices gathered together in the exhibition is a deep-seated thoughtfulness about colour and an idea that objects are far from dumb, instead engaging with their users in complex and varied relationships. Many of the installations in the Experience Rooms use human interaction as a force for transformation. Portuguese jeweller Patricia Domigues’ Modern Animism is a case in point. Blocks of stone – chosen to reference the materials from which many pigments were sourced in Van Eyck’s era – will be slowly fragmented into small pieces during the course of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to take a picture of their favourite stone and upload it, contributing to a new and evolving digital collage.

“Colour impacts our mood, and light gives us information about the world around us. Like the natural light that

“When I think of the work of Van Eyck, I see the tangible immateriality of the sacred through his eyes.

But I see, as well, the physical reality of the landscapes from which the pigments used in his paintings were extracted – lapis lazuli, malachite, jasper…” she explains. “I find it fascinating how man has made use of the material world to understand immaterial aspects of our lives. The world of beliefs is not so far from the virtual world. Both are intangible and immaterial concepts, collectively built and shared, through the use and transformation of our physical world.”

Another project that navigates the relationship between the physical and the digital but with a more playful and tactile approach is Pinaffo Pluvinage’s Noisy Jelly, a new version of an installation created in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Décoratif & Design Bordeaux. Described as a “sonic chemistry set” the installation replaces the usual smooth, hard surfaces of digital technology with soft, squishy and colourful gelatine blocks that make different noises when touched. What sounds should jelly make? What sounds should colours make?

“The colour is not applied on the surface but is in the material and so is very linked to the shape: because of the transparency, the same colour will not appear the same at all with different thicknesses, and surface details,” says Raphaël Pluvinage, co-founder of the studio with Marion Pinaffo. In previous versions, the duo had found the colours to be a bit unpredictable, so relished the opportunity to dig further into the world of pigments under the guidance of Demyttenaere.

Experimenting with opacities they have created a new colour palette for the work, exploring the idea of what colours should sound like.

Even more literally playful is Joanna Reuse’s C S D H L A O P U E R (= colour + shape). In accordance 197

ANIMA III, 2020, Nick Verstand, in collaboration with Salvador Breed, Naivi, NAP Framework, Pufferfish, created for KleurEyck

Noisy Jelly, 2012, PPinaffo-Pluvinage, adapted version for KleurEyck, 2020 Sound and programming: Léo Baqué, partner: Madd-Bordeaux (detail image by Pinaffo-Pluvinage) 108 lines, 2020, atelier Haegeman Temmerman, in collaboration with Nitto, HARU stuck-on design for KleurEyck

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Photos: Filip Dujardin, © Design Museum Gent, except where mentioned otherwise

Un Jardin Miraculeux, 2020, Les Monseigneurs, partner: Verilin, photo by Siegrid Demyttenaere (top left), Modern Animism, 2019-2020, Patricia Domingues, in collaboration with VA Studio (bottom left), both projects created for KleurEyck and RembrandtLAB – Constructing Colours, 2016, Studio Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters (right) C S D H L A O P U E R, 2020, Joanna Reuse, in collaboration with Vrijdaghs, Ateljee Recycling Shop, created for KleurEyck

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KLEUREYCK. VAN EYCK’S COLOURS IN DESIGN Anna Winston

to the designer’s “theory of reuse”, it encourages children to play with colour in a soft, foam landscape, presenting them with brightly pigmented, discarded objects sourced from a chain of circular stores in the Netherlands.

“Every reused object of C S D H L A O P U E R was a banal everyday product, but all with a particular colour and form,” says Reuse.

“By constructing, assembling, arranging, joining, ranking… arise monochrome mountains, colourful changing chains, transparent towers, and flashy sculptures.”

Although there is a section of the exhibition dedicated specifically to research projects, many of the earlier installations are also the result of research-driven practices. Viennese duo mischer’traxler have created an installation called Colourful Kinaesthesia, based on a workshop with 15 students at Domaine Boisbuchet (the international research centre for design and architecture) in France last summer.

One project in the Experience Rooms contains narratives told by the many, many plants featured within the landscape of The Ghent Altarpiece, sees De Onkruidenier (Ronald Boer and Jonmar Vlijmen) collaborate with Marente van der Valk (Food Lab – Jan van Eyck Academy) and food artist Céline Pelcé.

De Onkruidenier (or weed grocers) have a history of exploring the wild origins of cultivated plants to reveal the relationship between humans, plants and landscapes through short stories and gestures. One work focused on a ‘rare’ dandelion and speaking to dandelion expert Karst Marer led them to discover

market to buy tomatoes from Spain in December. When it is possible to buy whatever food whenever we want, people lose their connection to the season and the value of the cultivation of their groceries,” says Vlijmen In a similar vein mischer’traxler’s project The Idea of a Tree, which explores using natural process as a production technique, is also on show in the Pigment Walk alongside pieces like Stéphane Mouflette’s Peinture au Chevalet. A “transgender object” that identifies as a painting, tool and light fixture, it has been designed as a riff on classical modes of painting and features a chromatic colour scale supported by a white structure.

“We saw a Netflix Red alongside a Trump Orange.

I also encouraged the children I worked with to think about colours that weren’t always pleasant or ‘nice’.”

“Workshop participants had just four and a half days to work on a project and we also did not know who would be participating, so it was a very interesting challenge for us,” remember the designers.

“We liked the idea to underline the movement of the body with designed objects.”

The designers and participants matched key words to primary and secondary colours, then translated the words into adjectives that related to movement before designing, building and performing a scenario in the grounds of Boisbuchet. A series of striking twists, turns and leaps of colour, in Gent we see projects from the workshop, photography by Martina Orska and a film by Holog Wang.

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the common weed’s importance to biodiversity, and use as an ingredient in cooking and medicine. For the Gent exhibition the team members have created Re-Table(au), a project that evolves with the change of the seasons. Revealing new colours, tastes and smells as they are harvested throughout its presentation, the piece grows through time extrapolating the seasons that Van Eyck had beautifully blended together.

The installation is one that visitors can taste and interact with. First we see plants as raw materials, various stages of fermentation and as a printing material. Then there is a second part that displays plant parts cooked in glazed ceramics, plant extracts and preparations, and a video diary of the whole process.

‘We are living in Van Eyck fantasy landscape; it is part of our weekly routine when we go to the super-

“I designed this piece as a tool for contemplating colour and its variations,” explains Mouflette. “My productions are similar to toys for adults, which questions the idea of maturity, acquired knowledge, and everyday boredom in an environment of standardized objects.”

In the Pigment Walk there are also a number of works created especially for the exhibition. One of those is Picobello Peeters by British artist Ann Carrington. It contemporizes references and influences from 17th century Dutch and Flemish still lifes and takes its name from a type of tulip and the painter Clara Peeters – she was a pioneer of still lifes during the period, and when an exhibition of her works went to the Museo del Prado in 2016 it was the first solo show devoted to a female artist in its history. In the form of a bouquet made from spoons, goblets, vases and plates, it maintains the delicacy of its decorative predecessors. Another such project is a specific version of DWA Design Studio’s Hacker Vase series. Made

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Re-table(au), 2020, Marente van der Valk (Food Lab – Jan van Eyck Academy), De Onkruidenier, Céline Pelcé, created for KleuEyck, photo: Filip Dujardin, © Design Museum Gent

KLEUREYCK

Colourful Kinaesthesia, 2020, mischer'traxler, workshop at Boisbuchet, making of Pink, created for KleurEyck Photo: Lake Lewis

KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, view on the Pigment Walk Photo: Filip Dujardin, © Design Museum Gent

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KLEUREYCK Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, mid 1420s - 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck - zooming in on 13 details.

Sint-Baafskathedraal Gent, www.lukasweb.be Art in Flanders Photo: Hugo Dominique Provost and Hugo Maertens

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Polychromy Plays, 2018, Navine G. Khan-Dossos Courtesy of Navine G. Khan-Dossos, The Showroom London & Imperial Health Charity

KLEUREYCK. VAN EYCKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S COLOURS IN DESIGN Anna Winston

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KLEUREYCK

from remnants of Carrara marble – the designers were determined surplus didn’t equal ending up in a skip – its link to Van Eyck is in the use of lapis lazuli, the precious stone from which the artist got his blue pigment.

The research section is populated mainly with extant projects, some with rethought displays for the exhibition. Founder of Grace of Glaze, Simone Doesburg, explores how ceramicists can use new and more vibrant hues by combining the coloured porcelain or coloured glaze more generally used. Creating a special series of the Colour Library that forms the basis of all her works, the research is displayed grid-like and shows three colours of porcelain and 25 colours of glaze and porcelain. Alongside the grid, there are porcelain objects that reference the colours of the Mystic Lamb.

London-based Greek designer Navine G. Khan-Dossos is presenting Polychromy Plays, a project that came out of a residency at St Mary’s Hospital in west London. Over a series of workshops with patients, Khan-Dossos developed a new colour palette to be used in a medical setting to improve the experience of being on a ward. There were three outcomes of the project: individual colour palettes developed with children who were long-term patients on the paediatric wards; a working colour palette with names developed in small groups; and a final publication of the finished palette that was given out by the hospital.

“I was surprised by how many of the references of names were brand based, but also political references,” says Khan-Dossos. “We saw a Netflix Red alongside a Trump Orange. I also encouraged the children I worked with to think about colours that weren’t always pleasant or ‘nice’.”

“There were just 20 final colours, but it took four people working full-time for six months and approximately 1000 glazing recipes to create it,” says Kusters. “By presenting the work for the first time in a very edited way [for KleurEyck] visitors will not see the enormous amount of research behind it, so we’re taking a risk in that way.

“But we want visitors to see what we see when we look at a Rembrandt. To see how pasty, rich, flat, deep, shy and bright colour can be, and hope the next time they look at a Van Eyck or Rembrandt they will look at their paintings in another way.” /

Peinture au chevalet, 2018, Stéphane Mouflette

Although the range of work on show is extremely wide, there is a sense that many of the designers are still coming to terms with their own understanding of a relationship with colour. Uninterested in becoming ‘masters’ like Van Eyck, they are concerned with experimentation and understanding.

“We’ll never look at colour the same way and even though we’ve studied colour for quite some years now, we’re still rookies,” says Kusters. Studio Maarten Kolk and Guus Kusters’ RembrantLAB – Constructing Colours project is perhaps a perfect encapsulation of the exhibition, with the clearest connection to the artworks that have inspired it.

Carried out over the course of a year and originally commissioned

by Museum het Rembrandthuis, Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden Marketing, Culture fund Leiden and partner Rijksmuseum, it picks apart the origins of the layers of colour used by Rembrandt in his paintings and reapplies them to ceramics as a way of understanding their material properties.

KleurEyck. Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent, Belgium, until 21 February 2021 designmuseumgent.be dawnbendick.squarespace.com nickverstand.com patriciadomingues.pt modernanimism.com pinaffo-pluvinage.com joannareuse.com mischertraxler.com onkruidenier.nl marentevandervalk.com celinepelce.fr stephane.mouflette.fr anncarrington.co.uk dw-a.it graceofglaze.com khandossos.com maartenkolk-guuskusters.tumblr.com 205

206 A LETTER FROM RACHEL MASON Rachel Mason is an artist, musician and film-maker from Los Angeles

Yellow, from Stonehenge (with Two Persons), John Baldessari, 2005

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Nothing is as Valuable as Generosity John Baldessari taught me that generosity is the key to success.

Like many recent post-graduates, when I finished college I was completely lost. At UCLA where he was my teacher, John was one of the most successful artists on a roster of artists that were some of the most powerful in the United States at the time, and he had no reason to take me under his wing and be kind to me, but he did.

One of the first things he told me to do was not get an MFA. He said it was a scam. And this was in 2001. And yet, I saw it as the only entry portal into a career as an artist. He went ahead and wrote me a letter of recommendation when I applied to Yale. And when I got to Yale, I found a handwritten letter in my mailbox from John.

He wrote in all capitals. He wrote simple, definitive words in ink, on paper.

the mainstream, outside of the sphere of the art world. And he was right. He gave me that feeling that I could figure it out, even if there wasn’t any road map.

When he came to see my first and only solo show that I did in Los Angeles, I offered to give him a drawing. He insisted that it be a trade. Why? Because as artists we are equals he said. And he followed through on it and gave me an artwork. When I told him I was making an album, he offered to make me an album cover. And he did. He followed through. He didn’t make empty promises. I took this lesson as the lesson for my own practice as an artist and as a human. I cherish everything that John Baldessari gave me.

Not for the inherent value of his work, but for the underlying value that each piece is worth as a symbol of what it meant to be generous, and to be a great person.

Nose/Silhouette: Red, John Baldessari, 2010

When I had my own successes in the art world, I noticed that these successes didn’t feel particularly great to me. So I moved more into work that made less money but which was more fulfilling – performing, writing songs, and making films. In my panic about not knowing how I would really make a life for myself as an artist, moving into an unknown sphere, I talked to John about it and he reminded me of his friend the artist Laurie Anderson and predicted I would cross over to

Someone with the kind of power that he had as an artist has absolutely no reason to share it the way that he did, and yet he did. And he shared constantly. And what he taught me and so many other artists, was that this sharing was the secret to his greatness as an artist. He did countless acts of generosity for many, many people and I will always be grateful that John gave me these precious gifts of his humanity. / John Baldessari 1931 – 2020 207

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