The world’s most prestigious furnishing and design show,Salone del Mobile in Milan, Italy, was canceled in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the weeklong event is scheduled to return in September. Portland design reporter Damon Johnstun recaps highlights from the last fair.
While attending Milan Design Week, the largest design event in the world, in 2019, I noticed a fundamental shift in the way designers and decision makers referred to sustainability. A clear-eyed exhibition about climate change’s assault on the natural world was profoundly influential.
The message had to break through six days of visual noise: More than a half million attendees were tempted by 30,000 events.
Among all the hustle and bustle, the city’s design museum, the Triennale di Milano, presented the impressive exhibition, ”Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival.” The exhibition was conceived by Italian author and architect Paola Antonelli, who is based in New York City as the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of the architecture and design department as well as the director of research and development.
I had attended Antonelli’s earlier exhibition, the thought-provoking ”Design and the Elastic Mind,” in 2008 at MoMA. This was a preview of what she would later accomplish with “Broken Nature” as she explored humanity’s strained and failed connections to the environment using design as a lens to explore key issues of human existence.
“At some point in the future, we will become extinct. We have no control over that, but we have some control over when and we do have a lot of control over how,” Antonelli stated. “We can design our own elegant extinction to leave a legacy.”
The variety of ideas covered art, science, design and engineering, and the topics were as large as the cosmos and as small as a single cell. “My job as a curator is not to tell people what is good or bad, but to help them develop their own critical skills and be better citizens of the world,” she said.
Calling on designers, artist engineers and scientist to create the works in the sensory-rich exhibition, Antonelli arranged the works to flow from serious such as regrowing the Australian coral reef, to humorous with a model in fashionable spiked heels planting seeds while strutting around a field.
NASA images documenting the effects of human-made changes filled a large room. Industrial robots were programmed to tend and bottle feed human babies. Soundscapes of animals in the wild penetrated the scene.
A small tree suspended in the air by four cables had an egg-shaped root ball meant to contain a decomposing human body to nourish nature. In another exhibit, silkworms were employed to spin on a framework, creating an architectural structure. Algae, often a byproduct of human pollution, was converted into a bioplastic filament that was then 3D printed into serving ware.
Formafantasma's office furniture was included in Paola Antonelli's ”Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival” exhibition at the Triennale di Milano in 2019.Damon Johnstun
Formafantasma, an Italian duo working in Amsterdam, took on the problem of electronic waste by disassembling old technology and demonstrating the complex systems required to recycle each discard. They then took elements of the used electronics and created designer office furniture.
“The design presents the means to plan a more elegant ending ... to ensure that the next dominant species will remember us ... as dignified and caring, if not intelligent beings,” Antonelli wrote in the introduction to the exhibition.
-- Damon Johnstun
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