Broken Nature. Tackling Reality
Under the title “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival,” the 22nd edition of the Triennale di Milano revolves around the notion of “restorative design”: design, says curator Paola Antonelli, is a tool
“to actively engage with nature” and reconsider the relationship between humans and the environment. Interviewed by Julian Rose, Antonelli unveils intentions and inspirations behind this vast exhibition, featuring a hundred projects from the last three decades, from design to art and architecture.
JULIAN ROSE: To start at the beginning: how did you get involved in this edition of the Triennale, and how did the theme of “Broken Nature” evolve?
PAOLA ANTONELLI: I tend to organize design exhibitions that deal with something that’s happening now, something urgent – new types of materials, for example, or new interactions between design and science. And so I’ve been mulling over the environmental crisis and the politics of nature for a long time, as many people have. But I was also waiting for the right occasion, because I’ve been concerned about the necessarily dark, even moralistic, character of the whole topic. When I was approached by the then-director of the Triennale, Andrea Cancellato, about a year and a half ago, I said I was willing to get involved if we could actually do what the Triennale used to do, namely tackle reality. The strength of the Triennale is that in the immediate postwar period, for instance, it was very topical. In 1947, it was all about housing, which of course was one of the most urgent problems of the postwar era. Architect Piero Bottoni was the curator of the 8th Triennale and he jumpstarted a new experimental neighborhood, QT8 (Quartiere Triennale 8).
There is a long tradition of the Triennale making powerful statements about how design can engage with real-world problems – the 1968 iteration incorporated protests into the exhibition itself! Was part of your goal to come to grips with this history?
The Triennale is almost 100 years old, and it was not like that in the beginning. It began in 1923 in Monza and at first it was an exhibit of decorative and applied arts. Since 1933, it has been part of the Bureau International des Expositions, so the international participations have to be submitted through official channels. I was however absolutely inspired by the spirit of those postwar exhibitions.
Getting back to the present, you have organized this Triennale around a few key concepts. One of them is “restorative design,” which interests me because it seems like you are drawing a deliberate, if implicit, contrast to ubiquitous phrases like “green design” or “sustainability.”
Exactly. “Sustainable” is still synonymous with a kind of aesthetic constipation, and I wanted to get beyond that. For too long now sustainability, for whatever reason, has been a kind of punitive or negative concept in architecture and design. It’s been not only about using less, about not using “bad” materials, but also about “looking” and “liking” less. It has been expressing atonement. Whereas “restorative” seems interesting to me because it has a connotation of agency or activity, even pleasure and sensuality. It implies that design can find a way to actively engage with nature in a positive fashion. But I’m still testing the waters, trying out these new terms in real time, to see if I can steer people towards a different way of thinking about these issues.
So this is less about a rejection of sustainability than a kind of evolution of our thinking about the concept.
Certainly. For this project I looked back at the Hannover Principles about sustainable design that Michael Braungart and William McDonough formulated in 1992, and I saw that they are still very much alive and still very relevant. But what is missing is the pleasure of design; I think it is important to get to the point of thinking that living ethically, with a sense of responsibility and awareness, is not the opposite of being elegant, sensual, communicative. I actually adopted the term “restorative” in part because of its historical associations. The “restaurant” began in France in the 18th century, as a place to eat what was considered healthy, “restoring” food, namely bouillon. So it was a place to mix socializing, pleasure, and health.
I’m intrigued by your strategy of using the exhibition planning as a way of testing out new terms. What are some of the others you’re experimenting with?
Another crucial term I have tested is “reparations,” which I was afraid would trigger a backlash, but interestingly it has not. Reparation is a very clear concept. You lose a war, you pay up. You’re a colonial power, you have subjugated people for centuries, and now you pay the price. The problem is that the discussion surrounding this term is really heated here in the United States, because it is so much about the legacy of slavery. It gets very complicated and I was not sure I could “appropriate” the word.
It’s certainly a fraught term. But I can see the value of using it in combination with a word like “restorative,” because you’re trying to reflect the severity of the crisis we’re facing. Terms like “green” or “eco-friendly” design can give the impression that all we need to do is to add some solar panels and green roofs to our buildings and everything will be fine. You’re trying to get across the idea that serious, likely permanent, damage has already been done. And in that sense, “reparation” dovetails quite well with “restorative.”
And it’s important to remember that design has played a role in getting us into this situation, so design is going to have to help us get out. I do believe that design can have the power to change behavior, and that is part of what I want this exhibition to communicate.
You mentioned design actively engaging with nature, and that idea is certainly suggested by your theme of “Broken Nature”, along with terms like “restorative” and “reparation.” But that implies an important question: what should be the focus of design today? Humans or nature? Discussions have already begun in many fields about the Post-Anthropocene, which means we are starting to think about a future in which humans are no longer part of the ecology of this planet, and therefore should not necessarily be the focus of our worldview. At the same time, it is hard not to see design as having a human focus, insofar as design is always about some sort of process of mediation or negotiation between humans and their environment. To me, this focus on the human is not necessarily a bad thing; but does this link to the human make design itself seem old-fashioned, even unnecessary, in relation to some of these new cultural and intellectual trends?
I don’t think you can divorce design from the idea of a human user, or a human designer. It is not however only about seeking multispecies justice (which is an imperative, mind you), but also about recasting our priorities and owning our power as citizens and individuals. I think many critiques of human-centered design are misguided, because today human-centered design is synonymous with corporate-centered design.
That’s a fascinating point. Do you mean that a lot of the design that is supposed to be about us – about improving our lives in some way – is actually just about consumption?
Yes, and since we’re talking about terminology here, I should say that I do not use the word “consumption,” or the verb “consume.” I get particularly creeped out when people talk about “consuming culture.” Again, I think this kind of reasoning is important because changing language is a way to change minds. Words can be self-fulfilling prophecies. And this is particularly important at the Triennale because it is really intended for a general audience, for citizens. We’re lucky that in Milan people are not afraid of the word “design,” so design professionals will come, of course, but so will the public. We want visitors to leave the Triennale with an idea of what they can do in their life to address some of the issues we’re raising.
Now that we’re speaking about audience, I would love to hear, in more concrete terms, about your curatorial approach. How do you open people’s minds, and get them to think about concrete steps they could take toward a different way of living?
The exhibition has three main goals. First, again, it is for the general public, so in some parts of the show we are purposefully presenting very mundane objects. Other parts address loftier topics, but this blend of high and low contributes to the overall meaning. Second, we want to convey a sense of the long term. When you talk about extinction – that may happen in 500 years, or maybe 1000 years, or maybe longer, but we are already a part of it, and we want people to start thinking from this different temporal perspective. The third objective is to give people a sense of the complexity of the systems involved, whether we’re talking about ecological systems or human infrastructures and constructs.
How are these goals manifested in the objects you’ve chosen to exhibit?
Let’s take the matter of scale. The exhibition starts with images of change supplied by NASA. Large projections, showing before and after (climate transformations, disasters, human interventions) for different places on Earth. A large mural by Accurat dramatically gathers other “data points” to illustrate similar concepts. Then you enter a room that is about the geology of the future and of the past. This is about the big picture, with fossils of the future and scents revived from extinct flowers. Then – and I will give you just the broad strokes – further inside the exhibition you narrow the focus to everyday objects, more mundane things, like a biodegradable pregnancy test, or fabrics that serve for sun protection – because all the sun protection lotions we use end up creating a film on the sea. Then you step up in scale again, to Systems. There’s Formafantasma’s commission, a project with and about electronic waste. It looks like beautiful furniture, but then when you understand where the materials come from, you also understand that they are building a narrative about consumption and circularity. At the same scale, there is also the work of Forensic Oceanography, which is about borders, and once again about the way systems work and the way people move around the planet.
That sounds like a fascinating combination, and I notice that most of the examples you mention are engaged directly with some sort of real-world problem on a practical level.
The exhibition intentionally doesn’t include much speculative design, but there is some art. Kelly Jazvac, for instance, a Canadian artist who works on plastiglomerates. Or Mandy Barker, whose work reflects on geological findings, and Laura Aguilar, a photographer whose work describes a deep empathy with nature.
You say you’re staying away from speculative design, but most of these artistic projects are operating in a kind of speculative realm. Are you making a conscious distinction between art and design, and suggesting that artists should pursue more conceptual or philosophical projects while designers should remain more practically oriented?
No, that distinction does not apply. We did include a few pieces by designers that would be in the more speculative or conceptual category. For instance, we are displaying Foragers by Dunne & Raby – which uses design to imagine new kinds of biology and modifications to the human organism – because it’s a work that is very important to me. But I’m honestly not sure what the difference is between art and design anymore. I know I don’t want to display science fiction, not here. I know that I want plausibility, something that could be felt as real somehow. I talked about this with Oli Stratford, editor-in-chief of Disegno, and he brought up the idea of magical pragmatism. Actually he said magical realism, but then we switched to magical pragmatism.
That’s a good term, I think, because it has the potential to bring together art and design. My last question is about your subtitle: “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival.” When we first met, you were working on a show about risk, which had a very similar subtitle: “SAFE: Design Takes on Risk,” which you organized at MoMA in 2005. Now, almost 15 years later, you have design taking on human survival. This is a dramatic shift – from risk to the survival of the species itself – and I’m curious to know what it means to you. Is it simply a matter of magnitude, that the problems we’re facing today are that much more terrifying and acute, or has the nature of the problems themselves changed?
Well, at the time of the “SAFE” show our approach was all about human beings. If you think about it, there was still very little, too little focus on the environment, or on other species. It was 2005, and the preparations had started a few years before, so 9/11 was not that far in the past. We wanted so badly to feel safe at that time. It was very much a show about human conflict and protection from unknown enemies, that kind of pervasive risk. If I think about it now, even when we were addressing something like housing for refugees, the focus was still on individuals. I loved that show, and it was very topical, but a larger scale was missing.
So the difference between the two titles represents how the conversation in the field of design has shifted?
Yes. This new project for Milan reflects a different maturity. Not only mine, in particular, but of the discourse, of everyone.
Julian Rose is an architect and critic based in New York City.