passages
Design? Design! The Forms of Our Lives Lyrical in Leukerbad: Translating the Music of Language On the Move in Cairo: Choreographic Research Along the Nile Illuminated in Delhi: Jonathan O’Hear’s Lamps and Shadows THE CU LTU RAL MAG AZI NE O F PR O H E LV E T IA, NO . 6 1 , ISSU E 2 / 2 0 1 3
4 – 31 DOSSIER
32 LOCAL TIME Cairo: Trance Dance Two choreographers on a research tour in the Egyptian capital. By Dalia Chams
The Forms of Our Lives
New Delhi: The Universal Language of Light Geneva-based lighting designer Jonathan O’Hear shares his craft in India. By Elizabeth Kuruvilla
36 REPORTAGE How to Translate the Music of Language? A translation workshop in six languages tackles a novel by Arno Camenisch. By Michael Braun (text) and Jonas Ludwig Walter (photos)
6 Of Pizzas and Laptops The designer as mediator: a role worth taking more seriously. By Volker Albus
22 The Heart of Order An essay on design and Dasein, space and experience. By Siddhartha Chatterjee
8 The Precarious Creative Process An interview with designer Jörg Boner and design scholar Claudia Mareis. By Meret Ernst
26 On the Shoulders of Giants On the advantages of design history for design students. By Alexandra Midal
12 Design in Global Competition Designed here, manufactured elsewhere, sold everywhere: what does this mean? By Dominic Sturm
28 Danish Design: A Case Study On Denmark’s long tradition of state support for design. By Hanne Cecilie Gulstad and Till Briegleb
14 Business Models for the Design Market How do designers navigate the market, and what are their options? By Meret Ernst and Claudia Acklin 18 Design and Art: A Love Story On the long relationship between art and design. By Tido von Oppeln
About the artist: Patrick Hari was born in 1977 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He lives and works in Zurich.
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PRO HELVETIA NEWSFLASH Cultural Exchange Along the Rhine Spotlight for Young Artists Interactive and Transmedial New Swiss Orchestral Works
42 PARTNER PROFILE Folk Culture for the Future By Ariane von Graffenried 43 CARTE BLANCHE For a Creolized Switzerland By Pierre Lepori 44
GALLERY A Showcase for Artists Délit de Faciès 1 By Omar Ba
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Cover image: Patrick Hari, Kulturtransporter. Product Design Photo page 2: Patrick Hari, Eintauchen und Auftauchen als Methodik für Ort- und Raumfragen. Site / Space
In the design universe: a photo series created for Passages by artist Patrick Hari takes a look at the work designers do, and reflects on how design shapes our experience of the world.
Design? Design! From corporate design to nail design and design hotels, “design” has become the buzzword of our time. It encompasses both the expertise of the industrial designer and the rough draft that marks the start of any undertaking. It crops up in management theories, glorifies all kinds of creative follies, and lends a mark of distinction to consumer goods, from sports equipment to railway timetables. Its impact is as much economic as cultural: we may recall that design once saved the Swiss watchmaking industry, and it has long shaped Switzerland’s image around the world. It is hardly a coincidence that the two most famous Swiss typefaces are called Univers and Helvetica: design is a medium through which any given society communicates its origins and its goals. Our opening essay by Volker Albus playfully investigates the vexations inherent in our relationship with design. But how does an idea become a sketch, then a prototype, and ultimately a product? An interview with designer Jörg Boner and design scholar Claudia Mareis sheds light on a creative process that cannot be rationalized down to the last detail. As Dominic Sturm demonstrates, design has long been a globalized phenomenon; today, Swiss designers work together with manufacturers from all over the world and cater to an increasingly international market. At the same time, design also cultivates a close relationship with fine art: a fascinating subject explored here by Tido von Oppeln. The dossier featuring these and other articles appears in connection with Pro Helvetia’s newly-launched initative to fund and promote design. We are thus taking the opportunity here to ask what forms support for design could take, and what the guiding principles should be. Effective encouragement for young designers must position itself between arts and culture funding on the one hand, and economic growth initiatives on the other. And it must take into account the conditions under which today’s designers work, as described in this issue by Claudia Acklin and Meret Ernst. Only in this way can we do justice to design’s particular ability to generate added value in both cultural and economic terms. And, finally, we take a look beyond Switzerland’s borders with Till Briegleb and Hanne Cecilie Gulstad, who provide a glimpse into Denmark’s unique funding system for design. The dossier for this issue of Passages was guest-edited by Hochparterre, the Zurich-based magazine for architecture and design. Andrew Holland Director, Pro Helvetia
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In the Design Universe Design is everywhere – but what is it really about? This dossier takes a glimpse behind its seemingly glamorous surface to reveal how designers develop their ideas, and how design helps shape the way we experience the world. We look at design’s relationship with the business world on the one hand, and the art world on the other hand. The dossier is illustrated by Patrick Hari’s photo series, which focuses on model and process, object and service, space and fantasy: everywhere design can be found.
W. A . R . P. Virtual Design
Like the arts, design creates possible worlds. But design must test out the transformations proposed in its models, in the real world. Even fictional worlds like those created in game design depend on a concrete application in reality: through the games themselves, and the ways in which they condition our perceptions, arouse our desire for play, and sharpen skills that may change our lives.
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ou could hear the newsreader’s disapproval in his negative connotations. That is regrettable, not least because devoice. As he announced on Bavarian radio that Peer sign has long since found its way into all areas of life: every time Steinbrück, a candidate for German Chancellor, had we go into a supermarket, we are faced with at least as much deappointed “design researcher” Gesche Joost from the sign as we would find in a designer furniture store. From the placeBerlin University of the Arts to his shadow cabinet, his ment of the shelves, the signage, the layout of the products and the normally practised delivery noticeably faltered. He didn’t stumble choice of music, lighting and temperature to the packaging and over his words; in fact he enunciated the job title perfectly. But an standardization of “natural” agricultural produce, everything is almost imperceptible pause and his halting articulation of a term geared to a single design philosophy: form follows function – even not often heard in the political news betrayed an unmistakeable though the sole function of these goods is to be bought. scepticism: A “designer”? In the shadow cabinet? Maybe even the Selling the product cabinet itself, one day? Whatever next? Like other members of the journalist’s trade, the man from Naturally, this complex arrangement is not exclusively the work Bavarian radio is less than wholehearted in his appreciation of of designers. Success – as measured in sales figures – is just the design business. In the eyes of the political class, and the as much down to the marketing and advertising gurus, the minds of the majority in society, the purpose of Gesche Joost’s management experts, the sales psychologists, the workers who profession is to optimize the built the shop and, of course, aesthetics and functionality of the staff, whose task is to presobjects. It has very little to do ent the product with a smile. But when it comes to how the with politics. Even adding that the new appointee would be product looks, especially when working to address the “needs it is packaged (and is anything sold without packaging these of a networked society” did little to dispel the fundamental lack days?), it is the product, packagof belief in the relevance of deing and communication designsign to society as a whole, let ers who make the decisions. Design is everywhere, but as a alone politics. And now that even sectors profession it is not held in particularly as intangible as the financial high esteem. Yet designers are Form and function industry have started thinking moderators: mediating between technical This comes as no surprise. For in terms of “product” categories, many, be they traditionalists design has become a key eleprogress and society’s changing needs, or enlightened amateurs, even ment there too. In short, wherand translating them into material “good” design is, for all its facets, ever customers are advised and objects. Volker Albus believes it is time to at best defined as a quest for served, wherever something is take designers seriously. form dictated by rational considproduced and sold, design is at erations: whether a device comes the heart of the action. with clear instructions and is Even in areas that resist the By Volker Albus easy to use, a chair is stable and metastatic expansion of comcomfortable, or a lamp is glaremercialism, the tools of design free and simple to adjust. While our expectations – about these ob- are still put to work. Where would Greenpeace, the Occupy movejects’ importance to us, what they say about us and how sustaina- ment or trade unions be without an identifiable signature? Of ble they are – have become much more complex, the classic course, the protests in Egypt, Turkey and Greece got themselves utilitarian and aesthetic parameters still dictate the general per- noticed through their immediate power, despite the lack of logos ception of what design is for. and other signifying elements. But whenever protest is part of a Conversely any kind of design that, whether obviously or dis- mission, whenever the aim is to effectively publicize concerns or creetly, seeks to undermine that rational approach is viewed as draw attention to an unacceptable state of affairs, every camp is eaself-indulgent, frivolous or even – dare one say it – disreputable. ger to use signs, symbols, performances or costumes specifically That is the invariable response when advertisers give essentially designed for its campaign. They give the various forms of protest manual tasks a specious sophistication by tacking on the trendy a distinctive profile. They not only render the opposition compreword “design,” thereby branding them as superficial “lifestyle” hensible and identifiable, but also actively promote it: they help to products: “hair design,” “nail design” and “food design” are just “sell” it to the public. some of the more fanciful examples. So there can be no question that the scope of design has Such labels make it harder for design to gain acceptance, be- expanded. And yet: whereas right up to the 1980s and 1990s it cause they associate it with things that may well have their place reached out mainly towards the fine arts, the focus now is on the in a pluralistic and market-oriented society, but whose meaning is market, advertising, service and society. Here, design is viewed unlikely to extend beyond localized image management, often with as a set of tools that can be used to fine-tune every conceivable
Of Pizzas and Laptops
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strategy – and not as an opportunity for self-realization. Design’s core business – classic product and industrial design – is no exception. The difference is that here, a canon has grown up over the decades that, for all its periodic upheavals, is always in principle guided by the same parameters of form and function. So it is not just reasonable but also thoroughly responsible to ask why such
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designers? Must we become sociologists? Or users, constantly trying to keep pace with the latest technological innovations? I believe the answer is: neither in isolation, but both together. Designers need to precisely diagnose socio-cultural change and be alert to developments in both people and production. Designers unquestionably have a vital role to play: as mediators or moderators. They must analyse developments, weigh up and reconcile the available opWherever customers are advised and served, wherever tions and the needs that are articulated – something is produced and sold, design is at the heart of consciously or unconsciously – by their the action. customers, and translate them into products and services that make all our lives constant renewal is actually needed (given that there is nothing easier; that fit seamlessly, are permanent and, ideally, self-evident new under the sun anyway). After all, many of humanity’s prob- and inconspicuous. In short, designers must transform possibililems are caused at least partly by its lack of restraint, the surfeit of ties and desires into real things. goods produced by people and machines. And even designers If they succeed, then perhaps even the newsreader will rethink themselves freely admit that design bears its full share of respon- his attitude to their profession. sibility for the deluge of consumer goods.
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A state of flux The only problem is that almost every feature that governs the appearance of these consumer goods is being transformed: manufacturing techniques, materials and construction methods are influencing and altering stability, weight, sustainability, acceptability and robustness at exponentially increasing speed and on an almost daily basis. We designers must therefore constantly observe and analyse these developments and incorporate them into our work. We must match them against the entire spectrum of attributes of each and every product, and assess whether this or that novel material is really suited – in terms of price, sustainability and aesthetics – to making something that is new and better, or in other words cheaper, more stable and easier to recycle. Such technical and physical turbulence, however, is just one reason – albeit a central one – for the refinement of existing products and the development of new ones. At least as important is the constantly changing socio-cultural make-up of society. It is in a state of permanent flux driven by migration and our own travel experiences, by the influence of the media and technical innovation, but also by the mobility imposed upon us by our work. It also has an immense influence on our behaviour. We work and eat on the move, in the train, on our bike, in the car. We communicate using miniaturized devices at every hour of the day and night, wherever we are – in bed, at the dinner table or in meetings. We sleep almost anywhere: in the office, in airports, on demos or in front of the Apple store. Nowadays we take many of these combinations for granted, even though the two activities – eating and working, eating and communicating, travelling and eating, travelling and communicating – are still far from perfectly attuned, at least when it comes to the hardware we use. Devouring a pizza with greasy fingers while using a high-tech laptop, riding a bike in traffic while text messaging on a smartphone: not only do they not go together; they are mutually exclusive. These are of course commonplace concerns; yet it is precisely these situations from the mundane reaches of everyday life that design needs to address. But what does that mean for today’s
Volker Albus (b. 1949) studied architecture at Aachen University. He has been working as a designer and exhibition architect since 1984, and has published numerous books, articles and exhibition catalogues. He has been Professor of Product Design at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe since 1994. Translated from the German by Geoffrey Spearing
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reating prototypes for serial production is a skill that any designer must master on the path to success. But what happens during the evolution from draft outline, to model, to finished product? Jörg Boner, an award-winning designer, and Claudia Mareis, a design professor and scholar, share their thoughts on a conceptual and creative process that cannot be rationalized down to the last detail.
Boner: In product design, there is an even greater difference between the prototype and the end product. In designing the model, we must take the production parameters into account, so that the final product doesn’t look like we had to compromise in any way. I always aim for a finished product that does not seem to have been determined by limiting factors.
When you say that the model is not supposed to seem like a There is this image of the designer who, after having accepted a compromise, it sounds like you are comparing it with an origi commission, is sitting in front of a blank piece of paper, pencil nal vision you had. How do you come up with the idea that leads in hand, and sketching. Is that just a romantic cliché? to the model? Jörg Boner: (laughs) Yes, it’s a myth. We have Philippe Starck to Boner: There is no one big idea. There is a sum of propositions that thank for that. arise while working. I start with the proposition that something Claudia Mareis: Every project draft has its limitations. It starts with might seem interesting at a certain moment. It has to at least our own limited ability to visualize the end product. Then there convince me on the computer screen: that is the first hurdle. Then are the limitations imposed by we draw digital 3D models, print the materials and the production them out like paper cut-out pattechnologies. And that holds terns, and use them to build an true not only for product design, exact model out of cardboard. We are already aware of the but also for graphic design. Not problems, but we want to see everything that looks great on the computer screen can be successwhether the proposition, in the preliminary form of the model, fully printed. The idea of an outis viable. line with no constraints is utopian, given the constraints of What is the function of the production. Just as the metaphor cardboard model within the of the blank piece of paper idealizes the process. The real quesdesign process? tion is: how do these limitations Boner: It is a useful tool at a cerinfluence the project planning in tain stage. The cardboard model How do designers develop their ideas? the first place? is a phantom, an intimation of Boner: In design, the model must the finished product. The model An interview with designer Jörg Boner and also be optimized for serial proallows us to see its character, design scholar Claudia Mareis. duction. That is the big difference which is more or less impossible compared to architecture. Archion the computer. Either we conInterview by Meret Ernst tects have an image in mind, and tinue to develop the model – or we go back one step. the builders are forced to adapt Mareis: It’s a process of distillatheir work to that image. I, on the other hand, am always happy when the engineers tell me that a tion. Until the moment when the right balance is achieved. sketch of mine was very cleverly designed because it took their pro- Boner: It’s extremely important to seize that moment. Like a duction conditions into account. painter, I need to know when to stop. Mareis: Product designers tend to be more restricted by technical parameters, and by the capabilities of industrial production. In And how do you seize the right moment? graphic design, the process is more fluid, developing almost seam- Boner: That is probably the only part of the design process that’s lessly from the sketch to the prototype and the final poster. It is not a myth. I can’t explain it. Recognizing the right moment is less marked by the gap between the original design and the fin- based on the sum total of my experience, which includes knowing ished product. that I’ve sometimes stopped at the wrong places in the past.
The Precarious Creative Process
What exactly is a graphic design prototype? Mareis: As a graphic designer, I always had to explain to my clients that what I showed them during our meetings was only a working model. Digital display formats and printing techniques can be misleading: the model may look perfect, but it’s still a work in progress. As long as it’s not the definitive printed product or the final material object, it’s still a prototype.
When designers reflect on their own creative process, are there blind spots? Mareis: One thing that is rarely taken into consideration is the fact that designers do a large part of their work on the computer. The keyboard and the mouse are key tools in design. And yet, there is a normative discourse about tools: people prefer to talk about sketches rather than digital technology.
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Does the move from 3D drawing to cardboard model create a link between digital and analogue tools? Boner: On the computer screen, the design sketch remains isolated. The model, on the other hand, immediately interacts with the space around it, and changes as a result. One time, we carried a model for a street lamp onto the street and attached it to a road sign. Then we went right back inside, had a coffee, and started over from the beginning. The model was much too small. Claudia Mareis, you trained as a graphic designer, but today you do design research. Has your perspective changed as a result? Mareis: For me, it was not a big change. I’m still the same person, asking the same questions, but now I do so by other means, and
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And yet, there is still such a thing as practical skill. Is that the basis? Mareis: Designers must learn to master their profession, and not be mastered by it. One of the most important qualities for a designer is the ability to question everything and to think differently. The worst thing to say is: “That can’t be done, it’s impossible.” That’s what engineers say… Mareis: Designers can be nay-sayers too. But if they want to be successful, they must take up a position that seems eccentric or a little crazy – like an inventor. If they are able to create something new and innovative, they are held in high regard. But placing oneself outside the norm can also lead to failure. Designing and inventing are precarious processes.
One of the most important qualities for a designer is the ability to question everything and to think differently. with other consequences. As a result of my scholarly work on design and culture, I have come to realize how little I know about my own profession – and, at the same time, how much. As a designer, I always believed I had a very highly developed ability to use and understand images. It wasn’t until I began working with theories of visual culture that I realized that, although designers do have a certain practical ability to deal with images, that ability is limited. Designers rarely look at images as images: they tend to think of them as something they might potentially use. They are not very good at describing what they see, and they lack visual literacy. What kind of knowledge is involved in design? Mareis: There are a variety of forms of knowledge. For instance, craftsmanship or technical know-how. But there is also an implicit knowledge that is based on experience with materials, techniques and design methods, and there is aesthetic expertise. However, although all these forms of practical knowledge are crucial, design education rarely covers them explicitly, and discussing design methods is still taboo. How can students be taught to develop their own design abi lities? Boner: I teach them to observe closely, and to distance themselves from the flood of media images. And I try to make them aware of the personal aspect of the design process. Because the only interesting thing about this profession is the pleasure you derive from it. If you lose that, you’ve lost everything. Mareis: In my opinion, it’s a question of education. Design is an attitude, a way of facing the world. Discussing methods and imposing strict design rules can only play a small part in developing that attitude. For students, it is more important to have the time to get an education and develop their skills. Boner: That’s true. Becoming a designer involves a lot more than just being able to accurately render an object. Method is a good framework, but nothing more. Design is ultimately about culture and cultivation.
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Isn’t it also a myth that creators must overstep the boundaries to capture the new? Why is that considered better than perfecting something that already exists? Boner: I don’t make that assumption. What’s innovative is not necessarily good. Creating something that generates a good ambiance is just as valuable. Mareis: People appreciate different things in design: the exceptional or the typical; hard work and stamina, or eccentricity. These changing value judgments reflect our relationship with the material world. But we tend to talk only about exceptional designs and processes, and not about everyday design. As far back as the 1970s, anyone who could improve an existing situation was considered a designer, including doctors, geneticists, and engineers. Nevertheless, the normative discourse about who is or is not a designer has persisted to this day. Hair design or nail design don’t count. But why not? Boner: Amateur design still functions according to the design myth we just deconstructed: as pure self-expression, which shuts off any discussion before it can happen. But the more design acquires cultural added-value, the more complex it will become. Different design styles also reveal different attitudes toward au thorship. In the art world, a signature style is essential. Is that also true for design? Mareis: Appreciating authorial style is always about connoisseurship. Recognizing a signature style requires expert knowledge on the part of the beholder, which is connected to education, and depends on being able to situate a work and to understand its context. Boner: I think it’s more important to recognize the manufacturer or the product line, rather than the designer’s signature. That’s why it’s critical for us as designers to choose those manufacturers who do not demonstrate obvious deficits. Also, they are the ones who will see to it that our designs find their place in the market, and are noticed and sold. We must always ask ourselves for whom we are putting in the work. Design is not an economic factor in and of itself. It becomes one only when it finds the right niche and is properly cultivated. Mareis: It’s not just the designer’s signature style: the products themselves tell us a lot about certain ways of working. About how
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materials are used or, for example, how a clasp works. We can learn all that from the objects themselves, without knowing who created them. Boner: As a designer, you are necessarily a dilettante. In other words, I learn from existing objects. Before I developed that street lamp, I hardly ever looked at one. A light engineer explained to me that the way light is diffused is of central importance. The glow of a lamp extends 20m in breadth, but only 8m in depth. I had never realized that before. Designers must reflect on that kind of knowledge, in order to make use of it in future projects. We consumers, on the other hand, tend to use things without thinking about them. What does that say to you? Mareis: The question is: where does design end? When we use something differently than the purpose for which it was intended, the creative process continues with our use. That raises the question of co-design, of non-intentional or participatory design, and their possibilities. Boner: It’s a wonderful moment when people use something I made in a way I hadn’t imagined.
Prof. Dr. Claudia Mareis (b. 1974 in Zermatt) is both a designer and a scholar of design and culture. She is Professor of Design Theory and Research at the Basel School of Design, and director of the Institute for Research in Art and Design (IDK). Jörg Boner (b. 1968 in Uster) studied Product Design in Basel. He is a member of the N2 design group, runs his own design studio in Zurich, and teaches at the ECAL in Lausanne. He was the 2011 winner of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture’s Design Grand Prix. Meret Ernst is Culture and Design Editor at Hochparterre. Translated from the German by Marcy Goldberg
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THE C AT H E D R A L OF WEIL AM RHEIN Site / Space
Improving one’s status with a noble pedigree: the houses we live in have long become spaces in which to stage our own personal fantasies. They are the only places we are free to shape as we wish. “I am my interior design” is a formula we have internalized – to the benefit of the home furnishings industry. Cited image: Hisao Suzuki, El Croquis
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n Switzerland, which was spared the horrors of two World willing to dig deep into their pockets to buy a product manufacWars, industrial consumer goods long continued to be de- tured in the world’s “most expensive country.” For the Zurich designed in the same place where they were manufactured. signers, this contradictory approach makes sense. After all, really Until the late 1960s, companies like Turmix, Zyliss, Rolex, good products always require a customized solution for design, Schindler, Hilti, Geberit, Jura or Bernina helped create a manufacture and distribution. The Flink design agency based in Chur is always on the lookrich Swiss design and product culture with a prestigious inter national reputation. But “Swiss design” has long since ceased to out for ideal production sites. Designer Remo Frei, engineer be necessarily synonymous with “Swiss made.” Globalization, and Curdegn Bandli and the Taiwanese economist Frances Lee travel especially the digital revolution at the turn of the millennium, sim- regularly between the Alpine town and the megacity Taipei, the plified and speeded up the exchange of ideas and the division of Taiwanese capital. They take responsibility for product developlabour. It has become increasingly easy to separate the design and ment and sourcing, i.e. the organization of outsourced production manufacture of industrial products: digital designs can be dis- for their clients. “We not only work as designers for our clients cussed across continents in real but also as producers. Ideally, we take charge of the whole process time, manipulated on the screen, – from the first sketch to the finand immediately given material form, using techniques such as ished mass-produced article,” is rapid prototyping, to enable them how Remo Frei explains the busito be handled physically. But it ness model. Depending on the would be too simplistic to contype of product, design, quantity made, target market, quality and clude from this that agencies and designers work on one side of the manufacturing method, the comworld while production now only pany seeks out suitable manu takes place on the other. Examinfacturers all over the world – ing Switzerland as a site for design and they can also be found in and production shows how designSwitzerland. Small and mediumDesigned here, manufactured ers respond to the challenges of sized enterprises in particular elsewhere, sold everywhere: designers have benefit from this cooperation. global structural change. to find the right solution for every They often lack the necessary The ideal production site product. An industrial designer explains contacts and resources to operate Five years ago, the Zurich industheir own production systems what this entails. abroad. Remo Frei believes that trial designers Christian Kaegi and Fabrice Aeberhard of Aekae took outsourcing production to counBy Dominic Sturm the bold step of moving to China – tries with emerging economies is not as designers, but as entreprenot just a matter of cost savings neurs behind the bag label Qwson the manufacturing side: it also tion and the eyewear brand Sire. A bold venture indeed for a small calls for the right know-how. The fact is that a great deal of mancompany, as they readily admit. One reason for the move was their ufacturing knowledge and experience have been lost in Europe, aim of achieving uncompromising product design. “In our dual precisely because of this outsourcing. Nowadays, they are to be role as designers and entrepreneurs, we do not just control the de- found primarily in the emerging production sites in Asia. sign and production process; we also take care of marketing and distribution. That is how we are able to put our vision of a good Swiss made product into practice,” Christian Kaegi explains. For them, good However, mass consumer goods are still being made in Switzermeans that all the resources deployed must be appropriate for the land for the global market. A recent example from my own design intended purpose – and not just in design terms. They should also practice confirms this. Lamprecht, the manufacturer of baby prodsatisfy the demands of manufacturing and material technology, ucts, now makes the newly-designed soother under its own Bibi entrepreneurial and ecological criteria. The two designers regard brand in quantities running into tens of millions in Regensdorf, themselves as typical representatives of a Swiss design and prod- near Zurich. When the product was developed over a period of sevuct tradition. Working pragmatically and with high standards of eral years, the task on the design side was to integrate the product quality, they endeavour to unite function, form and emotion in a seamlessly into the brand’s global communication, which is built on the company’s seventy-five-year history as well as on Switzersingle product. Qwstion bags are manufactured in China. They are shipped land’s reputation for quality. In addition, the different needs of the to Europe, and also to nearby Japan and South Korea. On the other babies and their parents had to be reconciled with the fully autohand, Sire horn-rimmed spectacles are made by the Swisshorn mated and high-tech mass production of an article that is both eyewear manufacturer in Aargau and are sold in Switzerland. They emotionally charged and ergonomically challenging. “Switzerland also appeal to Far Eastern buyers who are interested in design and is still the perfect place for complex mass production processes
Design in Global Competition
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that do not require manual intervention,” confirms engineer Curdegn Bandli. Like Aekae, the people at Flink have a product brand of their own in their portfolio: the Rotauf mountain sports label. They found the right manufacturer for their avalanche rescue device in Taiwan. On the other hand, the winter sports garments sold under this label are sewn in Switzerland. Direct distribution via the internet enables the company to sell its garments at prices rivalling the global competition, despite the high cost of manufacturing. Remo Frei points out the advantages: “Designed and produced here
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understood. “Everyone is involved in the global design competition,” Chris Harbeke says. All the designers who were asked agree that design competition from Asia must be taken seriously. Strategic thinking
For Christian Kaegi, however, there is no reason to fear this competition from Asia. “There will always be a demand for intelligent design thinking, i.e. understanding complex styling and entre preneurial problems.” Peter Wirz also sees the ability to think and design strategically as a small but important advantage in the globalized design competition. In this view, products are not considered in isolation but “Swiss design” has long ceased to be synonymous with always as part of the solution of a strategic “Swiss made.” problem. Industrial designers in particular have recognized that, with the shift to an for the local market. In our view, that is a reasonable proposition information and service society, product design now also encomfor a brand like Rotauf.” The niche brand appeals to mountaineers passes the design of services, spheres of influence, forms of organwho prefer locally made products designed to last, over mass-pro- ization and behaviour. Here, high standards of training and pracduced goods manufactured in Asia. tical experience are called for. But are young designers sufficiently The examples of Bibi, Rotauf, Sire or Qwstion show that man- well prepared for the increasingly complex design process? Expeufacturing costs are no longer the only key factor behind the choice rienced designers Chris Harbeke and Peter Wirz have their doubts. of a production site. Alongside the manufacturing technology and They see shortcomings, especially in entrepreneurial thinking, logistical parameters, account must be taken more than ever be- technical expertise and maturity – qualities nearly impossible to fore of “soft” design and brand strategy factors. achieve after just three years of study to take a bachelor’s degree with no practical experience. But they do recognize great potenGlobal business with local roots tial for small and medium-sized businesses in Switzerland as a “All business is local” is how designer Chris Harbeke of the Nose centre for design, work and knowledge – on the condition that the design and brand agency answers the question as to the impact of manufacturers do not merely use “Swissness” as an empty slogan. globalization on the design business. He goes on to point out that A comprehensive design approach is not a waste of time or money, good industrial design necessarily occurs in the place where a but holds the key to success in today’s globalized and increasingly product is effectively developed: because the complex business de- fragmented market. pends on the client, the target market, the knowledge hub with its research and training centres, and the workplace. Its origins are always local – anywhere in the world. That is why the Zurich designers charged with the interior styling of the Dutch railway trains built by the Stadler Railway Company in Thurgau take their Dutch counterparts on board: to get to know the tastes of the trains’ future passengers. Peter Wirz, co-owner and founder of the Process design agency with offices in Lucerne, Zurich, Shanghai and Taipei comments: “Today, there is no such thing as local design, only good or bad design – all over the world.” However, he believes that good design requires products and brands to be firmly embedded in a local context. That is as self-evident for designers today as their colour concepts, ergonomic studies or foam models. The “Swissness” fashion concept simply stands for one contextualization strategy among many to create identity. Its aim is to secure local and global recognition for brands, products or services. Asian interest in the luxury “Handmade in Switzerland” eyewear by Aekae shows that a new market is being created. It is attractive for inventive entrepreneurs and designers who know how to embody this universally Dominic Sturm (b. 1973 in Berne) has worked as a product designer in Switzerland since 2002. In 2009, recognizable design language in a particular brand. Flink and he completed post-graduate studies at the FHNW Process help both domestic and, increasingly, also Asian compa- University of Art and Design in Basel. He runs his own nies to gain access to the vast Asian market for “Swiss design.” The practice, Bureau Sturm Design, in Zurich. fact that this involves design-specific knowledge transfer is fully Translated from the German by Jaja Hargreaves
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ome artistic careers depend on grant money for years. trade and industry initiatives. And yet, they have made little use of From the point of view of arts funding policy this makes them so far. What is the reason? On the one hand, these schemes sense, because an international breakthrough can also are explicitly addressed to businesses demonstrating technologibe achieved at an older age. In design, however, it is un- cal and scientific innovation. Start-ups in fields like biochemistry, thinkable. Whoever wants to make it as a designer has or IT and communications technologies, are preferred. On the to become economically independent sooner or later – or else other hand, young designers are not aware of the business-oriented change jobs. support tools available. What a business plan is, how it is used, the Designers work in a variety of professional relationships general principles of business administration: none of this is part and business models. They are either self-employed or employed. of their professional training. At the same time, the business coaches and consultants lack Some are commissioned by clients, while others license their designs or establish a brand. Many of them combine various models. knowledge of the conditions under which designers work: learnYet all designers who want to become self-employed need entre- ing on the job and acquiring skills as they are needed. This in-depth preneurial skills. In the three years of study leading to a Bachelor’s knowledge often extends beyond managerial know-how. Thus, supdegree in design, they concenport schemes based on coaching trate on the core business of sessions that focus on a specific project are more promising, belearning how to design, which is complex enough as it is. They cause they create a situation in develop into entrepreneurs only which the necessary knowledge in the years after their training. is picked up in a context-related How can public funding for and solution-oriented way. design make a contribution to Integrated support this development? Up until now, government support for design Designers wishing to position in Switzerland has been under themselves as self-employed enthe umbrella of cultural funding. trepreneurs need a type of supThe funding instruments have port that provides them with the How do designers navigate the market? been conceived accordingly: as necessary tools – taking it as a For newcomers, making the non-repayable work and project given that entrepreneurship will transition from training to professional grants, as awards and, more rarely be a means to an end for practice can be a challenge. rarely, as training and studio them. Designers define success scholarships or internships. Are not only in business terms, but entrepreneurial skills strengthalso according to the degree of By Meret Ernst autonomy in their professional ened this way? Yes, if an award is received at the right time and activites, their degree of connectleads to further instructive commissions. Yes, if an internship edness, and the possibility of playing several design-related roles helps a designer decide which professional role he or she wants to at the same time. Or they measure success by the recognition of adopt in the future. But only to a limited extent in terms of learn- their authorship within the design scene. Designers are constantly ing to behave like an entrepreneur. In order to further these skills, changing their field from the inside. They specialize in thinking of additional promotional instruments are needed: like the ones that which does not yet exist: their success is based on this skill. currently being discussed and tested under the term “cultural en- However, this does not always correspond to the objectives of clastrepreneurship” – and modelled after strategies used in trade and sical trade and industry support measures, where the definition of industry, and to promote local business. success is, amongst other things, a micro-business gradually developing into a small or even medium-sized business and becomEncouraging entrepreneurship ing a good taxpayer. However, managing a growing company deUnlike state funding for the arts, the model under which design is mands sacrifices in the time spent on designing and in the creative supported in Switzerland, trade and industry support does not gen- autonomy designers strive for. erally take the form of direct financial assistance. Instead, the canThe two sides would do well to converge. Entrepreneurial tons may provide help in the form of attractively-priced building thinking should be incorporated into the educational process, acplots, or tax breaks during a start-up phase or a planned business cording to the “cultural entrepreneurship” model. At the same expansion. The federal government, on the other hand, aims to time, trade initiatives to support local business must adapt to the provide a favourable economic framework, including support for needs of the design sector and the creative industries. administrative processes and for the communication between enMeret Ernst holds a doctorate in art history. She has been trepreneurs and local authorities and offices. Culture and Design Editor at Hochparterre since 2003. Of course designers can also take part in the entrepreneurial the She is currently the vice-president of the Swiss Design start-up courses and coaching opportunities offered as part of local Association (SDA) and sits on a variety of design juries.
Reaching Market Maturity
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pon graduating with the three-year Bachelor’s degree own brand means more entrepreneurial control, but it is the most offered by one of the seven Swiss design universities, challenging business model of the four. A creative entrepreneur’s young designers must decide how to launch their ca- career starts with the search for producers and the calculation of reers. Nowadays, they usually choose one of four busi- purchase prices and margins. Production and marketing investness models to establish themselves on the market, ments are often necessary too. And yet, there is significant intereither as an employee or a freelancer. Some of these options are est in this model today. The growing opportunities for handling more established than others, but ultimately all of them present sales and marketing via the internet encourage young designers initial hurdles as well as advantages and disadvantages. This be- to experiment with so-called micro-brands. comes obvious by taking a closer look at the four business models. Model one: designers start working in a design agency, often A series of decisions as trainees, later as junior designers – or they eventually start their So where does this leave a designer? There is no universally valid own design business. This is logical because designers are service path to bliss. Each designer must develop an individual strategy providers. With their services, agencies contribute to product de- based on personality, life situation, openness to risk, and knowlvelopment, innovation, to a comedge. But designers do have a depany’s image or its customer excisive advantage: surviving in the perience. It is a highly competitive market is similar to the design market, despite the fact that the process, involving an iterative sedesign sector has been growing in ries of decisions toward the best recent years in Switzerland, with possible solution. And they have been taught how to do that. designers often convincing their customers that design is a strategic long-term responsibility for any company. This is why small agencies bear a concentration of risk: they often work for only a handful of customers. If they lose Every emerging designer must choose a just one client, the situation besuitable working model. There are at least comes critical. According to some four paths to professional bliss. studies, larger agencies fare better because they can acquire cusBy Claudia Acklin tomers collaboratively and continuously. Model two: designers work as employees in a company with its own design department. Switzerland is known to be a country of small and medium-sized businesses – and these can rarely afford to maintain an in-house design department. On the contrary: many companies are not really aware of the added value of design, or are prejudiced against the work of designers. These days there are some large companies in Switzerland that value design thinking and design-driven innovation processes. However, this trend also has its drawbacks for designers, because a growing number of non-designers are now setting up as consultants to obtain new solutions using client-oriented processes borrowed from the design field.
Business Models for Designers
Creative control Model three: designers can license their products to an agent or to an intermediary. Many designers are happy to delegate the tedious product marketing process to an agent or an intermediary. But royalties are low, and rarely cover the costs linked to product development. They therefore provide a supplement to earned income rather than a livelihood. Designers choosing this model have to obtain cross-financing. Or they develop, according to model four, their own small brand, and market their products themselves. The creation of one’s
Dr. Claudia Acklin is the director of Creative Hub, a platform for the promotion of Switzerland’s design business. www.creativehub.ch Translated from the German by Clarissa Hull
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REFLECTIVE R E L AT I O N S H I P S Industrial Design
We adjust our behaviour in order to maintain clear and meaningful relationships with the artifacts that surround us. They determine what we can or cannot do. They teach us how to use them, and their form indicates their categories. In short: we are involved in intense relationships with the devices that make up our surroundings.
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n 1987 the French artist Ange Leccia presented the latest design objects that invited the audience to participate in art. Artmodel of the Mercedes 300 CE as a work entitled La Séduc- ists deployed this strategy to renew and expand a concept of art tion. It stood in the Orangerie close to the Stadtschloss in that had come to be seen as old hat. From now on, art was not Kassel as part of documenta VIII. The “seduction,” it sug- merely to be looked at: it was also to be experienced. In 1998 the gested, was the car itself – or rather its character as a com- French curator Nicolas Bourriaud identified this as a genre that modity and the form of its presentation. The vehicle revolved he termed esthétique relationelle, according to which the striving slowly on a gleaming platform erected by a car dealership, before for immediate relevance to everyday life can also find expression the admiring gaze of its spectators. The dark blue metallic body- in the fact that “designed” objects from our lives find their way into work appeared cool and understated, the clean lines seemed a per- the exhibition context. Yet the aspiration of autonomous art to infect fit for this cathedral of art. In fact, the work broke with estab- filtrate people’s lives was not invented during that decade. It was a lished conventions of presentation, and must surely have been seen feature of the classical avant-garde as far back as the early twentias a provocation even for the art market, accustomed as it is to eth century. One might even go further and say that the avant- treating works of art as tradable commodities. Leccia’s work high- gardes saw design as the realization of an aspiration for art itself. For design – in the form of styled lighted a paradigm shift in the significance of design in the exhibiproducts – is already at work in tion context. Two years before the the lives and everyday experiences opening of the Vitra Design Muof human beings. And that, ultiseum in Weil am Rhein and the mately, was what the avant-gardes Design Museum in London, docuwanted art to be. menta VIII was the first exhibition In design as in art, however, to present applied art as every bit we experience alienation – at least the equal of fine art, making no if we follow Karl Marx, that perdistinction between them either in ceptive analyst of the industrial age. For Marx, the factories give the exhibition layout or in the catalogue. the product the character of a Artistic director Manfred commodity and render industrial Art and design have long been Schneckenburger readily acknow labour an exchangeable, tradeable in a r elationship – but which is the ledged the difference between the good, alienated from life. This alseducer and which the seduced? two disciplines, but for the purienation also extends to the comDespite their different functions, each poses of his exhibition he saw no modities themselves, which are fundamental divide in terms of transmuted into an unapproachdiscipline profits from the their visual and conceptual quality. able antithesis to life. Removed other’s presentation and reception. Design was presented not merely from the context of their manufacas an application of art but as a disture, their presence discloses neiBy Tido von Oppeln cipline in its own right. It was a ther their production process nor theme that ran right through dochow the material has been transumenta VIII. The installations of formed. This purity renders them established designers such as Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi desirable, alien objects, bereft of origin or history. The character and Andreas Brandolini stood side by side with those of their of the commodity is based neither on its use nor on the satisfacyounger counterpart Jasper Morrison. A strikingly large number tion of everyday needs, but on the market alone. of artistic positions also addressed the aesthetics of commodities. The fact that Ange Leccia’s work was put together by a Mercedes The designer as author dealer transformed the presentation of the commodity into an ex- As with art, so with design: it is this alienation of the commodity hibition of itself, a kind of confrontation between art and design. from its purpose and its producer that engenders the desire for auAt the same time, Leccia invited audiences to view the design ob- thenticity and rootedness. Just as autonomous art became a comject afresh: as an object with its own autonomous meaning. modity on the art market of the nineteenth century, the industrially manufactured product lost its link to life and became an Art and the everyday autonomous commodity too. But in the world of design, the kind Because design is always linked to concrete functions, milieus or of artistic self-criticism formulated by the avant-gardes did not target audiences, it has long been a way of challenging the com- emerge until the 1970s. In Italy especially, designers countered placency of l’art pour l’art. This was a consistent theme in the functionalist design, which slipped without demur into economic 1990s. Visiting a museum back then, it was by no means unusual circulation, with a conception that asked to be considered as “emoto find oneself called upon to read, discuss, listen to music or even tional” and “radical.” The classic modern design of Marcel Breuer, cook, in art installations designed to resemble bars or lounges. Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Max Bill and Dieter Rams emphasized funcThese spaces were configured using furniture, everyday items and tion, whereas Radical Design, as this movement came to be known,
Design and Art: A Love Story
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The obvious question, then, is whether one discipline is merging with the other. Though many have postulated such a development, the twin fields of art and design have retained their distinctive identities. Indeed, what we are talking about here is not so much a synthesis of design and art as a changed concept of the work within design. Even designers such as Jurgen Bey, Jerszy S eymour and Martino Gamper, whose objects can be interpreted as “fusions,” or artists such as Martin Boyce and Tobias Rehberger, have no problem locating themselves and their work in their respective environments. Instead, what we are seeing is a tendency for each discipline to avail itself of the other’s creative repertoire. Design is adopting the One might even go further and say that the avant-gardes working methods of art, and artists are borsaw design as the realization of an aspiration for art itself. rowing the themes and strategies of design. Works and ways of working have thus beor perhaps because of it – their avant-garde aspirations became come more similar. In some cases, design objects are as difficult to a central topic of discussion for cultural commentators. Most of distinguish formally from works of art as works of art are from dethese designs were produced only in small numbers, but there were sign objects. Design has now given rise to a self-reflective creative a few exceptions, one being Alessi’s three-legged Juicy Salif citrus praxis and found ways of engaging critically with itself as a discisqueezer, designed in 1987 by Philippe Starck. Starck’s response pline. To those who wonder whether design objects might actually to the functionalist criticism that the squeezer was not practical be art, we respond that while they may aspire to be autonomous was to produce a gold-plated anniversary version. In this product, works, they nevertheless remain located within their discipline. the incompatibility of citric acid and gold is an unambiguous hint The only remaining question, therefore, is whether the time has at its essence. The squeezer comes with the following instructions: come to start talking about “works of design.” “Use with citric acid can be poisonous. Can also cause discoloration and erosion of gold plating.” When it was pointed out to him that the object is manifestly unsuited for its intended purpose, Stark is reputed to have said: “My juicer is not meant to squeeze lemons; it is meant to start conversations.” This represented a significant expansion of the attitudes that both designers and users can legitimately adopt towards utilitarian objects. In the 1960s this kind of auteur design, with its refusal to be guided solely by what outsiders expected it to do, was only ever discussed in small and often exclusive circles, but that changed in the 1990s. Now, auteur design is collected and traded in such quantities that galleries have stepped in to meet the demand. Today, Design Miami / Basel – the collectors’ fair for design galleries – is held not only at the same time but also in the same place as Art Basel, as if to demonstrate the close ties between the two disciplines from which both profit: art, in that design establishes the link to everyday life; and design, in that art offers the possibility for self-reflection. set out to integrate social and political factors, humorous and lighthearted motifs and emotional moods into the creative process. Yet their concern was not so much to emphasize the aesthetic as to stress the role of the designer as author. Their approach highlighted a resignification of commercial goods: the objects’ form no longer claimed to have a purely functional basis. Indeed the products that came onto the market as a result of this design practice polarized the design scene. They defied all the rules of functional design, disregarding principles such as the congruence of purpose and materials or practicality. In spite of this –
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A changed concept of the work In installations, individual pieces and strictly limited editions, design now seeks not so much proximity to art as the opportunity for a distanced, reflective observation and appraisal of its own work. In so doing, design is developing a discourse about itself as a discipline and offering a critical counterpoint to the unquestioning faith in progress that still characterized modernism. “Critical design I guess is about using design to ask questions rather than provide answers,” was how Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby put it, formulating a programme that, today, is not seduced by art but can instead be seen as an aesthetic praxis and a commentary by designers on design.
Tido von Oppeln (b. 1974) studied culture, philosophy and museum education at the Humboldt University of Berlin. As an author and curator, he has been involved with design, art and architecture since 2005. He has been teaching design history and theory in Potsdam, Lucerne and Zurich since 2010. Translated from the German by Geoffrey Spearing
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R E N AT O B AT O , B O AT B U I L D E R Product Design
Everyone is a designer: planning, sketching, making. “All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity,� wrote the US-based designer Victor Papanek in 1972, the same year that saw the publication of the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth. It was a critique directed at all designers and architects whose work contributes to the problem of overabundance.
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omewhere near the nerve centre of high modernism, Switzerland remains identified with a high order of precision, aesthetic and otherwise. As people, objects and media become increasingly mobile and intertwined, what is happening in “the heart of order?” This short piece will cut a personal cross-section from the vast, indissociable order of design and Dasein, things and being(s). For me, here and now in Basel in the summer of 2013, what may link the enjoyment of this promotional poster, these pixel displays, that piece of public art and those concrete city blocks? With an eye to the material poetics associated with the grid, I’ll confront just a few contemporary objects and situations, as well as some ideas about space and experience. The grid and its associated material culture form key objects with which I begin this poetical research excursion.
strongly persistent influence. It’s merely a starting point. In keeping with the modernist belief in technological progress and scientific rationality, I’ll proceed with the assumption that grid systems have proven practical for some purposes, as well as rigidly deterministic or tedious for other problems and practices. Grids clearly have some desirable visual qualities and ‘infrastructural’ benefits. The question is not whether they work, but how they work, and what experiential effects they have on people. Façade or Armour?
Walking down the streets of Basel, I am reminded of grid systems by other visible fragments of urban life, such as the transferable glazed alikeness of gym interiors (and bodies, to some extent!). Or landmark buildings such as the Ramada Plaza tower at Basel’s exhibition square, MesseOf Grids and Signs platz – quite similar to buildTo an outsider in an atmospheric ings in many other cities that city like Basel, there is immediate share the model global typoloevidence of grids at the scale of gies of apartments, stadiums everyday things. Like the arrays and malls. W alter Benjamin’s arof electronic signboards, the letchetypal arcades come to mind, The Delhi-based design expert terbox stacks (of equally boxy of course: vaults of steel and Siddhartha Chatterjee spent apartment buildings), tile- and glass that p refigured new, amthe summer of 2013 as a research fellow pixel-based art, the ubiquitous bivalent reconfigurations of the in Switzerland, supported by Pro Helvetia flags, a few public sculptures and interior and exterior spaces of even some graffiti. In many, the home, shop, street and world beand hosted by iaab, the International articulation of a grid emerges yond. Benjamin’s Parisian “PasExchange and Studio Program Basel. In this from the assembly of repeating sages” revealed facets of a modplayful personal essay, he shares some prefab or mass-produced units. ern exhibitionary order coming early impressions of Basel, with Once whole, in working order, to enclose the street within itthe object may convey proself, in order to draw in a new insights drawn from his ongoing design- grammed patterns and content at consumer citizen. We could apculture project “The Art of Order.” resolutions addressed to a viewer proach contemporary exemplars at some distance (clock, elecof this sort of thing, selectively, By Siddhartha Chatterjee tronic scroll, typeface, mosaic under the optically flatter cateart). Other forms may offer viewgory of façades. ers an experience of a (sub)culTake the exhibition square. Its tural expression – in a range from sanctioned investments in civil many recursive scales are dramatized in the massive floor pattern aesthetics and orderly urban services, to provocative acts of self- that overlays the surface of the entire square, the façade-spanning affirmation (sculpture, fountains, crests, flags, graffiti). Some may clock at the north-east corner, and the architectural skin of the be used by able-bodied persons as manual-mechanical systems new Messe Hall. Herzog and de Meuron’s freshly-minted exhibiof sorting, storage and retrieval (postboxes, wall-cabinets, bank tion building shimmers and hovers along the south face of the vaults, all the way up to apartments, housing estates and urban square. Strips of silver-grey panels make up its rectilinear surface precincts). It’s very obvious that grid principles have been useful construction. Yet each scale-like unit has a slight curvature, fabin enabling similar entities to be packed close: to be tessellated like ricated to generate areas of graded perforation. As I approach, mosaics, imbricated like roof tiles, or otherwise overlapped in or- these appear to ripple like waves and unfold across the surface. der to stay apart together, like unknown neighbours. Grids are also Where you might see daylight views of Basel from within, through applied to generate a host structure for disparate entities: a lattice these corrugations in the shimmering outer skin I can glimpse for plants, or a demographic registry to track gender and ethnic- only a dark opacity of inner surfaces and structural members. The ity. In graphic design, a grid may allow elements to be assembled, massive, diagonally-offset volumes of its stacked exhibition halls aligned and assessed with relative speed and iteratively modified dwarf the multi-storied façades of the old Kleinbasel buildings facto achieve some desirable balance of clarity, cost and style. ing it. Despite this monumental scale, the porous surface develI can’t generalize that the grid systems of the International opment of the new Messe Hall seems to me to lend the whole beStyle of modernist architecture or of Swiss graphic design have a hemoth an almost delicate touch in its interaction with the
The Heart of Order
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A well-known anthropological intuition feels close to a founding axiom for the applied arts and design: “things we make then make us.” In general terms, this calls for close attention to the ways structures are set up in order to serve as sets of guidelines by which producers and people create a range of live variations. As a trained user and abuser of grids in graphics, exhibitions and installations, it remains a relief that grids cover just one order of possible design responses. Instead, I hope to approach future acts of design as working constructively in the wide-open zone between physics and metaphysics, biology and philosophy – inspired also by the accidental, and by our The grid and its associated material culture form key precarious state of being. environment. The matte reflectiveness of the aluminum-composite façade picks up the colours of the sky and merges them with the earth tones of an adjacent brick building. It diffuses the harsh summer light, rather than mirroring it, like glass façades tend to. Besides animal scales and wind across water, for me this almost woven surface also evokes armour: woven chainmail. Whom might it be protecting? The light dims as the tram pulls under it and brightens again as we come to a stop in the diffuse illumination from a massive
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objects with which I begin this poetical research excursion. circular skylight. This opening curves up from the underside of the building, like the inside of a doughnut or torus, almost cold in its computer-aided-design and manufacturing precision, yet again somehow subtle, superficially organic. I enjoy the way it makes the daylight swirl in, and the sharp-edged way it reflects arcs of sunlight. Almost like a sundial or clock, mechanically exacting but with a simpler textural and volumetric magic that recalls cupolas and seed patterns. Waiting below, I enjoy the way it frames the sky.
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Communicative Tools Out in the plaza, my attention is also drawn repeatedly to the glass clock – this über-sign of precision mechanics – rendered transparent and built at a scale that is more often seen atop clock towers. Here it is surprisingly installed at mezzanine level. Huge, low, seethrough, reflecting its glazed surroundings, this public clock is visible only from within the square, and conversely as a fragmented silhouette from within the glass building. Rather than a public service, this clock face seems to convey a more immediate public face for its builder – a communicative tool commissioned by project consortiums for events such as Basel’s international watch, jewelry and art fairs. Like the ubiquitous “+” of the Swiss flag or Hilfiker’s beautifully minimalist clock for the Swiss Railways, the clock façade appropriates a recognizably shared visual symbolism, and distinguishes itself by its play of materials and location. In a way, it powerfully condenses the twin ascendance of the nationalist and capitalist orders. At once banal and beautiful. Walking on the edges of the square I became aware that these patterns would appear as MESSE BASEL from the buildings above. For a moment, this gave me the disorienting feeling of being within an architectural scale model, a tiny figure in a simulation. The modernist “machines for living” that Le Corbusier theorized have always allowed their cohabitants more agency. The graffiti scrawled in odd corners and cul-de-sacs of this brand new space suggests something along these lines: design can control and enable, yet its experience can also be remade by marginal acts of self-expression, re-creation and change, in time percolating up into mainstream practices. It makes one wonder to what extent the functional grid-based design of all aging modernist things influenced the actual functioning of the dynamic design-cultural spaces flowing through them, around them, despite them.
Siddhartha Chatterjee is an arts and design practitioner. He trained in museum design at India’s National Institute of Design, and in anthropology at SOAS in London. From Delhi and Bangalore he co-directs the communication arts firm seechange. sc@seechange.in
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JUST GET IT! Product Design
Design is about making plans. Often enough, a project’s outcome can be uncertain. Ideas can easily break down during the production process, with the transformation from sketch to model to prototype to series and end product. A failed blueprint is usually considered worthless from the user’s point of view. But designers know this is not true. These failures testify to the designer’s ability to conceive of something new.
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ome designers attempt to liberate themselves from correct, if we approach design exclusively from the point of view the theory and history of their discipline by acting as if of industrialization’s boom era. their work were sui generis. Others have done their However, there are just as many competing accounts of the homework and studied design history – thinking and emergence of design beyond the functionalist approach. Andrea re-thinking, digesting and sublimating it – and thus Branzi, and before him Reyner Banham, re-read the Italian Futurderiving from it an undeniable freedom. We might think, for in- ist movement in order to place design history in a new perspecstance, of Achille Castiglioni’s ready-mades, Gio Ponti’s re-designs, tive. In November and December 1976, Franco Raggi and Sonja or the position taken up by Andrea Branzi. Gunther organized the exhibition Il Werkbund – 1907 alle origini But which history of design are we talking about here? The del design at the Venice Architecture Biennale. They wished to development of the field seems more closely connected to tech- demonstrate that the birth of design could be traced back to the nical parameters than to the expansion of popular culture and the founding of the German Werkbund (Association of Craftsmen) media. The term “design” was coined by Richard Redgrave and rather than to William Morris’s nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Sir Henry Cole who, in 1849, founded the Journal of Design & movement. Manufactures; the fact that it emerged within the context of The very multiplicity of the accounts of design’s genesis makes post-Gutenberg mechanical reproduction points to the funda- one thing clear: a designer’s understanding of history will shape mental link between design and his or her own work, and make it standardization. possible to develop a distinctive position while avoiding readyBut the functionalist aspect of design partakes of an even made formulas, trends and commore complex history. It can be monplace solutions. traced back to the publication of From Ruskin to the Fab Labs two key works: Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern MoveWho today has not heard of the ment (1936) and Sigfried GiediFab Labs? These alternative proon’s Mechanization Takes Comduction units make use of Rapid mand (1948). Although these Prototyping and Open Source two works, published twelve technologies. They are presented years apart, share a common faith as new forms of the self-design Only designers familiar with the in technical progress, they make industries 2.0, while drawing on history of their field can develop opposite arguments about the ideas developed in nineteenth- their own positions, argues a design origin and definition of design. century England. Beyond the scholar and professor. While Giedion situates design promise of customized standardwithin technological culture, ization and in-house production, Pevsner writes a functionalist histhe Fab Lab revives ideals of colBy Alexandra Midal tory focused on individual piolectivity and communality put neers. The co-existence of such forth by John Ruskin. The signifdivergent accounts of the history of design raises the question of icance of turning to Ruskin today in order to develop a new concept whether it is possible to write such a history altogether, let alone a of design should not be underestimated. Ruskin, who was also Wildefinitive one. liam Morris’s teacher, was a fierce critic of the British economy of Modernism championed functionalist values, as if they were his time, pointing out the connections between economics and aesdesign’s only travelling companions. It is important to note, how- thetics, and between the manufacture of goods and the resulting ever, that the paths have been multiple. Many historians credit living conditions. A visionary critic, he was one of the first to imPeter Behrens with the dissemination of design: he was the first agine a welfare state guaranteeing both existential and cultural industrial designer to align himself with a company, the German well-being for all. Labelled a heretic for his views, he was dismissed AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft), for which he devel- from the Cornhill Magazine, and eventually withdrew from inteloped a consistent corporate identity between 1907 and 1914. An lectual life to become the head of a utopian artisanal community even larger number of historians, however, trace the birth of de- modelled after the medieval guilds. The current revival of his prosign back to the 1919 Manifesto written by the Bauhaus’s found- ject by the Fab Lab communities of engineers and designers demoning director, the architect Walter Gropius, who, flying in the face strates that returning to historical notions does not necessarily of the facts, associated design with the laws of functionalism. Nor mean retreating to the dusty shelves of design history: it may inshould we forget the important role played by Gebrüder Thonet, stead be a source of new and daring practices. the German manufacturer of bentwood furniture, or by the Ford The Master in Design at the HEAD (University of Art and auto factories in the USA. Both are often cited as originators of Design) in Geneva is based on this double mode of (re)uniting thedesign, and they demonstrate the influence exerted on its devel- ory and practice on a daily basis. Here, design is taught in a unique opment by the entrepreneurial spirit. All of these accounts are way: by insisting on the absolute necessity of an autonomous the-
On the Shoulders of Giants
DES IG N? DE SIG N! 26
ory for the discipline. At the forefront of this educational model is the goal of acquainting students with historical figures, thus allowing them to develop and perfect a contemporary approach to their own work. In the current climate of uncertainty, our design school undoubtedly provides a a unique space in which to experiment for a young generation looking for alternatives to the spoonfed knowledge and pre-digested trends offered elsewhere.
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project. In this case, it took the form of an installation of 120 square meters built by the students under the supervision of Nitzan C ohen and Dominic Robson. On 12-meter angled screens hung on both sides of the space, two films are projected simultaneously, thus making it impossible to watch both at the same time. With the accompaniment of a musician composing a live instrumental performance each evening, the audience is plunged into a multi-sensory space. This modest homage to the multiple talents of Charles An instructive homage et Ray Eames takes on new forms, generating a public space conThe example of Re-Think the Eames demonstrates the relevance structed according to a total design concept. of our approach. This homage to Charles and Ray Eames, the twenThis is just one of many examples that allow us to set the tieth century’s most famous design couple, was presented by the counters back to zero and thus to contest, at least partly, the modernist claim that creativity and innovation are only possible after a tabula rasa. But of Returning to historical notions does not necessarily mean course, the modernists who made that retreating to the dusty shelves of design history. claim knew their history. Breaking with the past can be helpful, but never at the price of Master in Design programme at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2013. sacrificing knowledge. Re-Think the Eames also demonstrates that Although their furniture, still manufactured today by Herman our relationship with our own history can lead to creative teachMiller and by Vitra, and the Case Study House they designed in ing strategies far removed from nostalgia: because they restore dePacific Palisades, are well-known, it is often forgotten that the pair sign’s ability to reinvent itself, with a freedom and an open-mindwere also prolific photographers who left behind an archive of edness that defy the strict – and oft-caricatured – functionalist more than 750,000 negatives. That collection is more than mere framework. documentation of their work: it is an exceptional opus in its own In this way, design history emerges from the libraries to be reright, and a source of inspiration for future designers. By immers- newed. If I have insisted on the double nature of design, “at once” ing my students in the powerful universe of the Eames’s complete practical and theoretical, it is because only an approach that takes works, I am able to offer them an unparalleled adventure in both into account the relationships between these multiple dimensions design and learning. will allow us to train mature designers: ones who are fully conCharles and Ray Eames liked to say that a chair was first and scious of their discipline’s complex origins, and capable of honourforemost a concept arising out of a holistic vision. This was also ing them even while re-appropriating or bypassing them. By takthe case for their Think Theater, presented at the 1964 World’s Fair ing up this position, I would like to prevent students from splitting in New York City and designed for the IBM pavilion. In Eero Saari- design into two distinct halves – one that privileges the technical, nen’s massive egg-shaped theatre, they created an immersive view- and one that privileges the theoretical – so that they do not fall into ing space equipped with synchronized 35mm projectors to create the trap of simplistic dualism. Combining both halves testifies to a performance replicating the way the brain solves both complex the designer’s ambition to engage in dialogue, however compliand simple problems. cated that might turn out to be. At a time when there is much conThis popular-science project is based on immersing the senses fusion between the disciplines, design is embedded in a historical in a marvellously-staged environment. The performance – for so continuity that easily permits re-examination. One whose eleit must be called – is accompanied by live commentary from a ments can be understood not only in terms of their mutual resotuxedoed ringmaster. The show begins even before the spectators nance, but above all according to an autonomous and individual take their places in the tiered rows of seats. They watch a rhyth- perspective: that of design. mic, uninterrupted series of photos and film images projected onto twenty-two screens of different sizes and geometric shapes, while receiving a cascade of explanations on the brain’s capacity for abstraction. In addition, the Eameses emphasized the importance of the spectacle by using movable seats. The seating tiers, attached to hydraulic pistons, raised the viewers to a height of 90 feet, giving them the same dizzying sensation as an amusement park ride. The promise of entertainment is suddenly disrupted by the need to pay attention. While the show was about the democratization of knowledge, it ended up being much more, transforming mere learning Alexandra Midal is a design scholar and historian, and into an unprecedental mental experience. a freelance curator. She was Dan Graham’s assistant, Based on previously-unseen images, the film we made for and is currently a professor at the HEAD (University of Art Re-Think the Eames restages the limits of the brain’s ability to and Design) in Geneva. visualize and comprehend, as first explored in the Eames’s 1964 Translated from the French by Marcy Goldberg
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DE SIG N? DE SIG N! 27
I
n a globalized world, it can be hard to tell where design pieces come from. Despite this expanding international style, there is still something distinctive about Danish design – not least because the Danish state dares to play a strong role in society. The Nordic countries of Europe are known for their generous government support of arts and design. In the 1950s, Scandinavian design pieces went on tour as part of a state-financed travelling exhibition with stops in North America and Europe. In his 2006 book Da danske møbler blev moderne (“When Danish furniture became modern”), Per H. Hansen, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, argues that it was basically this marketing that created the myth of Scandinavian design around the world. An updated show called “Scandinavian Design Beyond the Myth” was exhibited throughout Europe between 2003 and 2006. But beyond the branding, Denmark, like all the Nordic countries, also provides continuous support for the design sector.
are: talent, and the quality of the artistic production. This may include conceptuality and aesthetic quality, but also professionalism and environmentalism. The latter is of particular importance for industrial design, as the committee favours projects that demonstrate a consciousness of their environmental and social consequences. The classics of the future
How have recent grant recipients benefitted from this support? This year, Christin Johansson received a three-year work grant for her ceramics. Among other things, her solo exhibition Her Alter Ego Universe at Copenhagen Ceramics (2012) had appealed to the committee. In it, she had explored and challenged ceramics as an artistic medium, in combination with theater and fine art. This is not the first time Johansson received support from the Danish Arts Council. “The grants enable me to cooperate with other craftspeople and to finish projects that I would not Sums that make a difference have had the opportunity to do otherwise,” she says. In Denmark, public funding for the arts on the national level is Signe Schjøth, also a cemanaged by the Statens Kunst ramic artist, has received a fond, the Danish Arts Foundatravel grant, a work grant, and Denmark may be a small country, tion. Its Expert Committee for support for exhibitions from but it looms large in the world of design. Crafts and Design consists of the Danish Arts Council – all One key factor in its success three members who are chosen of which, by her own account, is a long tradition of state support. for a limited term only: two have helped her realize the projects she wanted. She has nominated by the Foundation’s Council, and one by the Minister participated in national and inBy Hanne Cecilie Gulstad of Culture. Currently, it consists ternational exhibitions and in of a ceramic artist, a graphic de2009 won the Anni and Otto Josigner and a jeweler. “The artists hannes Detlefs Award for young who sit on the committees know what happens in the art field. They experimental ceramic artists. Schjøth believes that the long tradicontribute to the continuous development of the fund so that it re- tion of crafts and design in Denmark stems from its high quality, sponds to the actual needs of the field,” says Nina Leppänen, senior and financial support from the government has made this possible. adviser to the Committee for Crafts and Design. The Kunstfond opThe solid Danish tradition of crafts and design represents both erates on an arm’s-length principle, guaranteeing the absence of advantages and disadvantages for new designers, who must comdirect government involvement. Decisions are final and cannot be pete with their well-established predecessors. Nina Leppänen, for overruled by appealing to another administrative or political body. one, thinks her organization should support designers who want In 2013, the Foundation’s funding budget for crafts and de- to move away from that tradition. “We know that Danish consumsign was 13 million DKK (about 2.15 million CHF). Artists receive ers are quite conservative. They buy classic chairs from designers support mainly through work grants and travel grants. Designers like Arne Jacobsen. But the younger designers are working hard. and craftspeople who apply may receive work grants lasting up to We will support them, so they can continue to work and make the three years and meant to cover basic living costs. The smallest best sketches. Maybe they will give us the classics of the future.” grant is a one-time sum of approximately DKK 50,000 (CHF 8300). “The fund does not distribute lower amounts, because they only want to hand out sums large enough to make a real difference to the recipient,” says Leppänen. As of January 2014, the Kunstfond will merge with Danish Crafts, another body funded by the Dan- Hanne Cecilie Gulstad is an art critic based in Copenhagen. ish Ministry of Culture. The arts foundation will then have more She has a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) funds at its disposal both to support crafts and design, and for in Trondheim, and a Master of Arts in Modern Culture from international promotion. The most important criteria for funding the University of Copenhagen.
Beyond the Myth of Danish Design
DES IG N? DE SIG N! 28
A
nyone who has even a passing familiarity with design Denmark’s young designers have nevertheless come to terms knows what Danish design looks like: the egg chair, with their frustrating heritage. Government subsidies have certhe swan, artichoke-shaped lamps; Arne Jacobsen, tainly been a help. More important may have been the call to kill Poul Kjaerholm, Verner Panton. Lots of wood, beau- their design fathers, as it were. The many design professionals tiful fabrics, cheerful colours. But this vivid image has supplied by the government with educational grants and jobs proone drawback: it’s as old as the hills, at least when measured in claimed design to be an approach to life that includes ecological terms of the chronology of design. The golden age of Danish fur- and social problem-solving. Once the intellectual field had been niture design was the 1950s and 1960s. As Gitte Just, the director expanded, the old icons of post-war modernism no longer got in of the Danish Design Association, explains, this overwhelming tra- anybody’s way. dition has become a “frustrating heritage” for young designers. She has had to fight against the curse of the country’s brand-name. New freedoms While the reputation of Danish design guarantees good turnover The new freedom of thought inspired a whole generation to re-exfor some producers, for decades now the brand has exerted an amine the world on the large and the small scale. Danish archiinhibiting influence on the development of style and content – tectural firms that have made an all-inclusive design concept a problem that has been recogtheir own – like BIG or 3XN – nized by the Danish governare counted internationally ment as well. As early as 1997, among the most original iniDenmark launched a national tiators of ideas when it comes design campaign with a budget to projects that are ecological of 10 million Danish crowns, and social, yet still perceived around 1.65 million Swiss as “cool.” Fashion designers francs. A government report such as Henrik Vibskov, Baum from the year 2007 nevertheless and Pferdgarten, or Lene and came to a sobering conclusion: Sören Sand, convey extrava“Danish design has fundamengance rather than stereotypitally failed to adapt to the new cal Scandinavian cosiness. And trends in design, compared to although new Danish design Government support for Danish design is the leading design countries: firms such as Hay or Muuto considered exemplary. But how can the United States, Japan, Gerconsider themselves phoenixes young designers overcome the influence many, England and Holland.” rising from the ashes of their of their country’s design heroes? The goal of the government’s indesign fathers, they now disitiative was thus to bring Dentance themselves more and more from earlier design mark back into the “internaBy Till Briegleb tional design elite.” dogma in favour of their own experiments with glamour and Looking for opportunities humour. The politicians’ unusually strong interest in supporting creative Denmark seems ready, in other words, to develop a contemporary enterprise arose not only out of the national malaise that Denmark attitude out of its own social tradition of design. This was also the was no longer the famous “design country” of old. Peter J. Lassen, theme of the 2013 Index Awards: to approach the great challenges the founder of the furniture line Montana, explains the high level of the world with creative means. Meanwhile, the D anish governof state sponsorship quite simply: “We are a small country that ment has just published a third growth plan for the creative indusoriginally lived from farming. We have to use what is at hand. And try. At last, its diagnosis is once again: “Denmark is especally strong that is not much.” With design, Denmark is thus in search of its in architecture, fashion and design.” place in the world market. That is why a second, more broadly-based catalogue of subsidies was developed in 2007, complete with scholarships, easier terms of credit, and international exchange programmes, and with a budget of 23 million Danish crowns, at the time worth slightly more than 5 million Swiss francs. To underline its ambition to be the world’s leading design country, the government had already Till Briegleb (b. 1962 in Munich) is a journalist and created the world’s most lucrative design prize in 2005. Every two writer. He studied political science and German literature in Hamburg, and was a musician before becoming a years a member of the Danish royal family hands out five Index cultural correspondent for various German newspapers, Design Awards, each worth 100,000 Euros – although in 2007, the including the taz and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. His areas of specialization are: architecture, art and theatre. year the government released its devastating assessment, not a Translated from the German by Bruce Lawder single Dane was among the winners.
Denmark’s Young Iconoclasts
DE SIG N? DE SIG N! 29
THE SYSTEM OF THE GAZE: SIMPLE ACCESSOIRES Object Design
In an uncertain pro足cess, designers create possible future worlds that they imagine, test and build. The crucial skill is their ability to see the world as it could be, not only as it is.
COMING EVEN CLOSER TO YOU Service Design
Providing a service is also part of design, because it includes both the ability to create and the goal of communicating. Even if it is seldom considered “design,” the service economy would be unthinkable without these skills.
L O CA L T I M E
SAN FRANCISCO NEW YORK PARIS ROME WARSAW CAIRO JOHANNESBURG NEW DELHI SHANGHAI VENICE
Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, maintains a global network of branch offices, which serve cultural exchange with Switzerland and support worldwide cultural contact.
Trance Dance CAIRO
French-Swiss choreographers Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon taking a break on one of their exploratory strolls through Cairo.
LO CAL T IM E 32
By Dalia Chams – On the night of 3 June 2013, Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon arrive in Cairo. The Egyptian metropolis welcomes them with a demonstration organized by the judges in protest against the Muslim Brotherhood. In another part of the city centre is the artist residence where the pair will be living for the next two weeks. The two dancer-choreographers are on a Pro Helvetia-sponsored research
Photos: Randa Chaath
In the summer of 2013, Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon of Compagnie 7273 visited Cairo on a research tour for their latest dance piece Tarab, which they premiered in Geneva in October. The Egyptian journalist Dalia Chams met the pair during their visit, which coincided with the start of the uprisings against the Morsi government.
trip to Cairo to prepare a new show, Tarab, meaning “musical trance” in Arabic. Yadi and Cantillon, who live and work in both France and Switzerland, hope to find inspiration for their upcoming dance piece in the pulsating energy of the capital city. The next day, the two stroll through the city, taking in the frenzied rhythms of the densely populated streets and locating their own landmarks: here a place to eat falafel (made Egyptian-style with beans), there a pastry and ice cream vendor with the same name as Laurence Yadi’s Algerian father. All along the way, the French-Swiss couple make new friends by greeting everyone with a smile and a quick “salaam alaikum.” What impresses them the most is the total lack of aggressiveness with which the local people weave in and out of the crowds. How, they wonder, can one make one’s way through the hurly-burly of traffic without bumping into anyone? People’s movements seem to flow into a continuous unrepeating stream. Quite by chance, Laurence and Nicolas are rediscovering the FUITTFUITT style they created in 2006 in order to lend an ornamental dimension to their dance and give free rein to their sensibilities. “It’s the music that makes our bodies move, and that’s what is then transmitted to the audience. It’s not an intellectual process,” explains Nicolas Cantillon. Fluid and contemporary Cantillon and Yadi have been married for six months and are celebrating the tenth anniversary of their dance company, Compagnie 7273, named after their re spective birthdates (Nicolas’s in 1972 and Laurence’s in 1973, both in France). Hence they have decided to create a work for ten dancers, and have ordered two rings engraved with the name Tarab from a local silversmith. Their previous show Nile, winner of the 2011 Swiss Dance and Choreography Award, beautifully conveys the flow of the long African river. There is something fluid, akin to the waters of the Nile, about the piece: its ethereal ripples, devoid of the slightest jolts, bring to mind the FUITTFUITT style. “With Nile, we wanted to create a contemporary ballet inspired by Middle Eastern music, without resorting to the usual clichés. That’s why we chose the Nile and Egypt, the cradle that brought forth the great stars of Arabic musical culture like Umm Kulthum and Mohammed
Abdel Wahab,” explains Nicolas, as if to justify their visit to Cairo. Laurence Yadi adds a few details about their way of working: “We started dancing and Richard Bishop set about composing, while watching us. We had given him a rhythm based on a Syrian pop song over a Sufi beat. For Tarab, our new project, we are working along the same lines.” Hypnotic States The word tarab keeps coming up, like a leitmotif. It means an indefinable state of collective trance, ecstasy and rejoicing invoked by certain pieces of music, best incarnated by the singer Umm Kulthum. “In this kind of music, the rapport that exists between the performers Dance moves inspired by the shapes of Arabic calligraphy. means that it is not the notes themselves that count, but what lies between the notes. curves of Arabic calligraphy and the araThe tarab goes right to your heart: it is besques in the Cairo mosques they visited. gut-wrenching. We want to create a style of Nonetheless, they remain within the regmovement capable of producing that kind isters of contemporary Western dance. “In of hypnotic effect,” says Nicolas Cantillon. Geneva, we are going to continue this “Nile premiered in January 2011 in work with other dancers and with Richard Geneva. We were supposed to perform it Bishop, who will be staying in Switzerone month later in Egypt, at the Library of land for a seven-month residency,” says Alexandria, but the show was cancelled due Laurence. The electric guitar sound of to political unrest,” recalls Laurence Yadi. the American musician, whose mother is This time, they have arrived just two weeks Lebanese, has enveloped and enchanted before the start of the second wave of polit- them so thoroughly that it has become a ical uprisings. Street vendors are crowding part of them. They discovered Sir Richard into the city’s main arteries, and business Bishop’s music in 2010 thanks to his CD is flourishing for the flag sellers. The Freak of Araby, which they spotted at At the Emad El-Din studio, also lo- a Cairo sidewalk stall. cated in the city centre, Laurence and Nicolas are introducing their style to the Unravelling the secrets of the tarab Egyptian dancers. The dancers are aver- Mornings are spent in the studio; afterage at best, but they show plenty of enthu- noons are reserved for meetings and consiasm. All together, they rehearse a cho- certs in order to better unravel the secrets reographic phrase from Tarab. Then the of the tarab. They have gone on a guided couple proceeds with research into the tour of the Umm Kulthum museum. There melodies of the Egyptian guitarist Omar are also visits to Mohammad Ali Street, Khorshid and his arrangements of some where musicians and dancers are to be Umm Kulthum songs. The bodies undu- found and where Nicolas is learning to play late, their movements inspired by the the oud, the Arabian lute. “I already play LO CAL T IM E 33
Note: This text was written in July 2013, shortly after the pair’s research trip to Cairo. Dalia Chams is an Egyptian journalist based in Cairo. She writes about culture, media and society. Translated from the French by Margie Mounier
The Universal Language of Light NEW DELHI
This past June, the Geneva-based lighting designer Jonathan O’Hear met with performance professionals in Delhi and Bangalore to share his ideas about lighting as an artistic medium.
Jonathan O’Hear explores the many faces of lighting design with workshop participants in Delhi und Bangalore.
By Elizabeth Kuruvilla – Jonathan O’Hear had just a few hours left in India. In the few weeks he’d spent there, he had been fully immersed in choreography rehearsals and lighting workshops in Delhi and Bangalore. Now, before flying back home to his wife and children in Switzerland, he was finally making time to visit New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Paintings, Jonathan explained, are often the best teachers of the use of light and shadows. “There’s a universal primal way of understanding light,” he said later. “We are all born from darkness into light, and return to darkness.” For Jonathan, light is nothing short of a language, signifying hope with its appearance, or despair and fear as it descends to create darkness. O’Hear, born in 1971 in Rugby, England, studied literature in London, and LO CAL T IM E 34
film and video in Vancouver. Never having been much of a theatre-goer, his shift to lighting design for performance art happened rather organically. “I thought I would do it for a couple of years and then move on. But I never did,” he says. The real shift in his thinking occurred when he started working with the eccentric Swiss choreographer Foofwa d’lmobilité. In their collaboration, innovation and the need to create meaning through visual design, became paramount. For Au Contraire, a choreography by Foofwa inspired by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Jonathan spent many hours thinking of ways to portray cinema in theatre. “I realized that cinema is just the illusion of movement, where the brain fills in gaps created by still images.” To recreate a similarly strong psychological impact, Jonathan decided to flash red,
Photo: Rahul Giri (90ml Photography)
the guitar. About three months ago, I bought a bouzouki in Turkey. And now it’s time for the oud. Playing music enables you to perform differently with your body,” says Nicolas, who was already a musician before becoming a dancer. The two choreographers have been immersing themselves in Arabic musical improvisation, going from one concert to the next. A score by Ahmed Al-Maghrabi reveals the logical and illogical aspects of the tarab. Al-Maghrabi is the owner of the Makan Centre for ethnomusicology, where the dancers attend a zar (exorcism) session transformed into a performance. The two note that “between zar musicians there is a singular style of listening very different from jazz musicians’ codes.” The concept of tarab comes up again at a popular celebration in honour of a saint, in mystical circles where the names of God are chanted. From time to time, the political context has made itself felt. One evening, a performance by a group of whirling dervishes is cancelled, power outages having become all too frequent during the unrest. Laurence and Nicolas decide instead to visit the swanky Zamalek district, where the intellectuals’ sit-in strike is taking place in front of the Ministry of Culture. Dance, music and politics are intertwined in the streets: yet another rebellious facet of a city that never sleeps.
green and blue lights in quick succession so that the viewer’s mind began to register them as white.
Photo: Soumita Bhattacharya
Sculpting spaces with light For Jonathan, illuminating a stage is never just that; it involves finding his own meaning in a performer’s piece. The first time he came to India in 2010 to mentor participants of the Gati Summer Dance Residency, he designed the lighting for a performance by Lokesh Bhardwaj called Rememory. “This piece on memory provided a lot of room to project my own personal experiment and explain what it did to me.” To represent memory visually, he hung bulbs at different heights to resemble a network of neural activity in the brain’s cortex. It seems not many practitioners in India use light as an artistic medium, the way Jonathan does. “In India, the way we function, light is a last-minute addition, decided about three hours before the show and based on what looks pretty,” says Mandeep Raikhy, a contemporary dancer and programme director for the Gati Dance Forum in Delhi. A Male Ant Has Straight Antennae is Raikhy’s second full-length choreography, on the themes of masculinity and touch. It opened to a packed house on June 13. In a country where alternate sexuality is still largely taboo, where the un-macho man is the target of mockery and the pressure to conform is high, Mandeep Raikhy’s p erformance was
brave and hard-hitting. Yet, before O’Hear arrived, Mandeep and his ensemble of dancers had a collection of episodes on masculinity, but no sure way of making a connection between them. Mandeep acknowledges Jonathan’s central role in shaping the piece: “The choreography shifted dramatically after he came into the picture.” In the beginning of the piece, the dancers, six men and a woman, stood waiting in their undergarments on the stage for the audience to enter the auditorium and settle down. And through the per formance, they never left the stage. Dancers at rest would look on from the darker side of the bamboo scaffolding built by Jonathan, thus becoming a metaphor for society itself. Elements like these, introduced at Jonathan’s suggestion, testify to what Mandeep calls the lighting designer’s “great eye for meaning-making.” He adds: “I’m used to going away into the wings. It’s a different relationship with the audience when you meet them in short bursts. Jonathan really helped me break that wall.” A breath of fresh air The light installation emphasized the piece’s theme of contrasting private desires and public postures of masculinity. For Gyandev Singh, a graduate in stage design from the National School of Drama who assisted Jonathan in this performance, the lighting designer’s interaction with the performers came as a breath of
fresh air. “We didn’t try to hide anything,” he says – from the scaffolding on the stage, to the lights hung in full view, thus creating different spaces through the play of shadows. While in India, Jonathan held non- technical workshops attended in droves by designers, photographers, even event managers. So successful were these events that Jayachandran Palazhy, artistic director of the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, plans to invite Jonathan back next year to hold a series of advanced workshops. “He has a painterly approach to light. Like Vermeer’s paintings, he makes light become a character,” says Palazhy. Theatre schools in India put few resources into lighting design, and Palazhy is aiming to correct that through workshops like these, on light and movement. As for O’Hear, constantly tinkering with light in his kitchen in Geneva, he is excited that galleries are now recognizing light as an artistic medium. He is currently working on using electrodes to draw out light, creating an interface that will project light according to how the brain is impacted by what is in front of the eyes. It is perhaps one of the most brilliant of his ideas, encapsulating all that he believes about the emotions light evokes in us. Elizabeth Kuruvilla is based in New Delhi. She is Books and Arts Editor at Open, an Indian weekly magazine focusing on current affairs.
The staging of A Male Ant Has Straight Antennae keeps the performers constantly exposed to the audience’s gaze.
LO CAL T IM E 35
R EP OR TAGE
How to Translate the Music Of Language? An international group of translators met in the Valais mountains for a workshop devoted to Arno Camenisch’s best-selling novella Ustrinkata. The consensus: the book defies literal translation, from the title onwards. By Michael Braun (text) and Jonas Ludwig Walter (photos)
How do I get from “what” to “water”? Which bridge leads from an interrogative to a similar-sounding noun? Six translators are struggling over the opening of Arno Camenisch’s wonderful narrative Ustrinkata. Gathered together around a table in a conference room in a small hotel in the Valaisan mountain village of Leuk, they feel their way slowly and meticulously into the idiosyncratic melodies of the text. Located on a language frontier where French, German and the local Swiss-German dialect (“Walliserdeutsch”) meet, the alpine canton of Valais seems the ideal place for a project devoted to translation and linguistic crossovers. The transition from “what” to “water” is the first great challenge for the participating translators from Ljubljana, Lviv, Moscow, Göteborg, Glasgow and Lausanne. “Was, Wasser, fragt die Tante am Stammtisch in der Helvezia…” (“What do you mean, water, ma aunt asks, looking at Alexi, at the regulars’ table in the Helvezia…” – from Donal McLaughlin’s work-
in-progress English translation, Ed.) So begins Camenisch’s text, and the translators, who are here in Leukerbad to examine the surface and deep structures of Ustrinkata in a three-day workshop, find bold and surprising solutions in their own individual languages. Arno Camenisch’s Grisons tongue-twister is an experience in foreignness even to the ears of a Swiss- German speaker, and all the more so for the convening translators from abroad. They make renewed attempts to approach the text and, like Alexey Shipulin from Russia, they speak of “luck” when they succeed in lending their own translations a similar rhythm and “a similar pattern of imagery.” The “melodic reconstruction,” as Shipulin emphasizes, has priority. Camenisch affirms this with his account of how the text of Ustrinkata came into being: he read the individual scenes aloud some fifty times before he found the appropriate syntactical music for them. With Ustrinkata the thirty-five-yearold author, who writes in German as well RE PO R TAG E 36
Author Arno Camenisch’s polyphonic prose is the subject of a translators’ workshop in Leuk.
37
Six translators, one author, and a moderator taking a break during the workshop on literary translation.
as in Romansh, has concluded his Grisons trilogy. The starting point of his story is a farewell scene. At the Helvezia pub in Surselva, in a Grisons valley, a few villagers are sitting at the regulars’ table and waiting for the deluge. It is the last evening before the place closes for good. To the sounds of the downpour, the regulars are telling each other stories of life and survival, of bad luck and wondrous rescues in their village world. At the same time they are practising the fine art of drinking: guzzling mugs of beer or coffee with a shot of schnapps (“Caffefertic”) in quantities that help the talk to flow and mobilize the locals’ spirit of resistance. The village pub becomes a universal space for storytelling, and the storytellers brace themselves against the menacing demise of their culture with their own tales. Camenisch’s prose – with
its scenes structured in dialogues that capture the idiosyncracies of Romansh village life on the brink of extinction – is a masterpiece of polyphonic language that has received overwhelming recognition on the international scene. Camenisch’s books have already been translated, wholly or in the form of excerpts, into twenty languages, including Dutch, Chinese, Hungarian and English. A variety of other translations are currently in progress. Spoken-word poetics Donal McLaughlin, the most experienced translator at the workshop, who has already translated Urs Widmer and Pedro Lenz into English, can take partial credit for the international discovery of Arno Camenisch. The two met in 2008 and, in order for the Scottish-Irish McLaughlin to get to know RE PO R TAG E 38
the Romansh world better, author and translator set off on a joint expedition to Camenisch’s remote native village. There McLaughlin had the opportunity to listen to, and absorb, the Romansh voices in order to let the characteristic melodies of the spoken language flow into his own translation. A publication in the prestigious American monthly Harper’s Magazine paved the way for the astonishing success that Camenisch has enjoyed since his very first appearance in print. This is the eighth time that a translation workshop has taken place as part of the Leukerbad literature festival. Once again it received support from Pro Helvetia (as part of the Moving Words project – see inset box), the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB), the Center for Literary Translation (CTL) at the University of Lausanne, and the Palais
Valais; and once again it was conducted by Jürgen Jakob Becker of the LCB. During the retreat at Leuk – interrupted only by brief coffee breaks and evening excursions to experience the local cuisine – the particularities of the melodic mix of languages in Ustrinkata were put under a philological microscope. Each sentence, in its meandering structure, echoes the oral character of the culture in which Arno Camenisch grew up. “I have no linguistic axe to grind,” says the author, “I only work with sounds and tonalities from Romansh.” Some critics have been misled by Camenisch’s origins into pigeonholing him as a curiosity of provincial culture. The first volume of the Grisons trilogy, Sez Ner – his virtuoso description of life on the Stavonas alp – does feature the Romansh version in Sursilvan printed side-by-side with the German text. But for Ustrinkata, Camenisch explains, he consciously chose German as his literary language, for in German he has a greater distance to his material. The Obstinacy of Translation While working on Ustrinkata, relates the Slovenian translator Amalija Macek, she experienced a fundamental uncertainty: the unbelievably “sealed off” text initially gave her the feeling of no longer understanding a word of German. Camenisch’s invention of new words continually required unusual solutions in order to render the text in the target language. The difficulties involved in the “carrying over” of the text from one language to another are clearly described by Alexey Shipulin from Moscow and Chrystyna Nazarkevich from Lviv, who for twenty years have translated modern classics by Heinrich Böll and Bertolt Brecht as well as contemporary authors like Ilma R akusa or, indeed, Arno Camenisch. For the artful sentence constructions in U strinkata, where a character’s first name is mostly preceded by a definite article (“der Alexi” or “der Luis”), Shipulin and Nazarkevich had to find creative alternatives, since there are no articles in the Slavic languages. Here virtuoso auxiliary constructions were necessary, such as the use of a demonstrative pronoun. The dialect-inspired curses and madeup words scattered throughout U strinkata – such as expletives like “Coffertori,” “Koffertami,” “Hailandzac” or “Saich” –
Moving Words Special Focus Comes to an End During the Solothurn Literary Days in May 2013, Moving Words. Swiss Translation Programme 2009–2012 officially came to a close with a panel discussion featuring international guests on the challenges of translating Robert Walser’s work. This is not, of course, the end for Pro Helvetia’s support for translation, which will continue in an optimized form as part of the regular support programme in the Arts Council’s Literature and Society division. During the lifespan of the project, which was extended by one year, the number of works of Swiss literature translated both at home and abroad rose significantly. In addition, nine Swiss book series were launched with international publishers, including ones in China, India, the USA, Russia and Norway. Thanks to worldwide collaboration with publishing houses, translators and translation institutes, Pro Helvetia has developed an established network of experts, which will facilitate, and raise the quality, of future work. Moving Words was carried out on a special one-time project budget of 2.4 million Swiss francs. For more information: www.prohelvetia.ch
also require poetic transpositions impossible without radical linguistic transformations (McLaughlin, in English, has opted thus far for renderings like “godsmajudge” or “jesusmaryandjoseph”). Camille Luscher of Lausanne is this year’s recipient of the Terra Nova prize awarded by the Swiss Schiller Foundation for Literature and Literary Translation. She has already translated Camenisch’s first two books into French, and tells of the difficulties in translating the author’s literary idiom, studded with Romansh elements of “farmers’ language,” into the more elegant and formal prose of her own tongue. The spoken nature of Ustrinkata’s language demands that translators maintain a fundamental readiness to renounce literal translation and re-invent the music of Camenisch’s prose in their own languages. Translating the book’s title is already a fraught exercise: the Swiss-German expression “Ustrinkata” (from the German “Austrinken”) refers to the last evening of a pub before it closes, when the regulars come together for a final “bottoms up.” The most varied solutions were tried out in which the combined senses of an ending, a farewell, and the disappearance of a culture might find their equivalent. The suggestions ranged from “the last round” to “the R E PO R TAG E 39
last pitcher” (McLaughlin’s current working title in English is Last Last Orders). In spite of all the difficulties involved in translating Ustrinkata, one may imagine that its translators consider themselves lucky. Although, like shipwrecked seafarers, they have abandoned the seeming security of their home language without being sure of ever reaching the yearned-after safe haven of the target language, they still enjoy the good fortune of sailing across linguistic boundaries. Michael Braun (b. 1958) is a literary critic and moderator based in Heidelberg. He has edited a number of anthologies of contemporary German poetry, and has published extensively on German literature, most recently with a book of essays on Hugo Ball. Jonas Ludwig Walter (b. 1984) studied photography at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. He is currently studying film directing at the HFF Konrad Wolf in Potsdam-Babelsberg. He lives and works in Berlin. www.jlwalter.de Translated from the German by Bruce Lawder
PRO H ELV E T I A N E W SF L A SH
Cultural Exchange Along the Rhine As of September 2013, cross-border cultural cooperation between Alsace, Baden Württemberg and Switzerland has been strengthened thanks to a new tri-national exchange programme. With Triptic – Cultural Exchange in the Upper Rhine Region, cultural institutions from the region will participate in joint projects. For example, the Kaserne Basel (CH), Theater Freiburg (DE) and the two Strasbourg theatres Le Maillon und Pôle Sud (FR) are collab-orating for one season on a joint dance programme, Dance Trip. The travelling exhibition Grenzgänger / Passefrontières (Border Crossings) is an experiment in new forms of cooperation, as three curators and three artists work together on a serial narrative involving
three continuously evolving exhibitions in three cities in Germany, France and Switzerland. And the Transborder project explores border crossings in literal and metaphorical ways with a series of acoustic performances. With Triptic, Pro Helvetia and its twelve local partners hope to strengthen ties between artists and cultural institutions in the region along the Rhine. Last year, a tri-national jury selected a total of seventeen bordercrossing projects drawn from all artistic disciplines, which audiences will be able to discover until May 2014. www.triptic-culture.net
Spotlight for Young Artists The future belongs to new talents. And Pro Helvetia is breaking new ground by offering them support for presentations at high-profile international art fairs. For galleries, it is often too great a risk to exhibit aspiring artists without additional support. Now, artists aged 35 or younger, who have obtained their artistic degree within the past five years, will now be able to take initial steps into the market and make contact with international professionals and audiences. As a further initiative, Pro Helvetia now offers support for curatorial projects involving aspiring artists, both in independent gallery spaces and in small and mid-sized art institutions. Gallery spaces or freelance curators may apply for funding grants for single projects, or for a year-long programme.
L’Ososphère’s travelling exhibition in containers will be shown in Basel, Strasbourg and Karlsruhe, as part of the Triptic cultural exchange programme.
PRO HELV E T IA NE W SFLASH 40
Photo : Philippe Groslier
www.prohelvetia.ch
Interactive and Transmedial
With Mobile. In Touch with Digital Creation, Pro Helvetia will support over 30 new media initiatives between 2013 and 2015.
In the 1990s, hardly anyone in Switzerland owned a mobile phone. Today, more than half the Swiss population has a smartphone, which ranks the country sixth worldwide, after Singapore, Sweden and the USA. The widespread
is enormous. New forms of cultural expression are developing at a lightning pace: from interactive books, to games for tablets and augmented reality apps. With the new programme Mobile. In Touch with Digital Creation, Pro Helvetia promotes digital works by Swiss artists. The focus is on interaction and transmedia storytelling. Between 2013 and 2015, the Arts Council will support over thirty initiatives. These include: a call for transmedia projects, a new edition of the Swiss Games call for projects, residencies at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, conferences, exhibitions, and promotional platforms abroad for Swiss software developers, game designers and media artists. www.prohelvetia.ch/mobile
use of mobile devices that make it possible to be online everywhere and at all times has not only changed the way we communicate, it has also changed our society, economy and culture. The creative potential of the digital age
Photo : Andreas Hidber
New Swiss Orchestral Works On 12 December 2013 at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Lugano, the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana will premiere the “Vergessene Lieder” (Forgotten Songs) by the contemporary Ticino composer Nadir Vassena. This event also marks the start of the Œuvres Suisse series, with further premieres already scheduled for Biel (12 March 2014) and Solothurn (14 March 2014) and others planned for Basel, Geneva and Lausanne in June. Over the next three years, thirtythree new symphonic works by Swiss composers will premiere under the Œuvres Suisse label. The result will be an unprecedentedly broad new repertoire of contemporary Swiss works for chamber and symphony
orchestras. The project is the result of a joint initiative launched by Pro Helvetia and Orchestra.ch, the Swiss association of professional orchestras. Eleven orchestras from all parts of the country have agreed to host three premieres each of new works by Swiss composers between 2014 and 2016. In return, during the entire duration of the project, Pro Helvetia will support all participating orchestras in their touring and promotional activities. In this way, Œuvres Suisses combines support for new music with enhanced international visibility for the participating orchestras. An additional partner for the project is the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRG SSR), which will record all of the PR O H E LV E T IA NE W SFLASH 41
33 new symphonic works will be performed over the next 3 years.
premiere events. The resulting audio documentation will not only preserve this important moment of contemporary musical life in Switzerland for audiences; it will also lend itself to further pro motion of the symphonic works and their orchestras on an international scale.
PA R T N E R
Folk Culture for the Future Good news for flag throwers, lacemakers and yodellers: in 2013 a newly-created fund began distributing grants to Swiss folk culture associations.
definitions, as Markus Brülisauer, the head of the IGVS administrative office, explains. Since folk culture is mostly practised by amateurs, and as there is often no professional training available, the funding criteria used by Pro Helvetia for other arts sectors cannot always be applied here. In addition, Brülisauer points out, not all branches of folk culture can easily fulfil the requirement of “advancing folk culture.” It is easier for the folk music associations to speak of “further development” of their art than it is for, say, the lacemakers’ association, which is dedicated to reconstructing and preserving the craft itself. But Schmid-Kunz adds: “Development does not necessarily have to be in terms of content. It can also be in the form of some kind of cooperation, for example one association joining forces with another and launching a joint project.” Schmid-Kunz is convinced that the new administrative office in Altdorf and Pro Helvetia’s new fund for folk culture will provide a breath of fresh air, opening up interesting new possibilities for the associations. He hopes that they will make use of this opportunity to ensure that traditional culture in Switzerland remains a vibrant practice, rather than a monument to be preserved. Ariane von Graffenried is a freelance writer and a spoken word performer. She has a doctorate in theatre studies from the University of Berne, and is a member of the writers’ collective Bern ist überall and the duo Fitzgerald & Rimini. Translated from the German by Clarissa Hull
first half of 2013, the jury has already approved four applications. One of these projects was for a 2013 “Day of Folk Culture” jointly showcasing the various folk culture associations at the OLMA, the Swiss Fair for Agriculture and Food held each October in St. Gallen. The day included information stands, performances, and interactive opportunities such as crash courses in folk dancing or workshops on how to play traditional instruments like the chlefeli, a Swiss version of castanets. For the folk culture associations, applying for funding is uncharted territory. But the fund’s expert jury also has to break new ground in assessing the applications: for instance, by establishing a joint list of
PARTNER: IG V O LK SK U LT U R 42
Illustration : Raffinerie
By Ariane von Graffenried – Sandwiched between gigantic mountains, grand townhouses and buses, a bronze statue of William Tell stands on the Altdorf town square, gazing into the distance. The Haus der Volksmusik is just around the corner, lending far-sighted support to traditional Swiss culture. In 2013, this expert organization on all questions related to Volks musik – “folk” or traditional Swiss popular music – became the new administrative office of the IGVS (Interessengemeinschaft für Volkskultur Schweiz), an umbrella organization for Swiss folk culture. IGVS has some 300,000 active members under its wing, grouped into eleven different associations. Among these are: the Swiss Federal Yodelling Association, the Swiss Brass Band Music Association, the Swiss Choir Association and the Swiss National Costume Association. IGVS represents large and small organizations, and provides a structure uniting amateur theatre troupes, fife-and-drum bands, and flag throwers. Founded in the late 1980s, the IGVS long lacked infrastructure and professionalism, recalls Johannes Schmid-Kunz, retiring director of the Haus der Volksmusik and managing director of the Swiss National Costume Association. “Even the most basic organizational structures were missing, such as an office or a website with a joint agenda of events. Each association did its own thing.” Thanks to the new administrative office in Altdorf, this has all changed, and should help the IGVS to greater visibility and effectiveness. Albert Vitali, a Member of Parliament for the FDP (Free Democratic Party) from Lucerne, has been its new president since February 2013. “We must succeed in making the IGVS shipshape,” stresses Vitali, who is also an active member of a yodelling club. This is all the more important as the IGVS has now entered into a cooperation agreement with Pro Helvetia. During a three-year pilot project launched in 2013, the Arts Council is to make an annual contribution of CHF 100,000 to an IGVS-managed fund. Twice a year, folk culture associations may apply for funding in support of talent promotion, cultural exchange, and the advancement of folk culture. The IGVS has appointed an independent jury of experts to assess the applications. In the
CA RTE BL A NCHE
For a Creolized Switzerland By Pierre Lepori – Every writer should be a “bastard,” says the great Franco-Algerian poet Jean Sénac. Or at least a “piccaninny” who does not “master” his own language, like the writer Patrick Chamoiseau of Martinique. Switzerland is not Creole – its mix of languages is territorial, existing side-byside and separately – but the country offers us the possibility of infringement, of an act of betrayal of the mother tongue and the fatherland. To be in exile in one’s own country, to take a position at the margin of oneself, delocalizing the identifying fiction that covers and protects us, in short: to be at the edge of language “neither in it nor outside of it, on the unlocatable line of its slope” (Jacques Derrida). Even in a tamed and regimented Confederation, writing has, perhaps, this – residual – power of braving boundaries, of crushing legacies with the madness of a Louis Wolfson, that “student of schizophrenic languages,” who, in 1970, wrote a novel fleeing his mother’s language to confront it with “whole words ideally irreducible, at once liquid and continuous” (Gilles Deleuze). We have the good fortune to live in a little patch of Europe where translation is a necessary practice, a communitarian respiration, but we must not mistake our situation: “Opposed to the idea of an equalizing translation – proceeding by carry-overs, by lateral equivalence – stands the joy of a respiratorial translation, idiotic and descending into the idiotic body, into the incomprehensible matter of each language (…). It is the experience of a voyage into the great well of memory and oblivion” (Valère Novarina). In my experience – and perhaps in yours as well – there are several linguistic strata: echoes of the Marche and the Veneto, where my maternal grandparents came from; the dialect of the Ticino valleys on my father’s side, then the Italian of my school days and my studies in Florence; in Berne, later, there was German; and for the last fifteen years, the French of Lausanne.
It was thus inevitable for me, once I became a writer, to ask myself the question of language: neither from here nor from elsewhere, not quite a migrant (with the attendant woes), I was able to exile myself more and more from the certainty of a monolithic language. Thus the need to translate myself, to betray myself by constantly betraying my origins (in the bastard sonorities of a Francophone with an Italian accent). And to stop trying to opt for one single language. Is there a fundamental difference between writing in one’s mother tongue or in another? Between translating others and translating yourself? I don’t think so, unless you hold a moralizing idea of translation. The philosopher Arno Renken has devoted an important study to the concept of “amoral” translation: Happy Babel (Babel heureuse). His subtle argument: “The experience (of translation) is not a fixation to cling to, but rather a destabilization to be embraced. If so much of the discourse slaves away with all the trappings of necessity and morals to render the translation indistinguishable from the original, if so many try so hard to appropriate it with great strokes of “accuracy,” “fidelity” or “adequacy,” perhaps it is only to suppress CAR T E B LANCH E 43
the anxiety that translation inscribes in the literary and philosophical order.” To transgress monolingualism is to affirm the perpetual motion of language, the freedom that stumbles at each step, at each word, that spills over to invent stammering worlds. A utopian idea? Yes, but… Let us not forget that fifty percent of the world’s population is already, de facto, bilingual or multilingual (as David Bellos reminds us). Let us creolize Switzerland, then, embracing our uncertainties and our transgressions, and the multiple languages that criss-cross and weave together the space we live in. Pierre Lepori was born in Lugano and lives in Lausanne, where he works for Swiss public radio’s French- and Italian-speaking programmes. A novelist and a poet, he translates himself and others. His most recent book, Sans peau (Without Skin), is the French version of his first novel, Grisù (Casagrande, 2007). Illustration: FLAG Aubry / Broquard Translated from the French by Bruce Lawder
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GA LLERY
Omar Ba Délit de Faciès 1, 2013 (detail) Oil, gouache, ink and pencil on corrugated cardboard, 210 × 150 cm The universe conjured up by the Geneva- based artist Omar Ba is at once tender and forbidding. Mysterious creatures, somewhere between dream and reality, haunt blackpainted cardboard backgrounds. References to contemporary politics mingle with iconographic beauty; European visual styles are combined with African symbols. These dark paintings tell of powerlessness, fear and hope, and invoke the invisible. With their archaic energy, they are able to move the spectator, while demanding close inspection and further reflection. This detail from the painting Délit de Faciès 1 (“facial discrimination 1”) shows a figure with closed eyes in the foreground. Is this a refusal to look at what is happening? In the background, two further figures are half-hidden in an ornamental landscape, embodying power and violence. Soldiers and despots are frequent figures in Omar Ba’s work, which unites the history of the African continent with the social realities of the present time. Omar Ba was born in 1977 in Loul Sessène, Senegal. He lives and works in Geneva. He was the 2011 winner of the Swiss Art Award. His work has been exhibited throughout Switzerland, most recently in a joint show with the Swiss artist Claudia Comte at the Centre PasquArt in Biel. He has also participated in exhibitions in Paris, London, New York and Miami. www.bartschi.ch
In each Passages issue, Gallery presents a work by a Swiss artist.
G ALLE R Y 45
Passages, the magazine of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, reports on Swiss art and culture and on cultural exchanges between Switzerland and the rest of the world. Passages appears two times a year in 60 countries – in German, French and English.
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Here and There: Art, Society and Migration No. 60
Here and There Art, Society and Migration Surrealism, Poetry and Acrobatics: Daniele Finzi Pasca in Montreal Venice Biennale: Valentin Carron at the Swiss Pavilion Warsaw: Surveillance and the Stage
THE C ULTUR AL M AG AZI NE OF P R O HE LV E TI A, NO. 6 0 , I SSUE 1 /2 0 1 3
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Dream Job: Artist No. 59
Rome, Milan, Venice/Italy www.istitutosvizzero.it Dream Job: Artist The Obstacle Course to Success
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Making Music for Clean Water: Spezialmaterial Tours Colombia Seeing Sound: Pe Lang’s Kinetic Art in San Francisco Kleinkunst: Strong Swiss Support for the “Small” Arts T H E C U LT U R A L M A G A Z I N E O F P R O H E LV E T I A , N O . 5 9 , I S S U E 2 / 2 0 1 2
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The Taste of Freedom No. 58
The Taste of Freedom Art and the Egyptian Revolution Expedition Dreamland: A Collective Sleepover at an Art Gallery The Swiss Institute New York: At Home in the Big Apple Andreas Züst’s Cabinet of Wonders T H E C U LT U R A L M A G A Z I N E O F P R O H E LV E T I A , N O . 5 8 , I S S U E 1 / 2 0 1 2
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Performance: Body, Time and Space No. 57
Performance Body, Time and Space Dan Bau Meets Schwyzerörgeli: A Swiss-Vietnamese Premiere in Giswil Instant Composition: Schaerer and Oester On Tour in Grahamstown Genius or Craft: Can Creative Writing Be Taught? T H E C U LT U R A L M A G A Z I N E O F P R O H E LV E T I A , N O . 5 7 , I S S U E 3 / 2 0 1 1
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Devouring a pizza with greasy Âfingers while using a high-tech laptop, riding a bike in traffic while text messaging on a smartphone: not only do they not go together, they are Âmutually exclusive. Of Pizzas and Laptops Volker Albus, p. 6
A comprehensive design approach is not a waste of time or money, but holds the key to success in today’s globalized and increasingly fragmented market. Design in Global Competition Dominic Sturm,p. 12
One of the most important qualities for a designer is the ability to question everything and to think differently. The Precarious Creative Process Claudia Mareis, Interview by Meret Ernst, p. 8
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