When it moves in the dimension of the analogue, contemporary design grows radical: it goes beyond form and function to return to the roots of the discipline and investigate what inhabiting really means. Discards in the place of materials, tactility instead of surfaces, leaps in scale rather than proportions: it is here that the more subversive approaches redefine views and priorities. The stories we present demonstrate this: the vision widens out, adopts anti-extractive, multipolar and postcolonial perspectives, and outlines a shifting field made up of unexpected connections and cultural hybridizations. The aim is to undermine established codes and open up new creative possibilities. Thus the home becomes a porous space, pervaded by rituals and tensions that redefine its meaning. ‘Home sweet home’ has ceased to be a certainty: how are we going to inhabit the future?
Noe Kuremoto’s work fits into this context. Jōmon: A Mother’s Anthem is a political and at the same time an emotional statement about motherhood, which presents the female figure as the origin and measure of dwelling. Her ceramics are contemporary talismans, moulded using the techniques of the Jōmon period (14.000–300 BCE). They are intended to serve as a protection of the hearth and home “and to remind us of the importance of growing up as mindful individuals,” stresses the artist, who has re-discovered the educational function of art in stoneware. Along the same lines moves Valentina Ciuffi’s La Casa Magica, reflecting, for Nilufar, on the esoteric dimension of domestic space. Here design ceases to be decoration and becomes archetype, active presence able to revive gestures and meanings. “It’s no longer inert objects that we need, but talismans rooted in ancestral legends,” declares the curator. Flora Manon’s work is interesting: her Umbel Node metal flowers open out to evoke a post-apocalyptic rebirth. An imagery that also pervades the work of Jean-Baptiste Durand: Handle with Care, a series of lights made out of discarded laboratory glassware, is his way of imagining the home of the future. Hung on the wall, the works are micro-experiments in which water, nebulization and LEDs generate a subtle coloured mist: an exercise in equilibrium that reinterprets waste, reuse and circularity as languages of sensitivity. The Dutchman Rick Tegelaar also operates in maker mode: the exhibition Oasis is a biotope inhabited by Tabby lights, luminous modular thresholds filled with a silent energy, that of the handmade.
The relationship between form and material becomes a living organism in Onno Adriaanse’s work for Dilmos too. Hedera, inspired by creeping plants, turns the dynamics of the natural world into design: solid walnut and maple wood for his sinuous structures, while Lauze, the luminous column made by Zimmer for ArchiThoughts–ArchiTouch, a project curated Federica Sala, utilizes Arpa Luserna Bianco stone. As the founder of the studio, Federico Panella, observes: “It is imperfection, turned into rhythm, that updates codes and language.” From the object to its relationship with space: ‘Home sweet home’ is no longer a reassuring promise, but an open question. In progress.