Beauty and functionality are the two large ideological blocks – and somewhat opposed – of design throughout the twentieth century. While for quite a few years there has been a development of numerous trends focused towards the experimental, the social or the conceptual, linking with other art branches as well as creative and contemporary thinking, the usual tendency is to automatically identify the word design with the product.

Although this is a natural branch of design (we could almost say foundational) and it is through it that design as an autonomous discipline reaches its present position, current economic and cultural features have caused this meaning to be dominant and to have phagocytosed the very original design concept, making it synonymous with the product.

A displacement of meanings that has removed from the everyday life other concepts of design, whose origin actually has more to do with a process that with a final product.The word design originally meant drawing, but also plan or project, meanings that make reference to a process associated with creation (artistic, architectural, objectual). This process refers to the development itself of the work where an idea is generated and elaborated and whose final result can be enormously varied, and that might depend, for instance on what methodology is developed during the same, the research and experimentation carried out, or the relationship it will have with the object made.

The exhibition Molto Molto Fuori – Object and process, designed by Studio La Cube and by the ephemeral designer Luca Hugo Brucculeri, wants to investigate the possibilities of the meaning of design through different works of artists, architects and designers who have generated a series of projects that oscillate between different disciplines and that question the limits of the very words that define them.

When working with the idea of design as a process, the processual art approach has been taken as a reference, and from this point, we proposed experimentation and research as its fundamental pillars. Both fields can be understood in very different ways, not only influenced by the personal perspective of each but also by the branch in which they are inscribed. This is precisely the reason for having brought together creators from different fields and languages, which from their own ground have contributed to a collective reflection on these questions. The investigation and experimentation of each one and the relationship between these procedures and the objects that have been creating have generated a series of very different works but whose nexus is that common inquiry.

In spite of considering the process as a fundamental part, the purpose of this debate is not to separate it from the object, nor highlight the traditional dichotomy between these two concepts, but rather the opposite: to rethink the relations between the processual and the objectual through the different experiences exposed. Because when trying to overcome the limits of traditional artistic terminology, new questions about the process-object correspondence also arise: What happens in that process? How does every single one understand experimentation and research? How controlled and planned the process of creation is, then of research and of experimentation are? Is non-controlled design possible? How is the design process understood in the field of sculpture or artistic installation? What relationship is established between process and object? Can an object be a process itself? A whole series of issues that we wanted to leave open, to be experienced and thought through doing, through the thinking of doing.

“Our goal is to reverse some of the most common meanings associated with design to incorporate to these other concepts, proper to the creative process itself, and thus, through collective reflection from different areas, to contribute to the generation of a broad field of design” stated Luca Hugo Brucculeri. “The name Molto Molto Fuori takes as reference the Salone del Mobile in Milan and its off, Fuorisalone. Molto Molto Fuori aims to create an alternative space that is molto molto fuori not only geographically but also because of its objectives: whereas the fair presents the design-as-product, here our purpose is to show the design-as-process, creating through it different works and projects from varied artistic fields.”

Oriented towards social research and analyzing the human habitat and material context, it is Perpetual Motion Agency, from collective Parasite 2.0, a project that thinks about the possibilities generated when disassembling the architectonic standards and the normative basis, about the value of the tool rather than the product and about the Open Source Design in current times.

Questioning the paradigms of aesthetic perfection it is also Agarrar, Envolver, Plegar (Grasp, Enfold, Pleat), by Omarya Maymó, who reconsiders the standardization that brings the industrial production and proposes a revision of this through a process of particularization of everyday objects.

The project Crash Hill 611, by Luca Hugo Brucculeri, also look for a reversion of the causal process of influence-references=final-object of regular design, turning it over and proposing an object related to the intuitive and the poetics of the materials and their ephemeral characteristics.

The poetics of the void is addressed by Andrés Izquierdo with Volúmenes Negativos, two pieces in where the formal leading role goes to what is not present instead of to the what is material and physical, “making the symbolic into the function and the fiction into reality”.

Anemone, by Sara Regal, also questions what is usually considered worthless, by transferring to a functional object the materials, shapes and images from another whose use is temporal, such as the fruit’s plastic net.

Ad Infinitum, by Studio La Cube, is made up of two pieces through which it has been done an infinite dialogue or conversation between the art and design fields, by playing with attributes associated with them, from the idea of function to the component of the pedestal, leaving open the future development of the work.

From April 12 to 15 2018

CasabanchelC/ Santiago Estévez 26, Madrid

Photos: Nicolas Chiaravalloti