Scaling Up: Formafantasma

As part of the Walker’s presentation of Designs for Different Futures (on view now—or at least when the museum reopens), we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

This conversation took place in September 2018 at Studio Formafantasma in Amsterdam, between exhibition co-curator Zoë Ryan, and Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi.

Zoë Ryan (ZR)

Since you graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2009, how have you seen the field of design changing and addressing issues related to the future as a way to imagine alternative ideas of how we might live, how we might interact with one another?

Simone Farresin (SF)

It’s a difficult question. It’s always easier to reflect on how you see yourself changing and how our way of working is changing and reflecting, perhaps, larger changes in design. I think what is really carving a new path for design is its increasing connectedness to issues of climate change and the impact of ecological troubles that design has participated in creating. 

Andrea Trimarchi (AT)

We feel very lonely as individual designers. I’m speaking for us, but I think if you talk with others, they will feel the same. In the past, companies or industry were asking designers the right questions. Today, there are many cultural and arts institutions that are asking us the right questions, but not companies, especially not the furniture design industry.

SF

If you think about, for instance, the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape that opened in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972, the collaboration with manufacturing companies and the Italian government was essential. They were financing these avant-garde ideas. That kind of relationship is completely lacking now. It’s completely disappeared. We are [instead] contacted by manufacturers who can engage on the level of product development, but only on that level. Our way of thinking about design is not product oriented. We want to think about design in a much more holistic way. Until now, design has always been focused on the human as the center of the conversation. In this moment when we are facing severe ecological troubles, maybe we need to enlarge our thinking and be more considerate of other species inhabiting the planet. 

ZR

Can you talk more about the types of questions that galvanize you? How did the commission for your work Ore Streams come about, for example, and what questions were asked of you? 

AT

Ore Streams was a commission from the National Gallery of Victoria in [Melbourne,] Australia. We were interested in learning about electronics—how they are produced and the forces behind the design of an object. While we were working on this research, we were contacted by a big producer of electronics. They asked us to give them some trends on …

SF

The colors of phones and patterns of phones.

AT

How the phone should look, basically. We were happy to look into this as a way to continue our research into electronics, but again, this is not the question they should have asked us. We are interested in questions that can lead us to designing products or systems that can make greater changes to the way things are made and distributed, for example.

SF

We talked to them about the research we’ve done. They were not interested in hearing it.

AT

But these types of large companies can make a difference because they have the power and they have the scale and the numbers to generate change. But they are not able to see, or maybe they know their limits.

SF

We would love to do a project about restructuring the departments of a product-development company, so that they don’t just think in boxes. I think it’s interesting to see how the infrastructure of companies is not allowing conversation between the parts. It’s not allowing the bigger picture. We need partners that can allow us, for instance, to investigate how electronics recycling works, not just questions of product development, aesthetics, or the relationship between the user and the product, but the larger consequences of the product. We are interested in the ecology of the product. 

AT

We also see this [concern] with our students. It’s really rare that we have students who are just interested in working with companies. 

SF

They want to understand the system of production, since it is increasingly displaced and not something experienced anymore in a physical way, given new technologies and manufacturing methods. We also don’t have our parents working in companies and producing the things we experience anymore, as it was historically in Italy, where skills were handed down through the generations and there was a direct connection to how something was produced. We don’t know where our products come from anymore and how they are produced. A new level of understanding of the systems of production is needed, and I think design should also be preoccupied with that. Our work reflects on the origins of materials and the implications they have on production. I think that the layering of different elements is always present in our work, but I think that over time, especially with Ore Streams, it crystallized into something more precise. There is a deeper understanding of why we are interested in the transformation of materials into objects. At the beginning, we were interested in issues related to our dependence on oil and the overuse of plastics, for example, which you see in projects such as Botanica [2011], which seeks to explore alternatives. We were hinting at the problems, but we were not really getting our hands dirty. I think Ore Streams is attempting to not abandon our love of objects and their narratives and their qualities, but also to dig into the real problems of specific industries and try to understand if design can do something there.

ZR

How did Ore Streams develop?

SF

Our idea for Ore Streams (currently on view in Designs for Different Futures, Ed.) actually came from reflections we had while in Australia. The economy there is largely still based on the extraction of minerals from underground. We knew that we wanted to do a project connected with the processes of extracting, transforming, processing, distributing—[to discover] where design can come in to address some of the urgent challenges facing the industry.

AT

Ultimately it comes down to legislation. The major issue that we understood through this process is that certain things can only be solved through legislation. In the process of developing Ore Streams, we talked to people at the United Nations and Interpol and …

SF

The European Electronic Recyclers Association.

AT

What we realized is that design is missing from this. The International Electronic Recycling Association meets regularly, but the people who design the products are missing from these conversations. For me, the ultimate goal of Ore Streams is to create a platform in which the various sectors can actually discuss these ideas together. We went on to develop a series of films about the Ore Streams project for the Milan Triennale in 2019.

SF

We have an online database where we have archived our research and made our interviews available, and we are now also working on a publication. We also want to hold some seminars with recyclers, designers, and lawmakers so we can extend the areas of our research, for instance into the collection of electronic waste and the collection of trash, and the taxing of waste and how that works. We are interested in discovering if there are ways that we can really impact how planned obsolescence works, both on a physical level and on the digital level.

ZR

Do your projects begin by looking at historical precedents as part of your research?

SF

Yes, often. We did this with Ore Streams in the sense that we started not really from electronic waste, but by looking at the mining industry and how it evolved.

AT

We started to confront the old colonial roots as well as the contemporary roots of the distribution of metal and ore on our planet.

SF

We need to understand why, for instance, a certain economy exists instead of another; it’s interesting or it helps to remind ourselves that everything can be redesigned. That is where imagination can flourish, when you start to understand that the simplest actions we perform daily have been designed. These kinds of thoughts are what help you to be open-minded enough to realize everything is designed, and that everything, because it’s human-made, can be reversed. It can be rethought. That’s how we think about the future. Looking back can help free you from preconceived ideas of how the future is supposed to look. 

ZR

You were just talking about the potential to create the right conditions for the imagination to take flight. For a couple of years now you have been the head of the MADE [Mediterranean Art and Design] Program in Syracuse, Italy, which is an undergraduate program in design. Can you tell us more about this and what interested you in returning to Italy to teach?

SF

Sicily is an interesting place because design is not there. It’s perfect for the location of a design program, because you can avoid the product-based furniture design industry, which the north of Italy is completely obsessed with. 

AT

There is a high unemployment rate in the area for young people, who need new skills. There are ecological issues because it’s a place that is getting drier and drier every year. It’s at the center of the Mediterranean Sea, so it’s at the center of the refugee crisis.

SF

It is also a very beautiful place. It’s a case study for the complexities of the world. On a strategic level, we are taking the best education we have in the country and making it accessible in the south of Italy so that we can have more of an exchange between north and south. We had fifteen students the first year, ten the second, and about fifteen again this year. 

AT

What we really want to try to create is a context there—first, for understanding the potential of design as a political act. Enzo Mari, for example, thought of design in this way. 

SF

He saw design as an ideology, an approach. We do too. Given the complexities of our time, we see the need to create smaller frameworks through which to reimagine and redesign the present and, inevitably, the future. At the moment, in education there is still a conservative approach, and it is the bachelor program. We are also dealing with the restrictions imposed by the [Italian] Ministry of Culture. The ministerial directives are very limiting and at times confusing, with a narrow view of what design is. Our ultimate goal with the school is to make it into a much more open-ended education that could move beyond furniture design but [be] linked to production, a place where designers could not only work with different production processes but possibly rethink them in the light of the devastating reality of a collapsing planet. We hope to nurture a generation of designers like us who don’t know how to sort out the consequences of an irresponsible economic model, but who are not afraid to turn their heads toward those agglomerates of ugliness created by the present industry. ▪︎   

FORMAFANTASMA (Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin) is an Italian design duo based in Amsterdam. Formafantasma’s body of work is characterized by experimental material investigations that explore the relationship between tradition and local culture, critical approaches to sustainability, and the significance of objects as cultural conduits. Their work has been published and acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

ZOË RYAN is the Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She was formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the editor of As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History (2017) and curator of In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury (2019) and the 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be. Her projects explore the impact of architecture and design on society.

The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago