Ask Me If I Believe in the Future
How can design shape our future? What ideas, questions and strategies occur to designers as they develop future visions? How do we want to live tomorrow? The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) often engages with these pivotal questions, asking artists, designers and exhibition makers for their input.
Now, for the exhibition “Ask Me If I Believe in the Future”, the renowned Milanese curator Maria Cristina Didero has invited a group of international designers to reformulate their expectations and visions for the future: the Greek design studio Objects of Common Interest, run by designers Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis; designer Erez Nevi Pana from Israel; Carolien Niebling from Switzerland; and the multidisciplinary design studio Zaven from Italy with designers Enrica Cavarzan and Marco Zavagno.
Objects of Common Interest conceived their installation “Teahouses for domesticity” based on an existential insight that the coronavirus pandemic has brought into sharp focus: our human need for closeness and community. The designers invite visitors to interact with a sensory landscape. As they walk through three inflatable oversized PVC tubes, each viewer has a personal experience of space and time as well as presence and absence. Specific elements and materials play a special role here: recyclable silver film that seals off the interior from the outside world, iridescent holographic foil that changes colours depending on the viewing angle, and malleable memory foam in which every movement leaves visible traces.
With their participatory installation, Objects of Common Interest present an optimistic outlook on the future, putting at our disposal new forms and conceptual methods for sharing space with others.
Photographs by Henning Rogge
