POST FOSSIL: excavating 21st century creation
Kristina Dryza
Li Edelkoort, one of the world’s most famous trend forecasters, has directed an exhibition titled ‘POST FOSSIL: excavating 21st century creation’ for Issey Miyake at his 21_21 Design Sight museum in Tokyo, Japan. Open 24 April – 27 June 2010, the show presents new trends in the design world through Edelkoort’s unique filter – her ability to decipher social developments and indications of people’s changing values.
As Edelkoort says, “The value systems constructed over the previous century are being reviewed in the wake of the global economic crisis.” The exhibition focuses on the trends being set by a new generation of designers and is showing at a museum that prides itself on being a “venue that will generate design that sees clearly what is ahead.”
The exhibition brings together over 120 works of 66 participants that Edelkoort sees as POST FOSSIL creators. The show searches for the clues that will be necessary for us to live and define our future. As Edelkoort writes in the exhibition director’s statement, “Time has come for extreme change. Society is ready to break away from last century for good. To break with creative conventions, theoretic rules and stigmas that now are questioned, challenged and broken. To break with a materialistic mentality replacing it with the materialisation of modest earth-bound and recomposed matter.”
Some of the list of works include Ilse Crawford’s redesign of Alvar Aalto’s iconic Armchair 400, Maarten Baas’ special edition of Clay furniture in clay and Peter Marigold’s onsite installation of his Split Box shelves.
POST FOSSIL also raises philosophical questions. Carolina Wilcke investigates whether art can be functional and if functional utensils can be art objects, Thomas Thwaites questions our perception of production theory asking how a toaster can be sold cheaper than the price of a toasted sandwich and Dick van Hoff explores craft versus industrial process through his glassworks.
The exhibition intelligently and eloquently asks the questions that need to be raised namely:
“Can we do with less to become more?
Can design have a soul and therefore be animated?
Can man find a more meaningful way to consume?
Can we break with the past and reinvent the future?”
I was very fortunate to put some questions to Edelkoort on the eve of the exhibition’s opening and her response is reprinted below.
KD: Which are the value systems now being reviewed due to the global financial crisis?
LE: This crisis is different since it is initially based on a financial crisis and not an economic one. We therefore didn't experience the guilt that we did in the past after dancing around the golden calf too much and realising we needed to cut down and be punished. This time, we have accepted that life and culture will go on and we refused to give up our need for beauty and shine; it's for this reason that the design and fashion industries are still experiencing a strong presence of metallics, even if at times they are a little more matte or patinaed.
We will therefore need to focus on what we do best in a more mono-minded way of working, a concentration on the essential and the original, on pure form and high-performance functional details. Self-confident consumers will focus on the authentic and the sustainable.
We seem to move away from the age of individualism and towards a period of gathering and exchanging, connectivity, of working together, of family and friends. We are moving towards slowing down. We are searching for honesty, looking for a more truthful, more direct approach. We will definitely want regional colour, local flavour and outsider designs. We prefer the exclusive, the things that cannot be found on every boutique shelf. The importance of farms and the organic movement have carried a wave for this mood as we will seek to bridge the country and the city within this century.
KD: What are the new creative trends being set? And how will these trends play out in Asia?
LE: Like a fluid flow of water, creativity will prove to be the best method for recovery from the worst economic crisis in almost a century. From the source of life to a stream of youth or a river of experience; cascading creativity spilling into a sea of change, getting things started and moving rapidly into new territory.
We see a move in general interest away from fashion to the culture of architecture and design. Therefore fashion has to reconsider itself and bring out its design component; the renewal of form, the reinvention of function, the rethinking of colour and the revival of avant gardist textiles.
Retail should follow this movement and become more of a market place, a souk or gallery; everything except being just a shop. The marketing machine that has been oiled for decades is grinding to an abrupt stop and needs to be reconsidered.
Asia will continue to embrace narration, illustration and animation, from fabled romantic fairies to bright manga monsters. Drawing, painting and craft will become focal points as we shift away from the photographic image, while everything that is 2D will seek to become 3D with the importance of pop-up, virtual effects and the surprising revival of textile art.
KD: The exhibition focuses on designers, but how are businesses looking to the past to invent the future?
LE: POST FOSIL is a survey of works that are linked by many factors, including the important and sustainable use of natural and recycled materials; brands are conscious of this and will seek to get in touch with our more natural side through more animistic product ranges, packaging and marketing strategies.
The consumer of tomorrow is more of a Renaissance-minded person, aware of the important crossover between science, technology, humanities and literature. Classical history too, as much as simple archaic lessons learnt, hold many keys for new ideas and revived ways of thinking and being.
KD: How can businesses create living objects?
LE: I believe that we will soon be able to make the object, concept or service come alive to be our partner, pet or friend, thus relating to us on a direct and day-to-day level. Only when design and strategy will be empowered with emotion will we be able to create a new generation of products and services that will promote and sell themselves; they will have acquired an aura able to seduce even the most hardened consumers on their own terms. Only then will design have acquired soul.
KD: If interior and exterior spaces become one, what does the future office look like?
LE: No longer bound by the frontiers of traditional furniture in interiors, upholstery will go wild with abstract forms to hang on, sit on or lean against. Pebbles, hills, rocks and roots will be distributed through space in a scenographic sense, mimicking nature in a free interpretation of landscape. Landscaping our interiors can be extended to the office, where a sense of wellbeing and healthier living will become a backdrop for the open and horizontal corporate landscape that will gradually replace the closed-off hierarchical one. The changing way that people work today will also require more flexible conditions for employees, designing around people's lifestyles rather than forcing them to compromise their quality of life. Newer understandings of productivity will emerge and more organic systems will be enforced.
KD: How will these trends affect creativity and entrepreneurship?
LE: Business should interpret our important interest in farming, with all ideas and gestures taken from the culture of agriculture – seeding, growing, gardening, landscaping, pollinating, hybridisation and harvesting – each providing new ways to creatively do business and reap the benefits of the seeds we sow. A more organic way of working is on our doorstep.