Talks

Formafantasma
Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin
‘All Design is Geo-Design’

— Design has been both the greatest emancipator and worst exploiter of communities around the world, at times improving the lives of citizens and at times subjecting them to the interests of the dominant economic and political forces. Inevitably, design as a discipline has made obsolete the notion of production as a locally-situated act: as materials, energy, information, money, and people circulate rapidly around the world in search of favourable conditions, all design is GEO—DESIGN.
With the presentation Formafantasma will introduce two of their most recent works (Ore Streams, Visione Unica) and the upcoming exhibition at Serpentine Galleries, ‘Cambio’. The designers will draw links between the recent developments in their practice with the new Master program called Geo-Design, the duo will be heading from September 2020 at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin are Studio Formafantasma, an Italian designers duo based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Their interest in product design developed on the IM master course at Design Academy Eindhoven, where they graduated in July 2009. Since then, Formafantasma has developed a coherent body of work characterised by experimental material investigations and explored issues such as the relationship between tradition and local culture, critical approaches to sustainability and the significance of objects as cultural conduits. In perceiving their role as a bridge between craft, industry, object and user, they are interested in forging links between their research-based practice and a wider design industry. Their work has been presented and published internationally and museums such as New York’s MoMA, London’s Victoria and Albert, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou, the TextielMuseum in Tilburg, the Stedelijk’s-Hertogenbosch, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MUDAC Lausanne, the Mint Museum of Craft and Design in North Carolina, the MAK Museum in Vienna, Fondation Cartier in Paris, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Les Arts Décoratifs and CNAP in Paris have all acquired Formafantasma’s designs for their permanent collections. In March 2011 Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and esteemed design critic Alice Rawsthorn listed their studio amongst a handful of practices that would shape the future of design.
From September 2020 they will be the head of the new GEO-DESIGN Master at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Since October 2016, they are at the head of the Design bachelor at MADE Program in Siracusa, Italy.

Nick Axel
‘Histories of Territorial Instability’

— With a particular focus on how juridical processes and policy contexts come to reshape the politics of the built environment, this lecture will look at two distinct histories of territorial instability: the 2005 deregulation of hydraulic fracturing in the United States, and the nominal pricing of homes in distressed urban areas. By way of theoretical proposition and reclaiming practical alternatives, Nick Axel will gesture towards ways of securing the ground upon which communities affected by forces of disenfranchisement and displacement stand.

Nick Axel is Deputy Editor of e-flux Architecture and Head of the Architectural Design department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He is editor of the books Superhumanity: Design of the Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity (Actar, 2018), Work, Body, Leisure (Hatje Cantz, 2018), Dimensions of Citizenship (Inventory Press, 2018), and Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, 2018), as well as the forthcoming Human(s) Work (Taschen, 2020) and The New Normal (Strelka Press, 2020).