08.10.2018
Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, Vitra Design Museum
While a bacterial “ink factory” is certainly more eco-friendly than current dying methods, which rely on vast quantities of water and petroleum-based chemicals, the question of what we owe to the workers, or where the line between a living organism and a a tool exactly lies, remains. – ‘Victor Papaneck, The P0litics of Design’ Catalogue excerpt on Project Coelicolor.
We are excited to announce that Faber Futures has been selected as one of the contributors of Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design at Vitra Design Museum. The exhibition presents the first large retrospective focussing on the designer, author and activist Victor J. Papanek (1923–1998). Papanek was a pioneer in the exploration of socially and ecologically oriented design and dealing with complex themes such as global climate change, fluid gender identities, consumer behaviour, or the economic realities of migration.
The exhibition is supplemented with around twenty carefully selected contemporary works that transport Papanek’s ideas into the twenty-first century by designers including Catherine Sarah Young, Forensic Architecture, Jim Chuchu, Tomás Saraceno and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. They, too, deal with complex themes such as global climate change, fluid gender identities, consumer behaviour, or the economic realities of migration, meaning they reflect the continuing resonance of the questions Papanek was already addressing in the 1960s. At the same time, they break out of the white, Western, and male-dominated world to which Papanek was bound despite all his efforts to the contrary.
At Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, Faber Futures will display Project Coelicolor’s Assemblage 001, the world’s first garment dyed by bacteria from the 2017 Faber Futures x Ginkgo Bioworks collaboration.
The garment will be on display at the Vitra Design Museum until 10th March 2019.