EXD’13: No Borders

The eighth design biennial directed by Guta Moura Guedes explores the fact that design embraces all forms of creativity and culture, seeking ways to demolish the clichés and barriers of an all too complicated and inefficient world.

Experimentadesign starts greeting its visitors in the (recently redesigned) Terminal 1 of Lisbon airport with its satellite project “From here to somewhere” featuring a number of essential items for travellers.

Design has, in actual fact, invaded the entire city. Guta Moura Guedes presents the latest edition of this design biennial, a project that has always had the ambitious aim of using design to boost the country’s economy – and it succeeds, considering the many activities that branch out across the world from this creative nerve centre. This year’s theme could not be more fitting for a nation that looks onto the ocean and in times past conquered distant lands thanks to commanders who sailed into the unknown. “No Borders” is the title of the 8^th Experimentadesign (in several venues until 22 December), one that, today more than ever, looks to design as an innovative way of exploring the present and building a better future.

Experimenta 13 — Top: view of the exhibition “Unmapping the world” (fino al 22 dicembre 2013), Palacio dos Condes de Calheta. Photo © experimentadesign, by Maria Leonardo/Restart. Above: view of the exhibition “From here to somewhere”, Aeroporto de Lisboa (01.10.2013 — 22.12.2013). Photo © experimentadesign, by Maria Leonardo/Restart

“The theme explores the fact that design embraces all forms of creativity and culture, seeking ways to demolish the clichés and barriers of an all too complicated and inefficient world. ‘No Borders’ is synonymous with endless potential – for networking, partnerships, protagonists and power. Lisbon’s Experimentadesign 2013 starts an investigation that the event will then take to São Paulo, Brazil, in 2014,” explains its director Moura Guedes.

An invitation to the “Open Talks” in the wonderful Torre Oca of the Museu da Marinha drew representatives of the world’s most prestigious museums: the curator of the V&A, Kieran Long, the director of Z33, Jan Boelen, the director of the Vitra Design Museum, Mateo Kries, and Design Museum Holon director, Galit Gaon. Inside the cream-stuccowork wings of the cloister of the Jerónimos monastery – and produced in partnership with cork giant Amorim – is the “Metamorphosis” exhibition, a selection of the company’s latest commissions in this versatile natural material shaped by the hands of ten big names, including Jasper Morrison, who designed a pair of cork shoes in collaboration with Camper, Japan’s Naoto Fukasawa and architects Jacques Herzog and Álvaro Siza.

The Palácio dos Condes da Calheta overlooks the lush Jardim Botânico Tropical and is where the two curators Annelys de Vet and Nuno Coelho present “Unmapping the World”, in collaboration with the Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, an unusual journey through maps, real (e.g. of Iraq, Iran and Syria in the War Room) and imaginary (e.g. a huge carpet on which visitors are invited to walk and that reproduces all the IKEA buildings around the world seen from a satellite and even a project for an unlikely Expo in Mobuto’s palace in the Congo).

The Convento da Trindade in the Chiado district is the venue for “Identity”, a roundup of the most significant international profit and non-profit design bodies (and also graphic design = the Moscow Global Graphic Design Festival).

On the first floor of the Mude Museum (Museum of Design and Fashion), in the heart of the city and a stone’s throw from Praca do Commercio, director Bárbara Coutinho presents a history of contemporary design in a nutshell, exhibiting the museum’s permanent collection; on the second floor, Fabrica presents Objet Préféré; and, another floor up is a fashion exhibition centred on the fashion designer Felipe Oliveira Baptista and his geometric prêt-à-porter creations framed in a simple but effective exhibition design made of mirrors and oblique walls. The same museum – a former bank – also features a space given over to the Architecture Triennale recently curated by Beatrice Galilee; and design even ventures into the basement vault, where old safe-deposit boxes serve as pedestals-trays displaying a number of ceramic bowls.

Beneath the artificial sky of the Planetário Calouste Gulbenkian, “Neoasterism”, curated by Space Caviar (i.e. Joseph Grima and Tamar Shafrir), retraces the ancestral, engrossing and mysterious relationship between humans and the stars, revisited with input from contemporary astronomy, and invites visitors to create their own constellation with a “white cardboard ball” that they construct themselves by visiting the exhibition or wikistars.org on the Internet.

View of the exhibition “From here to somewhere”, Aeroporto de Lisboa (01.10.2013 — 22.12.2013). Photo © experimentadesign, by Maria Leonardo/Restart

In the heart of Belem, the Museu da Eletricidade is one of the most captivating spaces overlooking the sea. As it awaits the execution of Amanda Levete’s project, its huge machinery and control rooms are the backdrop for “Perfect Future”, a fictitious representation of a future city, with forests and clothes dipped in tanks of white paraffin that seems to vanish like a cloud in the accompanying video, and a supercomputer to be visited with a torch.

To end, we must also mention the Coach Museum by Brazilian architect Fernando Mendes da Rocha but not yet open to the public. A sequence of transparent planes plays on the concept of indoor/outdoor and brings a new institution to a city with numerous museums that are made to function successfully.

Until 22 December 2013
Experimentadesign 13: No Borders
vaious locations, Lisbon

EXD’13: No Borders

The eighth design biennial directed by Guta Moura Guedes explores the fact that design embraces all forms of creativity and culture, seeking ways to demolish the clichés and barriers of an all too complicated and inefficient world.

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