The Fakir's Rest and other tales of mobility
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Having finally found some time to go through hundreds of pictures, notes and a decidedly chubby catalogue, i'm ready to start a series of reports from last month's visit to International Design Biennial in Saint Étienne, France. The theme of this 6th edition was Teleportation. The biennale, the website says, intends to explore paths of discoveries that will tend in their extreme expression to lead to a possible teleportation as the dematerialization of movement which appears to be an incredibly revealing notion of our era. The topic was fairly loosely explored. I doubt i would have noticed any difference had they called it dreams or near future or speed or boundaries. But that's about the only negative comment i'm ready to make about the event. It was big, it was often smart, intense, joyful and ambitious and that's far more than an old blasée like me can ask from any design event.
Taking place at the Cité du Design, a former arms factory in the center of the city, the most exciting exhibitions of the biennial aimed at democratizing design without ever dumbing down its discourse and challenges.
Heating was in short supply as you might expect in any ex-industrial building but food was yummy, inventive and often organic.
Special mention for the architecture of the design shop:
I'll kick off with a quick review of La Ville Mobile (The Mobile City.) The exhibition, curated by Constance Rubini, attempted to picture what cities will look like in a not too distant future. It didn't actually have much to teach to most of you who, i suspect, have been interested in the exponential saturation of megacities, flashmobs, the challenges facing public transport, foldable bikes, and other urban issues for a while.
It did however bring a theme which is not often included in conferences and exhibitions about mobility and future cities: Forced Mobility which bring attention to the exclusion of socially deprived groups.
Among the works exhibited were a couple of works by Lucy+Jorge Orta, Krzysztof Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicles, Electroland's Urban Nomad Shelter, Michael Rakowitz's paraSITE, etc. And then there was this wonderful short video showing a series of attempts to subvert 'anti-homeless furnitures' in Paris. Also called antisites, they are occupied by pebbles, spikes, fences or even uncomfortable vegetation that prevents people, whether they are homeless or not, from sitting near a building or lying on a public bench. Stéphane Argillet and Gilles Paté call the braves who resist this architecture of oppression the "fakirs" of public places. In their short video The Fakir's Rest, they demonstrate a few fakir tactics.
And now a few images to illustrate the rest of the exhibition La Ville Mobile:
Cloud City is one of the proposals that emerged from a competition that challenged designers and architects to imagine temporary housing solutions in the event of New York City being struck by a catastrophic coastal storm. The helium-filled blimps would plug onto the rooftops and float above the flood-stricken city.
Also on view at the Design Biennial: The House That Herman Built. |
