Formafantasma. Object as Trojan Horse
Formafantasma – the Amsterdam-based design duo composed of
Andrea Trimarchi (b. 1983) and Simone Farresin (b. 1980) – approaches making and materiality through experimental design investigations, often in collaboration with craftsmen, scientists, and theorists. Delving into a wide range of contexts, from the cultural vernacular to networks of migration, their projects manifest as products, prototypes, performances, and exhibitions. In conversation with Tamar Shafrir, the duo discusses Ore Streams, an ongoing research project about electronic waste originally commissioned for the
NGV Triennial 2017 in Melbourne.
TAMAR SHAFRIR: You began your research for Ore Streams almost three years ago. What are your reflections on the first stage of the project, presented one year ago at the NGV Triennial?
FORMAFANTASMA: As a topic, Ore Streams was the largest project we have taken on as a studio: the geography, materials, populations, and networks involved in consumer electronics are truly global. It is also the first project where we feel that the research really exceeds the scope of a single object, a product, a film, an installation, of any standard format from the design world. The NGV Triennial had more than one million visitors, but for the ones who could not spend a significant amount of time watching the interviews and absorbing the information – and for anyone who could not come to Melbourne – the objects tended to become the face of the project. But the objects were just our first attempt to summarize and communicate the complex situation and unknown future we have been studying. The research is really the critical part, and we are looking for ways to make it more readable, to give impetus to the strategies we have observed and collected, as well as developed ourselves.
How will this evolution of Ore Streams fit into the working methods of the design studio and the tools and platforms you can access?
Our next project will be part of “Broken Nature,” curated by Paola Antonelli for the XXII Triennale di Milano in 2019. We decided to focus on one of the later “chapters” in Ore Streams – the collection and processing of electronic waste. In our research, we found out that no more than 30% of the materials in our electronic devices are recycled, but there is no good investigation as to why that is the case. We want to learn more about what happens to the other 70%, but we also want to explore what can be done about it. Design obviously plays a central role, but legislation is actually the strongest driver of change. If we focus simply on why people throw these devices away, we see that planned obsolescence is an enormous problem created by corporations to earn more profit. But governments can force them to change. Last October, Italy fined Apple and Samsung 15 million euros because their software updates were found to slow down older phones, and a similar case is being tried in France, where the crime of planned obsolescence can even be punished by up to four years in jail. Considering the fact that Apple released the first iPhone just 11 years ago and has launched 14 more versions since then, it is clear that corporations have a conflict of interest between their responsibility to the global environment and economy and their responsibility to their shareholders. The difficulty of Ore Streams is that it too runs the risk of becoming “obsolete.” New laws are being passed all over the world. For example, China has banned the importing of plastic and electronic waste since 2018. But design is also a field that, in certain conditions, is able to act quickly and with great impact. That is why we want to raise this issue for a design audience in “Broken Nature.”
Many of your previous projects have looked at design as a culturally situated practice, shaped by the availability of materials or energy sources or knowledge in a particular place. Craft, in particular, evolved historically between different social pressures and communities, as a holistic negotiation of material, aesthetics, function, and cost – it balanced all of those demands. How does your research into Ore Streams fit into this, especially in shifting the forces of human selfregulation from manufacturers to governments?
In a way, it fits very logically as an outcome of our previous work. We have always explored the forces that shape the design discipline and production more broadly, and how production interacts with other components of the society or economy in turn. Our interest in materials and artifacts comes from an intuitive curiosity about where things come from. But we have also approached design as a collective practice of transforming raw materials into commodities in different geographic and cultural contexts – not as a miraculous act of invention by a few creative visionaries. The issues identified in Ore Streams cannot be resolved by a genius designer with a radical proposition detached from the history of consumption, technology, material logistics, and empire. We see legislation as a way that societies can apply their collective power as a political force to change the underlying conditions of design and regulate production. It’s not that designers don’t have an important role in the process. We have a lot of freedom to speculate as a way of stimulating discourse. For example, in Botanica (2011) we wondered what plastic could be as a material if it hadn’t developed during the petroleum era and had revived experimental recipes for organic resins that had been lost to history. But we feel that our role as designers in the context of Ore Streams is growing towards a more strategic position, to take action and engage on a deeper level. As designers, sometimes we make statements, sometimes we make products, sometimes we educate.
That raises an interesting question: as a studio that works intensively in the cultural sphere, how do you see the role of the museum within the network of your project? Do you see the potential for the museum space to become more than just a place to exhibit objects or films, and to be more instrumental in its relation to government, science, commerce, and mass culture?
Absolutely! It is already happening more and more. Just look at recent exhibitions like “Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective” by Jonas Staal at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, or “The Future Starts Here” at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Sometimes it is easier for temporary institutions like biennials to work in that way, like the European Capital of Culture 2019 program in Matera, but they have to devote most of their budget to the overall production of the event, and sometimes the projects have less long-term impact and visibility than museum commissions. The commission is one of the museum’s most significant tools as an evolution of the social and educational role of institutions. Today, museums often talk about their public role almost exclusively in terms of audience and accessibility, but they also have a role to support projects that otherwise could not survive – especially when we are entrusting an increasing proportion of “public” space, whether physical, social, or virtual, to private developers and companies. That is our goal for the next stage of the project in 2020, when we will work with the Serpentine Gallery in London – we want
to use the opportunity to produce work and critical research, without a predefined format for the outcome, rather than simply curating a design exhibition.
In your practice, I think the designed object is often a kind of Trojan horse for your deeper investigations. You use the studio’s Instagram in a very unique way, blending research images with objects but also art exhibitions – many designers would never show an object they did not make on their Instagram profile, but your posts challenge the notion that design should be so available for direct and immediate consumption.
For us, the research and the objects are basically two distinct bodies of work, which explore different ideas and have different pressures on their development. And in our experience, audiences find it difficult to read the object on multiple levels. They apply a binary reading: it is either a representation or a solution – the first detached and aloof, the second a direct and applied intervention. That may have to do with a subconscious connection to the history of furniture design and its complex relationship with industry and standardization. That perspective, however, is not well-suited for Ore Streams: the research relates to taking action, but the objects are not a representation or a solution. They simply explore themes raised in the project – territories, labor, recycled material, and the echoes of obsolete technology – in a materialized way.
Do you think in a context like the Triennale di Milano, which has a history of radical experimentation but in past years has supported a more traditional reading of design, based on the Italian “masters,” it is possible to use objects to make bold political statements? At the same time, is there a risk of appropriating the aesthetics but not the meaning of radical politics? I’m thinking in particular of Giancarlo De Carlo’s “Il Grande Numero” at the 1968 Triennale, which tried to appeal to the contemporary protest movements but ended up being occupied and shut down.
It would be impossible to repeat that moment today, considering how much the economy and politics and culture have changed. When we were working on Ore Streams, we had a lot of discussions about the images we collected in our research, many depicting the abject working conditions of miners or waste handlers in developing countries. We did not want to fetishize the “beauty” of the disaster or repeat a clichéd mode of representation, where the audience feels a passive kind of pity with no sense of responsibility or possibility to act. We took a very different approach, focusing more on the network of interrelated actors in the entire global chain to connect to audiences more subtly. Nevertheless, it would be interesting if the Triennale could be as controversial now as it was in 1968. The Salone del Mobile has become overwhelmingly oriented towards furniture design – not without reason, since it’s still a place where things are made – but with “Broken Nature” Paola has the opportunity to introduce the more open vision of design that she established at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the past decade, the Triennale exhibitions were all commissioned or sponsored by companies, who could rarely give designers the freedom to really question the system. But we would love to see companies supporting more independent thinking, as they did in the past.
Today it seems so avant-garde when designers stop making, producing films or texts or performances rather than objects. But the Italian designers in the 1960s did exactly the same thing, critiquing everything from the commercialization of industry to the semantics of things.
We have been asked so many times, “When are you going to make something for the industry?” – as if manufacturing products were the ultimate goal for design. In the design community, we are much more conservative than our heritage would allow us to be.
Perhaps what is different now is that the future seems so much less certain and definitely less optimistic, and the speed of change is so much faster. How do you plan for an exhibition in 2020 at the Serpentine Gallery when so many things we took for granted from the 20th century are in flux?
We cannot say what it will be or how it will manifest, but we are developing the project towards a reflection on and action within the field of design production and the environment: design is one ecology within a larger ecosystem that we experience most clearly through climate. In Ore Streams, we had a more pragmatic approach to improve specific problems. Our attitude was still quite modernist, but it was not truly systemic. We can get better at recycling electronic waste, but the fundamental problems are much bigger. At the Serpentine, we hope to tackle those questions in collaboration with other disciplines.
Do you see that as an opportunity to challenge the authorship and ownership models in design, as in creative practice and technology, by working together on shared goals – more like scientists?
That is a question we are still struggling with, and it is very dependent on the tone of voice that is used to construct a project or product or exhibition or any format it takes. As designers we yearn to achieve real change, but we do not have the power to act alone. We are actually very preoccupied with the limitations rather than the possibilities of design: there is an excess of faith in what it can achieve independently. We hope the Serpentine exhibition becomes a focal point where different practitioners can meet and maybe even work together in a gallery setting.
Is there any danger of trying to solve through design a problem that has also been caused by design?
At this moment, we might need some naive idealism to work through the current complexity. Paola made an important point in relation to “Broken Nature”: we may have destroyed everything, there may be nothing left to do about it, but let’s at least try to conclude things with grace. If the human species has a future on this planet, let’s work towards a legacy as the generation that confronted our ecological consequences with dignity. In that sense, for our studio, projects like Ore Streams are the ultimate form of industrial design as an influence on everyday life.
Tamar Shafrir is a design writer and researcher based in Amsterdam.