“Our guiding principle was that artistic design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life.”
Walter Gropius
In this collective exhibit Everyone to Everything, the MADMi joins the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the international school (and school of philosophy) known as the Bauhaus. This early-twentieth-century institution was a landmark in the history of Western design, as it emphasized and fostered the idea of the transformative power of art and design. Over thirty artists and designers contribute to the exhibit, and in their work one can still perceive the influence of the Modernist thinkers, who believed that design could permeate every aspect of our daily life.
The selection of objects represents the various aesthetic schools that have influenced a new generation of local designers and their use of methods, media, and materials, as well as a wide variety of creative processes, from craft-based to the newest technologies. These processes and explorations are consonant with some of the notions of the reciprocal relationship between society and technology that the Bauhaus fostered.
The display of the works is inspired by the utilitarian aspect of the domestic space the Bauhaus defined. That is, the object does not operate independently, but is, rather, part of a whole within the functionality of the home, “a machine for living.” The displays, therefore, present the designs within the daily scenes/spaces for which they were made. We have chosen three domestic spaces: a living room, a kitchen, and a terrace or patio—that is, the common areas in which the home’s social encounters take place.
The location of each design in relation to its space creates an emphasis on group design, reiterating the Bauhaus philosophy of the collective nature of ideas. Presenting the objects within family spaces also responds to our interest in motivating our visitors to reflect on the objects they live with and to appreciate a spectrum of our contemporary designers’ ideas and styles.
Everyone to Everything makes visible the work of creators, many of them faculty members of industrial-design programs at institutions of higher education, where they are teaching and training the next generations. With that in mind, we hope that this selection of objects may serve as a platform for discussion of the future of that discipline on the island.
We are living in a time when good design, aware of not contributing to the culture of excess, has become an indispensable labor for guaranteeing better practices of daily living for everyone — practices more planet-friendly, and more friendly to ourselves. With regard to Gropius’ principle, we might argue, What does it mean to be a civilized society? We don’t think that design should be exclusive to one group; every society has the ability to improve its quality of life through design.
.png){kind=icon}