Strongly rooted & heartening
Green double opening at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich - Toni-Areal annexe.
After six months of renovation work in the exhibition galleries, the Toni-Areal reopens with a double exhibition following a single thread, inquiring about the status plants have in our world as raw material, as living creatures, or even as pets.
What do we design for them? What do we design with them? What is the relationship between the objects we design and use and the impact that producing them has on our planet?
As I walked through the exhibition and immersed myself in it, I started thinking about our planet and about our “human” extractivism. A line from the song “Kids” from MGMT started repeating in a loop in my head; “Take only what you need from it”.
Plant Fever
Towards a Phyto-Centered Design
On view from December 3, 2021 to April 3, 2022
Plant Fever is a touring exhibition -and a community- with both political and social dimensions around the topics of carbon footprint, climate change, food supply.
Designing with and for plants. Taking the stand that we urgently need to rethink our relationship with nature, it explores ways different disciplines develop solutions to our environmental and societal issues using plants as allies.
Curated by Laura Drouet and Olivier Lacrouts, the founders of studio d-o-t-s and Karin Gimmi, from the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plant Fever the relationship between people and plants, examining the potential of plants beyond their use as raw material or decorative object. The exhibition brings together international product design, fashion, and new technologies projects that demonstrate various ways to tap plants’ hidden potential.
Formafantasma: Cambio
Tree, Wood, Human
On view from December 3, 2021 to May 8, 2022.
The Milan-based design duo formed by Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi approach the timber industry and ask the question of how design can -and must- contribute to constructive and more environmentally sustainable solutions.
This exhibition is presented in association with the Serpentine Galleries,
London. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rebecca Lewin, from Serpentine Galleries, London and Damian Fopp, from the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich.
FormaFantasma put together a multi-sensorial experience. Arrive. Close your eyes. Inhale the woody forest scent, drift away for a sec and take an instant trip to wet earth memories, to that walk through the forest that made you feel grounded, feel your feet growing roots, connecting and getting deep under the ground.
Now, open your eyes, get curious, explore, walk around a tree trunk and discover films, objects, artifacts, and wood samples from all over the world, and a specially designed set of furniture made from a single fallen tree.
Post-Extractivist utopia
I left the exhibition feeling hopeful. Hoping there is a way, thinking that we humans are also capable of doing good for this planet.
I experienced this exhibition as three-dimensional poetry and I read it “there is a beautiful, organic and sustainable way to stop fucking this planet up”. Deeply Inspirational, aspirational, strongly rooted, down-to-earth, and heartening.