Multidisciplinary artist Dionysios presents Precarious Design, a series of objects and installations that explore fragility, impermanence, and improvisation. The works span design, sculpture, and installation, appearing suspended between utility and artifact, carrying the traces of time, use, and human care. designboom discusses with Dionysios how found and salvaged materials carry memory, how fragility becomes a source of resilience, and how his series transforms instability into functional, ritual-infused objects. The artist shares insights on shaping experience, embracing impermanence, and creating works where scarcity and care become central to design. ‘Precariousness is not weakness; it’s a form of truth. It forces you to stay alert, to remain awake to the present moment,’ Dionysios notes during our interview.

Rooted in his background in clinical psychology, the Greek artist approaches each project as a choreography of experience. ‘I often think less like a “maker” and more like a choreographer of experience: how someone interacts with the work, what they feel without realizing why, and how they might leave changed.’ Dionysios is drawn to the histories embedded in materials. ‘They carry memory. A found object has already lived a life before it enters my work. Scratches, dents, traces of touch, passage of time. When I use it, I’m not starting from zero; I’m in conversation with that past,’ he tells designboom. 

Meditation on Time | image by Raf Souliotis, courtesy of Onassis Foundation

precarious design explores human interaction

The Precarious Design series was presented in two contexts during the Art Athina 2025 fair. At Taxidi Tinos’ booth in the Design section, Cave Drawings inscribes sun and moon motifs in gold and silver leaf on rusted steel, their lacquered backs recalling couture linings while their corroded surfaces evoke humanity’s earliest marks. Across town at the art and design platform Spazio Altro, the exhibition PLAYDATE gathered objects including the Koutsombola (gossip bench), Balance Chair, Surrealist Side Table, and Totem. These pieces combine marble fragments, ancient timbers, and repurposed plastics into provisional yet fully functional forms, while gold leaf applied to century-old cypress logs and olive roots imbues salvaged matter with symbolic weight.

For Dionysios, the conceptual approach of Precarious Design stems from his broader practice. ‘We live in a world that sells us permanence and perfection, but in reality everything is temporary, everything shifts. Relationships, cities, even nature feel unstable. Through Precarious Design, and my practice overall, I don’t try to disguise that, I highlight it,’ he reflects. The series builds on the artist’s ongoing exploration of impermanence, which he has pursued in other works such as Meditation on Time (2022), presented at Onassis Stegi’s Plásmata 3 in Athens, and the durational performance Meditation on Light (2023) at the Great Pyramids of Giza. Read on for our full conversation with the Athens- and Paris-based artist.

Meditation on Time (2022) was presented at Onassis Stegi’s Plásmata 3 in Athens

designboom interviews dionysios

designboom (DB): You started out in clinical psychology. How does that background influence the way you create?

Dionysios (D): Psychology gave me a way to think in terms of relationships and dynamics. Whether I’m making a sculpture, a design object, a digital piece, or a large-scale installation, I’m not just arranging forms, I’m shaping behavior, atmosphere, even silence. It trained me to see the conscious and unconscious simultaneously, to notice what’s expressed and what’s left unspoken. I often think less like a ‘maker’ and more like a choreographer of experience: how someone interacts with the work, what they feel without realizing why, and how they might leave changed. I don’t use psychology as a method anymore, but it remains the quiet foundation of how I see people, spaces, and the interactions between them.

a crystallized truck as meditation on time, divinity, and reflection | image via @bydionysios

DB: When did you realize you wanted to work across sculpture, installation, and digital media rather than just one medium?

D: I don’t think there was a single moment. For me, it was never about choosing a discipline. It was about choosing the right language for each idea. Sometimes an idea needs the weight of a physical object, other times it needs to stretch into space and become an environment, and other times it belongs in the digital layer that now shadows our lives. What excites me is the movement between these forms, how they overlap, contradict, or amplify each other. I guess I realized quite early that confining myself to one medium would feel like cutting the wings off the work before it even began.

a relic from the future | image via @bydionysios

DB: Many of your pieces use discarded or salvaged objects. What draws you to these materials?

D: They carry memory. A found object has already lived a life before it enters my work. Scratches, dents, traces of touch, passage of time. When I use them, I’m not starting from zero; I’m in conversation with that past. There’s also something democratic about it: these objects are ordinary, recognizable, and almost invisible in their daily use, but when you shift their context, they reveal new meanings. And personally, I like the tension between fragility and endurance, an old car part, a worn surface, an ancient piece of wood, or a marble scrap. They are both vulnerable and resilient. I am also a huge advocate for sustainability, not as a political stance, but as a way of being. There is an abundance of materials to work with and transform.

Sunset Chair | image courtesy of the artist

DB: Can you explain Precarious Design in your own words?

D: Precarious Design is the more functional, sculptural side of my practice. For me, it’s about embracing instability rather than hiding it. We live in a world that sells us permanence and perfection, but in reality everything is temporary, everything shifts. Relationships, cities, even nature feel unstable.

Through Precarious Design, and my practice overall, I don’t try to disguise that, I highlight it. A work might look monumental, but if you look closer you see its sensitivity, its ability to change or even collapse. Expanding this into functional design pieces is my way of stretching the idea into the tangible, the everyday, creating objects to live with. Precariousness is not weakness; it’s a form of truth. It forces you to stay alert, to remain awake to the present moment.

Balance Chair 2 | image courtesy of Spazio Altro

DB: Your work often explores fragility and impermanence. Why are these ideas important to you?

D: Because they are unavoidable. Everything I’ve learned, through psychology, through life, through making, points back to impermanence. Objects decay, bodies age, structures fall apart. But within that transience, you also find a strange kind of eternity. Life itself is fragile and impermanent. I think it would be almost arrogant to create something that pretends to last forever. I’d rather make something that speaks to the present, to this exact encounter with the viewer. If it lasts, that’s beyond me. But the ephemerality, that’s where the intensity comes from. It’s a paradox I keep returning to: the eternal inside the temporary.

Dionysios approaches each project as a choreography of experience | image courtesy of the artist

DB: Meditation on Light at the Pyramids sounds incredible! What was it like to show your work there?

D: It was surreal, intense, overwhelming, probably the most transformative experience I’ve had to date. I went with the intention to present a perfect gold carpet at the feet of the pyramids, only for the desert to bury it, to destroy it. That’s when I truly understood my work and myself: learning to surrender to external forces and let the piece become what it is meant to be. It turned into a long-durational, performative installation rather than a monumental static object. People from the desert, camel riders, exhibition visitors, and guides all came each day to help add gold leaf, knowing it would be erased at night and start again the next day. It taught me humility and the power of collective effort. What moved me most was the fleeting nature of the work coexisting, even briefly, with something that has stood for thousands of years. That tension between the ephemeral and the eternal is exactly where my practice lives.

Meditation on Light at Great Pyramids of Giza – Art d’Egypte 2023 | image courtesy of the artist

DB: Looking ahead, what directions or experiments excite you most in your work?

D: I want to keep pushing the boundaries of where art can live. That means larger public works in iconic locations. But also unexpected collaborations with technology, theater, maybe even cinema or fashion. I’m interested in how an installation can shift when it meets the dramaturgy of a stage or the rigor of a science lab, and how an object might function in a ritual outside of the white cube. At the same time, I’m continuing to explore the overlap between the physical and the digital, not in a loud, ‘tech-first’ way, but in subtle infusions where nature, light, and code intertwine. Ultimately, what excites me is keeping the work alive, unstable, open to mutation. I don’t want a fixed formula. I want to surprise myself, and by extension, the audience.

Koutsombola chair | image courtesy of Spazio Altro

Dionysios portrait | image by Dio color

project info:

name: Precarious Design

artist: Dionysios | @bydionysios

The post dionysios on precarious design: turning found objects into sites of care and functional ritual appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada, Alex Da Corte pays homage to Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum (1965-1977) through a multitude of pop culture and art objects encased in a singular, panoramic glass pane. On view from September 18th, 2025, the exhibition and installation sit on the eighth floor of the Torre building within Fondazione Prada’s lot as part of Atlas, the foundation’s exhibition project presenting solo or comparative works by artists across the eight floors of the building. For the first time, visitors experience these two installations at once in the same space because the two mini museums – one by Claes Oldenburg and the other by Alex Da Corte – stand next to each other. When viewed from above, the structure housing the Swedish-born American sculptor’s collection is shaped like a cartoon mouse head and an early movie camera, drawn from his drawing named Geometric House.

In Alex Da Corte’s case, there’s a macabre twist: his structure looks like a cut-off left ear of the mouse, a reference to the episode of Vincent van Gogh’s life. Inside both of the mini museums, a collection of objects appeals to the visitors, reflecting on mass production and consumer culture as well as the ever-changing trends in pop culture. In an interview with designboom during the preview of Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada, Alex Da Corte tells us that he arranged the collection as a sort of self-portrait. When asked if they reflect his life, a peek into his daily practice, he shares with us: ‘I’m not interested in revealing a specific event or part of myself. I think viewers see what they see and find their own lives in the objects, whether or not they know the work’s source. We project meaning onto objects because they ground us and make a safe space.’

all images courtesy of Fondazione Prada | exhibition photos by Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio

Personal objects in varying color intensity for the exhibition

Alex Da Corte’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada mirrors the curation and artistic practice of Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum (1965-1977). The similarities occur in amassing and presenting mass-produced and pop-culture objects, but the saturation and shade of the objects seem shifted. It may be due to the aging of the objects, but in Claes Oldenburg’s space, the repertoire is hushed, earthy, wooden, domestic. In Alex Da Corte’s room, the colors are louder, the objects are familiar and recent, and the arrangement has a comic tinge. In terms of color, the Venezuelan-American artist explains to designboom that it is important in his practice.

‘Color for me is essential. Color relates to a psychological state. Colors chosen for products are meant to attract or repel. Depending on taste, you might dislike something just because of its color,’ he says. ‘When arranging things here, it’s often about color; painting in space with objects. Claes also had a perfect sense for color. His objects are rich, maybe a different tonality, but similarly colorful.’ Away from the shade, the technique in presenting the Mouse Museum collection inside Fondazione Prada links the artistic practice between the two artists. The order is not alphabetical, by material, or based on production year, yet in both museums, the items relate through a loosely associative sequence, relying mostly on visual similarities and suggestive connections.

exhibition view of Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) by Alex Da Corte

Alex Da Corte mirrors Claes Oldenburg’s collecting practice

Playful personal objects show up in Alex Da Corte’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada. Among them is a Harry Potter magic wand, a Bart Simpson thermos, kitchen utensils, a plastic beer pong cup, and a foam cast of Marcel Duchamp’s face. There’s also the ceramic-glazed Garfield statue, a yellow rooster with a tail made of quill feathers, wearable feet gloves that resemble real skin, beer bottles, brooms, a miniature disco ball, a blasted pumpkin, and perhaps the showstopper, a zombie-looking head atop a lamp base. These peculiar objects mirror the ones inside Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum: a rotting slice of pie, a balloon shaped like a human leg, an enlarged cluster of bananas, a giant ceramic ear, and even a miniaturized ladder.

‘Looking at Claes’s works today, I don’t know the objects, but I’m amused or reminded of something. I imagine where they came from and their function,’ Alex Da Corte shares with designboom. ‘My interest comes from thrift stores, where you find a fragment of an object and wonder about its function. Without its original purpose, it can have a new life. Seeing a second or third life for objects is exciting.’ For the artist, it feels like a dream come true seeing the objects collected by Claes Oldenburg for his Mouse Museum for the first time in Fondazione Prada. ‘I only knew them through photographs in the book, and those were in black and white. To experience the colors and textures and to see so many similarities is exciting. My interest is in hands, food, plastic, and even clay. There’s humor in the work, and I see a parallel there,’ he adds.

the exhibition and installation sit on the eighth floor of the Torre building within Fondazione Prada’s lot

The first time Alex Da Corte came across Claes Oldenburg’s works was around 25 years ago. ‘It was in my undergraduate library. I stumbled upon the book he made with his partner to mark the presentation of the Mouse Museum. I knew Claes’s work and his relationships to soft things, sculpture, and performance, but I didn’t know much about contemporary art. When I saw the Mouse Museum, I was taken by all it afforded an audience and how generous it was. Only today am I seeing the real one. For 25 years, I’ve been wondering about this work,’ he says.The artist created his Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) in 2022 for his survey exhibition ‘Mr. Remember,’ which is on view at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark. 

He recalls that when he was thinking about what a retrospective or a survey of his own work would look like and what it means to remember himself and the objects he had gathered over his life. ‘The person who did that so correctly was Claes. I thought, I can’t remake the whole museum; it’s too sacred. So I thought, I’ll cut off an ear: a little piece of me, a little piece of him,’ he shares. Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) is inside the Torre within the lot of Milan’s Fondazione Prada, on the eighth floor. The public viewing begins from September 18th, 2025, where viewers can also visit Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide by De Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a cinematic and photographic exhibition that unveils and showcases previously hidden film materials and imagery by the Mexican filmmaker, which were preserved for 25 years in the film archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. 

among the objects are a Harry Potter magic wand and a foam cast of Marcel Duchamp’s face

the technique in presenting the Mouse Museum collection links the artistic practice between the two artists

everyday objects are also on view in the installation

exhibition view of Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) by Alex Da Corte

exhibition view of Mouse Museum (1965-1977) by Claes Oldenburg

a collection of objects appeals to the visitors, reflecting on mass production and consumer culture

the similarities between the two installations occur in amassing and presenting mass-produced and pop-culture objects

view of the cardboard-made toothpaste

the collection is on view through a singular glass pane

view of the structures on the eighth floor of the Torre building

left: Claes Oldeburg’s Mouse Museum (1965-1977) | right: Alex Da Corte’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022)

the installations are on view from September 18th, 2025

project info:

name: Mouse Museum (1965-1977); Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022)

artists: Claes Oldenburg, Alex Da Corte 

museum: Fondazione Prada (Milan) | @fondazioneprada

location: Largo Isarco, 2, 20139 Milan, Italy

opening date: September 18th, 2025ù

photography: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio | @dsl__studio

The post alex da corte pays homage to claes oldenburg’s mouse museum in milan’s fondazione prada appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Village Numérique forms part of MUTEK, a festival that focuses on electronic music and digital arts with performances across Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles. Running between August 19th and 24th, 2025, the cultural event operates for six consecutive days with programs and shows on audio and visual presentations. Esplanade Tranquille serves as the central hub for outdoor programming, while there are three venues hosting the main indoor one, namely The Society for Arts and Technology building, Place des Arts’ Théâtre Maisonneuve, and the MTELUS functions for presentations. In the same festival, the MUTEK Forum also takes place, which functions as a marketplace and discussion platform for digital creation professionals. Then, the Village Numérique, a public digital art project that takes place in the Quartier des Spectacles, with a circuit of 23 digital art installations. 

It runs beyond the event’s date, from August 14th to 28th, 2025, with digital art installations in several formats. In an interview with designboom, Alain Mongeau – the founder, artistic and general director of MUTEK – and Mikaël Frascadore – the executive producer of Village Numérique – explore the 26th edition’s theme on a new cycle of digital creativity, as well as some of the digital art installations presented at the circuit. ‘MUTEK has always been at the forefront of digital art dissemination, with special installation projects having been presented in the past. For this second edition of Village Numérique, we have expanded our offering with a greater diversity of media, more in-depth content, and more ways for the public to discover digital arts,’ Mikaël Frascadore tells designboom.

FLIP! by Troublemakers | all images courtesy of MUTEK and Village Numérique; photos by Tannaz Shirazi

Digital art installations around mutek’s village numérique

The digital art installations across Village Numérique include large wall projections showing digital images and moving visuals on building façades, interactive works that allow visitors to take part by moving, touching, or responding to sensors, virtual reality stations that use headsets and controllers to create digital environments, and immersive projects that combine sound, light, and moving images to surround the audience. At the festival’s Place de la Paix, The Door of the Refuge sets up an immersive passage that acts as an entry point for visitors, guiding them into a sanctuary-like space. Nearby at the Society for Arts and Technology, Astronomical Water mixes cosmic themes with water-inspired visuals and sound, using projection and movement to create flowing images.

The VS AI Street Fighting at Le Central allows visitors to engage in a simulated fight scenario where artificial intelligence responds to human movement, showing a contest between human players and machine systems. Moving underground to Saint-Laurent Station, ‘Wantastigan – what will remain still’ reflects on time and permanence through digital imagery, balancing static forms with shifting motion. In Le Parterre, a cluster of works appears. In Camera focuses on private perspectives, showing hidden or internal views through audiovisual sequences. I’M NOT A ROBOT examines the line between human and machine identity, asking viewers to engage with prompts about authenticity, while TETRA uses geometric design to project or display modular structures in three dimensions. 

Situational Compliance by Matthew Biederman and Lucas Paris

Technology-driven artworks on new cycle of creativity

The digital art installations at Village Numérique also showcase Situational Compliance, which responds directly to its surroundings, adjusting visuals and sounds based on audience movement. Public Space, Latent Space contrasts the visible city environment with hidden digital layers, connecting shared physical space with coded systems, while For You I Will Be An Island presents a narrative of separation, creating an enclosed environment where the visitor feels isolated within the work. Then, there’s FLIP!, which introduces constant reversals and rotations, using visual shifts to alter orientation and perspective. At Hexagram’s experimentation room, HEXAPHONE delivers six-channel sound, placing the audience inside a controlled audio field. Going to UQAM’s Agora, three works are staged: Éco-sonorités du vivant reproduces soundscapes from natural and biological sources, Storms immerses audiences in visual and sonic turbulence, and OPAL explores refraction, scattering light and color across surfaces. 

In the mezzanine of UQAM, NEST: Colony constructs an organic digital structure that simulates growth and collective form. Back to the Place des Arts, Dialogues invites interaction through conversational exchanges, with inputs creating shifting outputs, while Labyrinthe builds a maze-like path, encouraging physical navigation through digital corridors. Then in UQAM’s Chaufferie, Reflections uses mirrors and projection to create surfaces that invite contemplation and play with repetition of images. Some of these digital art installations at Village Numérique use high-resolution projectors, motion sensors, cameras, pressure plates, LED systems, and real-time rendering software, falling in line with this year’s theme on the new cycle of digital creativity. Our conversation below with Alain Mongeau and Mikaël Frascadore further unpacks the 26th edition of MUTEK festival, the curatorial process for selecting the presenting artists, and the over twenty digital installations in the Quartier des Spectacles.

detailed view of Situational Compliance by Matthew Biederman and Lucas Paris

Interview with Alain Mongeau and Mikaël Frascadore

Designboom (DB): This year marks the 26th edition of MUTEK, with the festival embarking on a ‘new cycle of digital creativity.’ What does this new cycle represent in terms of programming, vision, and MUTEK’s place in the global (electronic) arts scene? What kinds of experiences have you shaped for the attendees?

Alain Mongeau (AM): The idea of a ‘new cycle of digital creativity’ embodies both continuity and renewal. After celebrating our 25th anniversary last year, we felt it was the right moment to open a new chapter, one that recognizes how profoundly digital arts and electronic music have evolved and how MUTEK can continue to serve as a laboratory for what comes next. In terms of programming, this means delving even deeper into the intersections of music, immersive audiovisual works, and emerging technologies – AI, spatial sound, and beyond – while keeping live performance at the very heart of the festival. At the same time, we are broadening the ways in which new works can be presented, exemplified this year by the return of the Digital Village for its second edition. 

In camera by Ying Gao

AM (continues): Our vision is to reaffirm MUTEK as a meeting ground where experimentation, diversity, and critical reflection converge, offering audiences a singular aesthetic experience filled with discovery and wonder. On the global scene, MUTEK has long acted as a bridge: between generations, between local and international creators, and across disciplines. This new cycle reinforces our role as a platform where ambitious projects can find a stage, and where audiences can experience these innovations firsthand. 

This year, we have crafted a wide spectrum of experiences: intimate concerts, large-scale immersive performances, an open-air program in the bucolic setting of Théâtre de Verdure, thought-provoking daytime talks and workshops, and the serendipitous encounters that only a live, collective festival context can spark. Our aim is to inspire curiosity, engage multiple senses, and nurture a sense of community around the exploration of digital creativity.

The Door of the Refuge by Normal Studio

DB: This year’s lineup includes the North American premiere of Max Cooper’s Lattice 3D/AV and performances from Kevin Saunderson’s E-Dancer. What’s your curatorial process for selecting both global names and emerging voices? In what ways does the team’s selection allow the attendees to see, feel, and experience the relationship between the music and digital art?

AM: Our programming approach is rooted above all in the search for balance and dialogue between the different facets of the festival. On one hand, we are committed to inviting renowned figures such as Max Cooper or Kevin Saunderson, whose work in electronic music and digital art is exemplary. Their presence provides a strong anchor for the lineup, giving audiences the opportunity to experience ambitious projects by established artists in a live setting. At the same time, MUTEK has always been dedicated to discovery and to giving space to emerging artists who are pushing boundaries in their own ways. 

Storms by Quayola

AM (continues): We scan projects internationally, but we also place particular emphasis on the local scene, which is especially vibrant this year, for instance, our open call targeting Canadian artists received around 450 submissions. By placing young talents alongside established names, we create a dialogue that highlights both continuity and innovation within this artistic field. At the heart of it all is the focus on the live, sensory relationship between music and digital art.

We are drawn to works that engage audiences beyond sound alone: immersive audiovisual performances, experiments with 360° projections and spatialized sound, or hybrid formats that challenge conventional stage dynamics. The goal is to create an ecosystem of experiences where festival-goers don’t just listen, but also feel, see, and truly inhabit the artistic universe that each creator brings to life.

VS AI Street Fighting by Dimension Plus

DB: Village Numérique was launched in 2024 to celebrate MUTEK’s 25th anniversary. What was the original inspiration behind creating a standalone digital art circuit within the festival, and how has that vision evolved for this second edition?

Mikaël Frascadore (MF): MUTEK has always been at the forefront of digital art dissemination, with special installation projects having been presented in the past. However, we felt that there was a real enthusiasm, but also an opportunity to showcase the enormous talent of local creators in a more formal context. Quebec is the birthplace of many highly innovative projects, artists, and studios. For this second edition, we have expanded our offering with a greater diversity of media, more in-depth content, and more ways for the public to discover digital arts. We want to develop audiences and contribute to the success of the industry.

NEST: Colony by Iregular

DB: This year’s Village Numérique features over twenty digital installations across Quartier des Spectacles. Can you walk us through how these works are presented? What kinds of tools, platforms, or experimental tech are being used by artists in this year’s program, if you can name a few, and how do they encourage interaction with the viewers, including those unfamiliar with digital art?

MF: There are indeed 28 installations spread across 23 venues. This year, several projects have been made possible thanks to university research projects. For instance, AI agents are used to generate content, analyze gestures, and translate them into actions. Audiovisual, networking, and computer integration are now at the heart of the means by which artists express themselves. The projects offer more targeted experiences, where people can interact directly with the content. Even when the works have multiple layers of complexity, newcomers can still find something to enjoy because the means of interaction remain intuitive. Users who want to go deeper can also do so.

For You I Will Be An Island by Chun Hua Catherine Dong

MF (continues): The artists have taken care to make their installations accessible in a variety of ways, despite the denser content or messages. For example, artist Matthew Biederman presents a project that repurposes the game ‘Simon Says’ to explore, with humor and insight, the mechanisms of public surveillance. Using AI and computer vision, the work stages a system that observes, interprets, and directs the actions of the audience, making visible the power dynamics at work in our digital environments. 

Participants are invited to follow simple instructions. Each posture performed becomes both an act of individuality and a negation of identity in a digitally mediated environment. The device places the body at the center of a game of control, between autonomy and algorithmic injunction.

view of a light-driven installation in the public space

Labyrinthe by students from UQAM’s School of Visual and Media Arts

project info:

name: MUTEK | @mutekmontreal

founder and general director: Alain Mongeau

location: Quartier des Spectacles in Montreal, Canada

dates: August 19th and 24th, 2025

circuit: Village Numérique | @village.numerique

executive producer: Mikaël Frascadore

dates: August 14th to 28th, 2025

photography: Tannaz Shirazi | @natourstudio

The post walk around mutek festival’s village numérique, a circuit of digital art installations in montreal appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Mona Sugata’s intricate sculptures are made from cotton fabric, thread, glue, and pigment, materials that hold traces of fragility, heat, and breath. Shaped into botanical forms and infused with an otherworldly quality, her works feel alive in a surreal way. In her latest exhibition, What Resonates Through Us — Echoes in Overtones, on view at Galerie Ovo in Taipei from August 22nd to September 6th, 2025, Sugata presents a series of installations that extend her ongoing exploration of living systems, unseen presences, and the subtle conditions that allow life to take shape. ‘I imagine them as relics quietly resting in an ancient monastery, holding a sacred presence,’ she tells designboom.

‘My installations do not try to speak too much,’ she remarks during our discussion. ‘They are quietly placed with space, light, air, and subtle presence so that the viewer may encounter their own sense of life and the quiet sensations within.’ The works do not represent plants in a literal way, but they reflect Sugata’s close attention to the movements and structures of plants growing in her own garden, particularly the forms of stems and the gestures of growth that seem to carry vitality. Her observations are translated into symbolic organisms, gradually taking on a bodily quality and sometimes resembling intelligent life.

all images courtesy of Mona Sugata | Tree of Life — A Planet of Playing Beings

delicate forms rooted in sacred cycles

Japanese artist Mona Sugata works with untreated cotton, glue, and diluted pigments, allowing the fabric to absorb and bleed color. Once dry, the pieces are shaped and detailed using a heated iron tool to burn fine vein-like lines into the surface. ‘This is the moment when life begins to inhabit the work,’ she reveals. Sugata avoids coating or overworking the surface in order to preserve the softness of the materials and the natural shifts in tone, resulting in a surface that feels more like something in a slow state of becoming instead of a finished object.

Pillar of Prayer Kumade and Pillar of Prayer Purple Star, some of her latest works, are rooted in the Japanese jichinsai, a ceremony performed before construction, where offerings are made to the local land deity. The artist imagines these sculptures as vertical structures that remain after such a ceremony, linking the land and its inhabitants. The ceramic base represents the land god, while the plant forms growing from it reflect a relationship of coexistence, between what is built and what is already there. ‘It expresses the idea of sacred plants living on the god of the land and living in beautiful coexistence,’ Sugata notes.

Tree of Life — A Planet of Playing Beings, installed at the atrium of the Spiral art center in Tokyo, reflects Sugata’s idea of the Earth as an active field shaped by invisible beings, bacteria, insects, and other non-human lives. ‘Even after death, life becomes part of other beings, undergoing a perpetual cycle of rebirth and rebirth,’ she says. The work evokes these cycles through layered organic forms that spiral outward in motion, resembling a kind of visual system for life as play, disappearance, and return.

reflecting Sugata’s idea of the Earth

A Practice Shaped by Sensitivity and Direct Contact

Sugata’s approach is shaped by physical sensitivity rather than strict planning. She adjusts the process depending on the direction of each piece, working by feel rather than concept. ‘If I feel tension or resistance in my body, I take it as a sign that something is off,’ she explains. The final step, using the iron to create form, is done by hand and involves direct contact with heat, often leading to burns. Still, she treats these traces as part of the work itself, as reminders of material resistance, timing, and repetition.

Mona Sugata was born in Tokyo in 1983 and studied printmaking at Tama Art University. That background still informs her handling of surface and tone, but her installations move away from printed images into something more spatial and responsive. ‘My works are not for interpretation,’ she highlights. ‘They are for quiet encounters.’

Sugata hopes viewers will encounter something of their own in her work. ‘In such stillness,’ she reflects, ‘one might sense a deeper connection, with the world, with others. And in that resonance, I too receive something essential.’

an active field shaped by invisible beings, bacteria, insects, and other non-human lives

Mona Sugata works with untreated cotton, glue, and diluted pigments

a kind of visual system for life as play, disappearance, and return

layered organic forms spiral outward in motion

Midday Moon (left) sits closer to abstraction

inspired by the pale yellow moon sometimes visible during daylight

Pillar of Prayer Kumade and Pillar of Prayer Purple Star are rooted in the Japanese jichinsai

the artist imagines these sculptures as vertical structures that remain after a ceremony

the plant forms reflect a relationship of coexistence

the pieces are shaped and detailed using a heated iron tool

the artist burns fine, vein-like lines into the surface

Sugata avoids coating or overworking the surface in order to preserve the softness of the materials

a surface that feels like something in a state of becoming

project info:

artist: Mona Sugata | @monasugata

exhibition: What Resonates Through Us — Echoes in Overtones

location: Galerie Ovo, Taipei, Taiwan | @galerieovo
dates: August 22nd to September 6th, 2025

The post botanical sculptures by mona sugata grow from untreated cotton fabric and slow gestures appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Nima Nabavi brings together a constellation of radiant energies that converge with structural order in his solo exhibition Sunrise at the Vortex in Dubai. On view at The Third Line, Roswell2223 forms a gravitational center, laying out a monumental hand-drawn piece that stretches across an 18-foot-long canvas. Saturated with color and encrusted with detail, it distills the core of Nabavi’s practice which seeks to evoke awe, resolve inner resonance, bridge abstraction with emotion, and manifest precise complexities and natural energies through geometry.

Created over the course of a year during a residency in New Mexico, Roswell2223 marks the furthest the Iranian artist has ever pushed the limits of his process. The result is a sprawling, crystalline composition that channels a spiritual intensity and meditative clarity. While the exhibition presents a range of works — some meticulously hand-rendered, others made with the aid of architectural pen plotters — they all maintain a sense of transcendence. Whether plotted by machine or drawn line by line, Nabavi’s geometries work somewhat like elusive discoveries. ‘These patterns, structures and geometries carry a magical appeal that I’m not getting any closer to understanding,’ he tells designboom. ‘It feels more like archaeology to me – I’m finding and exploring these visual phenomena, not inventing them.’ We spoke with the artist to learn more about the methods, philosophies, and intentions behind Roswell2223 and how they resonate with the introspective and technical undercurrents of Sunrise at the Vortex.

image by Ismail Noor | all images courtesy of The Third Line

Nima nabavi on the precision and labor of his process

Roswell2223 was created during Nima Nabavi’s time at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program in the US, where, for the first time, he notes, he had the space and time to expand the bounds of his intricate visual language at such an expansive level. ‘I bought the largest roll of canvas I could find, the biggest ruler I could find (9 feet long), and hundreds of markers in 17 colors,’ he shares with us. ‘I then rolled out the canvas on the floor and started working on the piece line by line.’

He describes this layered and considered process as physically taxing but spiritually immersive, and led partly by chance despite the calculated geometries, as he recalls not knowing exactly how the piece might turn out. ‘I was kneeling, squatting, sitting and bending over for hours on end, but being able to literally sit inside the work and be engulfed by it also brought so much joy.’  The resulting composition measures 18 feet by 6 feet, across which the layers upon layers of lines form a crystalline mapping of the universe that invites viewers, too, to loose themselves in. True to the exhibition’s name, the romantic vibrancy of the work and its motion exudes a sense of soothing energy.

Roswell2223 forms a gravitational center at the exhibition, Sunrise at the Vortex | image by Tonee Harbert

working between manual and mechanical precision

The surrounding works on view as part of Sunrise at the Vortex further reflect Nima Nabavi’s explorations of the connection between himself and the universe, bringing together works he created in makeshift studios in Roswell, New York, Los Angeles, and Dubai. Some, in contrast to the centerpiece’s laborious methodologies, are machine-assisted and produced using architectural pen plotters, a tool Nabavi only recently incorporated into his practice. Among them, Source Code closely echoes the idyllic, meditative hues of Roswell2223, though on a much smaller canvas.

Within a rounded surface densely marked by over 4 million plotted dots, resembling a sun about to set or rise, the artist notes that there is a level of detail, complexity, and saturation that he would have not have been able to achieve manually. Speaking then on this shift toward the mechanical, he reflects that these plotters are a tool that frees his imagination from the constraints of the hand. ‘It removes arbitrary limitations and opens me up to thinking about my work in a more expansive way,’ he adds. ‘Instead of considering how to reduce my ideas so that they are humanly ‘doable’, I’m expanding my tools to match the ideas… It’s a total paradigm shift – I can use alternate building blocks like curved lines in my works, I can saturate colors like never before, and I’m able to experiment faster.’

a monumental hand-drawn piece stretching across an 18-foot-long canvas | image by Tonee Harbert

translating energy into structured forms and geometries

This balance between control and joyful discovery pulses throughout the exhibition, which as a whole offers a continuum of experimentation across dualities. Between the intimate and the industrial, and the intuitive and the algorithmic, Sunrise at the Vortex embraces a spiritual luminosity that persists across the show’s various structural forms and scales. Even as Nabavi’s process becomes increasingly complex and precise in these abstract expressions, the work retains an elemental radiance that draws you in.

‘These patterns, structures, and geometries carry a magical appeal that I’m not getting any closer to understanding. It feels more like archaeology to me — I’m finding and exploring these visual phenomena, not inventing them,’ he tells designboom.

the vibrancy of the work exudes a sense of soothing energy | image by Tonee Harbert

Nima Nabavi brings together radiant energies that converge with structural precision | image by Tonee Harbert

the creative process was physically taxing but spiritually immersive | video still by Tonee Harbert

‘These patterns, structures and geometries carry a magical appeal’, he says | video still by Tonee Harbert

Source Code echoes the idyllic, meditative hues of Roswell2223, on a much smaller canvas | image by Altamash Urooj

marked densely by over 4 million dots plotted by a machine | image by Altamash Urooj

Sunrise at the Vortex reflects Nima Nabavi’s explorations of intricate geometries | image by Ismail Noor

project info:

name: Roswell2223

artist: Nima Nabavi | @nimanothome

location: The Third Line, Dubai

exhibition: Sunrise at the Vortex

dates: 15th June—3rd August 2025

The post behind nima nabavi’s vast geometric vortex painting: converging energy, labor, and structure appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

With fabric as her brush and sunlight as her collaborator, Rachel Hayes transforms architectural spaces and natural landscapes into shifting compositions of color and movement with her large-scale, textile-based installations.

Hayes inserts vivid, translucent forms into places as varied as museum atriums, desert dunes, glass conservatories, and ancient ruins. Her latest projects span a major commission for the Chicago Botanic Garden, a flag flying above Ballroom Marfa in Texas, and her participation in the group exhibition Soft Structures through August 8th, 2025, curated by Jen Wroblewski. Hayes’ process begins on site. ‘I always chase the light, and I always trust my instincts first!’ she tells designboom, reflecting on the design process. ‘My first visual response to a site is usually the best, and I have learned to trust my intuition deeply. I like to think about how someone will move throughout a space and interact with my work. Standard methods of experiencing an artwork are less interesting to me. With my installations, there is no front or back, top or bottom in the traditional sense.’

White Sands 2014 | all images courtesy of Rachel Hayes

texture, durability, transparency, color and light form the pieces

Trained in fiber and painting, Hayes blends painterly sensibility with sculptural scale. Her site-specific work often responds to the physical context of its location, not only the surrounding architecture or landscape but also the light. ‘I take note of the sun’s position throughout a space to see where it peaks through, offering a chance to create reflections and color-casted shadows,’ she explains. ‘Once I have decided how I want the piece to look, I bring in a practical side of my brain to engineer the construction and solve any installation issues. Depending on the demands of the site and lifespan of the work, I choose the appropriate materials.’

The Tulsa-based artist considers texture, durability, transparency, and the emotional resonance of color. ‘I am always thinking about texture, lightness, contrast, and color. I know how to pick materials that will work with light, and that’s important to a lot of my indoor installations. Outdoor installations are more complicated, because longevity and weather are players, but this also makes it an exciting experience. I hope these exhilarating experiences come across in my photos,’ she shares with us.

Tulsa Urban Core Art Project

Ephemeral Landscapes and Chromatic Rhythms

The artist uses photography to document the ephemeral nature of her work. Rachel Hayes often installs her fabric pieces temporarily in outdoor settings before removing them, including the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Park in New Mexico, ancient ruins in Turkey, and the Flint Hills of Kansas. These moments are fleeting, but the imagery lingers, capturing what she describes as ‘subtle and ephemeral nuances such as the changing light, shifting shadows, or the sound of fabric rustling in the breeze.’

Color is central to Hayes’ language, intuitive but never arbitrary. ‘Let’s call it controlled intuition. I will decide on a palette (the control), and within that group of colors, I’ll play (intuitively) with translucence, opacity, and tonal variation. I love a good staccato and rhythm within a piece to keep an eye roving about. I guess you could say that I think of color in musical terms.’ Her chromatic decisions often reflect the site or institution hosting the work. ‘I do take a site or venue into consideration. I have an installation opening August 23rd at the Georgia Museum of Art. My color references were in response to a few pieces in the museum’s collection: a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window, and paintings by Sam Gilliam, Joan Mitchell, Elaine DeKooning, Manierre Dawson, and Albert Eugene Gallatin. These beautiful constraints present me with endless color compositions,’ she says.

Columbus, Georgia

Art That Lives in Open-Air and Transitional Spaces

Rachel Hayes has long sought to bring her installations into unexpected places, beyond the white cube, toward more porous environments. Her work has been shown at SculptureCenter in New York, the deCordova Museum in Massachusetts, the Everson Museum in Syracuse, and the Roswell Museum in New Mexico, as well as in galleries from Los Angeles to Istanbul. She has collaborated with Italian fashion house Missoni on a solo exhibition during Milan Design Week, and more recently exhibited with ISTANBUL’74 during Contemporary Istanbul and at NOMAD in Capri. In 2023, she was invited to present a textile installation at the ancient Agora of Smyrna during the Turkish Textile Biennial.

Her dream sites aren’t only galleries but transitional or open-air spaces. ‘I would love to work in more large glass atriums, small alleyways, under piers by an ocean, and always more prairie grasslands.,’ she states. These are places where her textiles can respond to wind, weather, and light, where the work is never static, always changing with the day. Ultimately, Hayes sees her work as a way of engaging the senses—and the body. ‘I’m interested in how the power of scale and the ordered construction of bright color can attract a viewer’s physical response,’ she reflects. But beyond that initial pull, her pieces ask for deeper feeling. ‘I hope they will also experience more subtle and ephemeral nuances, such as the changing light, shifting shadows, or the sound of fabric rustling in the breeze,’  Rachel Hayes comments.

in Edge of Becoming, two panels span 100 feet on the grounds of Fruitlands Museum

Garden Loom, New Mexico

Little Barn Outside

Mirror Lake

Arcosanti, Arizona

Nomad Capri | image by ISTANBUL_74

Black Cube and the Biennial of the Americas | image by Third Dune

Black Cube and the Biennial of the Americas | image by Third Dune

Cloud Report, South Dakota

Whitesands National Park, New Mexico

Whitesands National Park, New Mexico

Backyard Path, Chris and Ben’s house

Fairfield, Iowa

project info:

artist: Rachel Hayes | @rachelbhayes

current exhibitions:

name: Soft Structures
location: Jane Lombard Gallery, New York
curator: Jen Wroblewski
dates: June 27th – August 8th, 2025

name: Patterned by Nature

location: Chicago Botanic Garden

dates: June 7th – September 21st, 2025

name: Looking Through a Sewn Sky 

location: Georgia Museum of Art
dates: August 23rd, 2025 — July 30th, 2027

The post ‘I always chase the light’: rachel hayes activates space with monumental textile installations appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Making its landmark debut at London Design Biennale 2025, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar) presents Matter Diplopia. This research-led exhibition draws from collective memory, contemporary challenges, and cultural hybridity, and is set within Somerset House. Matter Diplopia is open to the public from June 5th to 29th with the pavilion showcasing nine immersive projects created by the school‘s faculty, students, and alumni. Each work prompts audiences to ‘look again’ at the material world, uncovering the deep connections between heritage, innovation, and environment. As part of the Biennale’s Surface Reflections theme, the exhibition invites reflection on how local traditions and global influences intersect to shape the landscapes, both natural and cultural, of a rapidly evolving Qatar.

‘We’re excited to present the work of our VCUarts Qatar creative research teams at the London Design Biennale. Through the efforts of nine research teams, we’ve investigated how materiality can express the complex, layered narratives that shape Qatar…a place where ancient culture and rapid modernization exist side by side,’ begins Amir Berbić, Dean, VCUarts Qatar, in an exclusive video interview with designboom.

Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar) presents Matter Diplopia exhibition at the 2025 London Design Biennale (El Zaffah) | all images courtesy of VCUarts Qatar

how VCUarts qatar shapes creative practice

VCUarts Qatar is the overseas campus of the prestigious Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia, established in 1998 through a pioneering partnership with Qatar Foundation. Situated in Doha’s Education City, the school offers undergraduate and graduate programs across design, fine arts, and art history, and is home to the only academic Materials Library in the region. With state-of-the-art media and fabrication labs and a thriving culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the university supports globally oriented research through its Institute for Creative Research, launched in 2022 as a platform for innovative inquiry that now underpins the Matter Diplopia exhibition.

‘VCUarts Qatar is truly a gem within the Virginia Commonwealth University ecosystem. Through their bold creative approach and spirit of innovation, they’ve built an environment where art, design and creative research thrive,’ adds Dr. Rao, President, Virginia Commonwealth University.

El Zaffah offers an immersive audiovisual exploration of Arab wedding traditions, highlighting regional variations and shared cultural practices

exhibition’s interplay of sustainability and memory

At its core, Matter Diplopia positions design as a means of examining cultural identity through material form. The exhibition unfolds through three thematic pathways — Material Innovation, Cultural Narrative + Tech, and Observing Environments — each exploring how materials tell stories and adapt across time and context. From speculative environmental architecture to reinterpreted craft traditions, the projects consider how cultural narratives, sustainability, and technological engagement converge to shape our world. In line with the exhibition’s conceptual anchor—diplopia, or double vision—the works call on viewers to embrace multiple perspectives and deeper interpretations of place.

‘We’ve investigated how materiality can express the complex, layered narratives that shape Qatar… Matter Diplopia is about seeing from more than one perspective it’s an invitation to look again, to see differently and to discover how design can reveal connections we might otherwise miss. The exhibition powerfully reflects our vision, showing how art and design can break down barriers, spark new perspectives, and inspire meaningful global conversations,’ explains Amir Berbić.

Chrysalis is a kinetic air-cleaning sculpture that transforms fabric and structure into a dynamic, ‘breathing’ system

Each of the nine projects emerged through collaborative research by faculty, alumni, and students at VCUarts Qatar, reflecting the institution’s commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry and cultural engagement. Chrysalis is a kinetic air-cleaning sculpture that transforms fabric and structure into a dynamic, ‘breathing’ system, drawing in and purifying air through its rhythmic movements. While Tatreez Unbroken employs immersive media to honor the embroidery traditions of displaced Palestinian women, preserving and celebrating their cultural heritage, DUBDOUBT stands as a multisensory, dub-inspired installation that interrogates cultural appropriation through sonic and tactile experiences.

Tatreez Unbroken employs immersive media to honor the embroidery traditions of displaced Palestinian women

Project Greener Greenhouse Goes GMT is a bamboo architectural installation inspired by London’s Crystal Palace, constructed in Kenya using locally sourced materials and sustainable joinery techniques. El Zaffah on the other hand offers an immersive audiovisual exploration of Arab wedding traditions, highlighting regional variations and shared cultural practices. Drawing inspiration from role-playing games, Dunes and Dugongs examines the impact of human choices on climate change, urging reflection on environmental responsibility.

Dunes and Dugongs examines the impact of human choices on climate change, urging reflection on environmental responsibility

Meanwhile, Discursive Instrumentation of Urban Rhythms captures Doha’s cultural and migratory landscape through interactive instruments that blend elements into a unique urban soundscape. Similarly, Nature’s Alchemy delves into the cyclical essence of nature by exploring the significance of the date palm in the region’s cultural and religious contexts. Last but not least, Stone Plus is presented as a distinctive furniture collection that reimagines fragile Qatari stone through adaptive design, merging traditional materials with contemporary aesthetics

‘Research is a big part of who we are. Since 2022, our Institute for Creative Research has been our way of bringing that to life— it’s how we come together to explore ideas across disciplines. The works in Matter Diplopia explore a wide range of themes, from sustainable materials to digitally reimagined traditions. Some respond directly to the challenges of climate change and the resilience of nature,’ continues Berbić.

Discursive Instrumentation of Urban Rhythms captures Doha’s cultural and migratory landscape through interactive instruments that blend elements into a unique urban soundscape

For VCUarts Qatar, international platforms like the London Design Biennale represent both a showcase and a conversation—an opportunity to engage diverse audiences in dialogue with design voices from the Global South. Previous appearances at events such as Ars Electronica and the Venice Biennale have laid the groundwork for this growing global presence.

‘VCUarts Qatar’s presence in London marks another meaningful step in our ongoing international engagement’ highlights Berbić. ‘Having participated in renowned platforms like Ars Electronica in Linz, for example, and the Venice Biennale, we’re proud to continue contributing to global creative conversations.’

Nature’s Alchemy delves into the cyclical essence of nature by exploring the significance of the date palm in the region’s cultural and religious contexts

The university’s impact is reflected in its alumni network, many of whom lead cultural institutions, creative startups, and design firms across Qatar and the Gulf. More than 90 percent are currently working in creative fields or pursuing advanced studies, helping to shape the region’s design economy.

‘VCUarts Qatar is a leading voice in the country’s vibrant art and design scene. Its alumni are making their mark across fields from new media arts to fine arts, interior design, graphic design, and art history. More than 90 percent are working in the field, pursuing advanced studies, or running their own businesses. You’ll find them leading museums, launching startups, and driving the creative economy across Qatar and the Gulf,’ concludes Dr. Higginbotham, Dean, VCUarts and Special Assistant to the Provost for the School of the Arts in Qatar, to designboom.

DUBDOUBT stands as a multisensory, dub-inspired installation that interrogates cultural appropriation through sonic and tactile experiences

Greener Greenhouse Goes GMT is a bamboo architectural installation inspired by London’s Crystal Palace, constructed in Kenya using locally sourced materials and sustainable joinery techniques

Stone Plus is a distinctive furniture collection that reimagines fragile Qatari stone through adaptive design

project info: 

institute: VCUarts Qatar | @vcuqatar

exhibition title: Matter Diplopia

theme: Surface Reflections

location: Somerset House, London

dates: June 5 – 29, 2025

The post VCUarts qatar’s matter diplopia evolves memories at london design biennale 2025 appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives transforms the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens into a stage for over 60 international artists grappling with one of the most urgent ethical questions of our time: how do we live with, and not over, animals? 

Running until January 7th, 2026, the museum-wide show spans five floors, combining visual art, science, philosophy, and activism to challenge speciesism and advocate for animal rights, sentience, and voice. ‘At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings.’ Katerina Gregos, curator of the exhibition and EMST’s creative director, explains, speaking with designboom. Inspired by John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay, Why Look at Animals? underscores the notion of ‘listening beyond language.’ It implicitly strives to ‘speak for those who have no voice,’ as the curator frames it, a driving force that shaped the entire process.

from left to right: Mark Dion, Men and Game, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Los Angeles | Rossella Biscotti, Clara, 2016. Courtesy of the artist | all installation view images by Paris Tavitian, unless stated otherwise

listening beyond language: art as a site for interspecies empathy

The curatorial framework by the art historian Katerina Gregos pierces through the anthropocentric lens that has rendered animals invisible, both culturally and ecologically. ‘I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently,’ she shares with designboom. Far from romanticising nature, the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life: industrial farming, vivisection, the exotic pet trade, hunting, and entertainment. Works on view make visible the brutal disconnections of modernity, where animals have been relegated from myth, companion, and co-inhabitant to product and spectacle. Berger’s claim that animals have ‘disappeared’ from daily life is literal here – their erasure becomes the focal point of critical reflection and creative resistance.

While rooted in ethics, Why Look at Animals? also delves into science, drawing on neuroethology and animal studies to dismantle outdated ideas like Descartes’ bête-machine, the animal as automaton. ‘I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere,’ Gregos tells us, adding that she ‘realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech.’ Visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives, intelligence, and social structures that may differ from human norms but are no less profound. Texts by thinkers like Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Regan shape the theoretical spine of the exhibition, bringing together philosophical, legal, and environmental dimensions of animal advocacy. ‘This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront,’ insists Gregos. In a world where animals are often framed as voiceless, this show turns up the volume, demanding a reconfiguration of how we think and live. Dive into our in-depth discussion with Katerina Gregos below.

Nikos Tranos, Terrain (bridle for horses), 2024. courtesy of the artist and Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens | Jonas Staal, Exo-Ecologies, 2023. Commissioned by Power Station of Art l 14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist

INTERVIEW WITH KATERINA GREGOS

designboom (DB): How did John Berger’s 1980 essay shape your vision for this exhibition? Are there particular passages or ideas from the text that served as a curatorial compass? 

Katerina Gregos (KG): The title of the exhibition is drawn directly from John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay Why Look at Animals?, which was both a starting point and a conceptual anchor for the project. Berger’s reflections on the estrangement of humans from animals resonated deeply with me and informed my curatorial explorations. He begins his essay by highlighting the important role that animals played in human societies; ‘The animals first entered the human imagination as messengers and promises’ he writes, thus acknowledging the deep symbolic and spiritual role animals once played in human cultures. However, he goes on to point out a sea change in the relationship between humans and animals during modernity, highlighting the fact that ‘In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.’ This is a reference not only to extinction or physical absence but to their cultural and symbolic disappearance from human life. ‘Everywhere animals disappear’ he emphasizes, ‘In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.’ This is a striking statement on how animals have been marginalized and isolated in modern society, especially through artificial settings like zoos or circuses where they have been reduced to a spectacle or commodity – confined to manmade spaces, such as theme parks, factory farms, and, ultimately, to the abstraction of the supermarket shelf.

This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront. Berger’s idea that animals have ‘lost their centrality’ in the human imagination helped shape the curatorial vision, which does not aim to romanticise animals or nature, but rather to challenge the mechanisms – economic, cultural, and visual – through which non-human lives have been rendered invisible, disposable, or instrumentalised. The book serves as the basis for the exhibition’s ethico-philosophical approach to non-human lives, and its plea for a consideration of animal rights. It is in this spirit that Why Look at Animals? becomes not only a question, but a provocation, one that urges viewers to reconsider how we see, relate to, and live with other species.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: What was the most challenging aspect of curating an exhibition that seeks to raise awareness and advocate for the moral and legal consideration of non-human life?

KG: One of the most challenging aspects was finding the right balance between raising awareness and fostering critical reflection – without falling into didacticism or moralising or the trappings of simplistic agit-prop art. Art is not activism in the traditional sense; its strength lies in its ability to open up space for nuanced thinking, emotional engagement, and deeper contemplation. But when dealing with such an urgent and ethically charged subject as the rights of non-human life, the line between aesthetics, advocacy, and information is a delicate one. Another challenge was how to sensitively represent the often invisible or marginalised suffering of animals, especially those not typically granted empathy – such as lab animals, factory-farmed creatures, or those displaced by environmental destruction. How do you visualise their realities without sensationalising or exploiting their pain? How do you speak for those who have no voice? These were questions I constantly grappled with. That is why there are no taxidermied animals in the exhibition, or scenes of graphic violence.

On a practical level, assembling a constellation of works that reflected a diversity of voices, geographies, and cultural understandings of human-animal relationships was vital. It was important to resist a Western-centric narrative and instead draw attention to plural worldviews – particularly Indigenous, postcolonial, or non-Western perspectives – that often hold a much more holistic understanding of interspecies coexistence. Ultimately, the challenge was to curate an exhibition that doesn’t offer easy answers, but rather provokes questions – about ethics, responsibility, and our place in the wider web of life. I hope that Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives can contribute to a broader shift in consciousness and policy, while also encouraging a personal reckoning about the assumptions we have.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: How does the exhibition address our uneven empathy toward animals, especially those typically overlooked or excluded?

KG: The exhibition aims to challenge the hierarchy of empathy that governs our relationships with non-human animals – where certain species are cherished, while others are ignored, commodified, or exploited without a second thought. At its core is the recognition that all forms of life are interconnected, and that our survival is deeply dependent on the well-being of the ecosystems and species with whom we share this planet. Despite having histories marked by colonialism, fascism, and struggles for independence – oppressions that should have sensitised us to injustice – we continue to uphold a deeply anthropocentric worldview. We presume human superiority over other species, often failing to acknowledge the moral and ecological consequences of that belief. This mindset not only leads to the suffering of non-human lives but positions us as one of the few species capable of destroying its own habitat.

Through Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives, I hope to provoke a deeper reflection on these contradictions, and encourage viewers to reconsider the ways in which empathy is selectively applied. By bringing to light the lives and perspectives of animals we rarely think about – from those used in testing or factory farming to those displaced by extractivist practices – the exhibition seeks to foster a more just and inclusive understanding of coexistence. Empathy must be extended beyond the familiar and the lovable, to include all those whose lives are intertwined with ours – often invisibly.

the museum-wide show advocates for animal rights, sentience, and voice | image © designboom

DB: With artists from over 30 countries, how did you make sure the exhibition reflects culturally diverse understandings of human-animal relationships rather than a Western-centric view?

KG: From its inception, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives was conceived not as a Western-centric exhibition about animals in art, but as a critical, ethical, and culturally expansive exploration of human-animal relationships across different regions, histories, and worldviews. One of EMST’s core commitments is to challenge the dominant narratives that often shape large-scale exhibitions, particularly those rooted in a Western canon. In line with the museum’s mission to explore ‘creative memory practices’ and resist presentism and amnesia, the curatorial approach deliberately sought out artists whose practices are embedded in culturally specific, historically layered, and often marginalised understandings of non-human life.

The exhibition features over 200 works by 60 artists from more than 30 countries across four continents, many of whom engage with non-Western cosmologies, Indigenous perspectives, and postcolonial critiques of human exceptionalism. This diversity was not incidental – it reflects the museum’s broader aim to foreground multiple, often contradictory, ways of understanding the world, particularly those shaped by colonial histories, forced industrialisation, ecological degradation, and ongoing systems of exploitation. Moreover, EMST’s position in Athens – as a city at the intersection of Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa – offers a unique vantage point from which to question binary worldviews. Greece itself has a hybrid identity shaped by Eastern, Levantine, and Western influences, and the museum draws on this complexity to amplify voices and narratives that sit outside of dominant curatorial models. In this sense, Why Look at Animals? is not only about animals, but also about how different cultures relate to the living world – how they remember, mythologise, commodify, mourn, or coexist with it. It is about making space for those understandings that have been excluded or undervalued, and about using contemporary art to surface new ethical relationships with more-than-human life.

Oussama Tabti, Homo-Carduelis, 2022 (installation view), Sound installation, Bird cages, speakers, 33’ (loop), Dimensions variable, Collection of EMST

DB: Do you see this exhibition as the beginning of a larger movement within contemporary art to address the rights of non-human beings? What role should artists and institutions play going forward?

KG: Yes, I believe this exhibition is part of a growing and necessary shift in contemporary art – one that seeks to dismantle anthropocentric worldviews and take seriously the rights, experiences, and agency of non-human beings. While this conversation has existed in philosophy, science, and activism for some time, contemporary art is now increasingly engaging with it in ways that are visceral, imaginative, and politically urgent. Art has a unique capacity to visualise the invisible, to make felt what is often ignored, and to propose new modes of thinking and relating. Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives contributes to a wider re-evaluation of how humans coexist with the more-than-human world – by foregrounding the ethical, emotional, and ecological dimensions of that relationship. The exhibition does not claim to provide definitive answers, but rather opens up a space for questioning, witnessing, and empathising – urging us to reconsider our own fraught and conflicted relationship with animals.

Going forward, artists and institutions alike have a responsibility to foster this kind of critical dialogue. For institutions, that means programming that reflects ecological urgency, supporting transdisciplinary approaches, and ensuring that diverse cultural perspectives on non-human life are represented – not just those rooted in Western scientific or philosophical frameworks. For artists, it means continuing to challenge dominant narratives, creating work that highlights urgent issues and how we understand them and using their practices to imagine more equitable multispecies futures. If there is a movement underway, it must also be an ethical one – grounded in care, accountability, and an openness to learn from other ways of being. The museum can – and must – be a place where such reorientations can begin.

visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives | image © designboom

DB: In working on this project, did your personal relationship with animals or views on speciesism evolve in ways you didn’t expect?

KG: Curating Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives has been both a professional and deeply personal journey. I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere. But I’ve also grown up with many different animals, living side by side with them, and realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech. I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently. Working closely on this exhibition, immersing myself in the vast and often disturbing realities of human-animal relationships, made me confront more viscerally the structural violence and moral blind spots that underpin speciesism.

What surprised me was not so much a change of heart – I have always felt that the way humans treat animals is profoundly problematic – but rather a sharpening of perspective, an expanded sense of urgency given the ecological crisis, in which animals are the invisible victims. The research forced me to confront the sheer scale and normalisation of cruelty towards non-human lives, often hidden in plain sight. I realised just how embedded this hierarchy is in our culture and how difficult it is to disentangle ourselves from it, even when we try. The exhibition also made me reflect more consciously on the idea of co-existence – not as an abstract ideal, but as a necessary ethical imperative. It’s no longer enough to think of animals as beings we must protect out of compassion. We must start acknowledging them as subjects with agency, presence, and rights, as lives that matter in and of themselves, not just in relation to us. This shift, I believe, is one that artists and cultural institutions must support. We have to help recalibrate the ethical lens through which we look at the world, to open up space for imagining new forms of kinship and solidarity across species.

Lynn Hershman Leeson The Infinity Engine, 2014 (detail) Multimedia installation, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco and Bridget Donahue, New York

DB: What kind of emotional or intellectual response do you hope to evoke in viewers?

KG: The exhibition confronts a range of exploitative and often invisible forms of violence against animals – whether through scientific testing, space exploration, genetic engineering, hunting, or habitat destruction driven by extractivist and industrial agricultural practices. At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings. I hope the show elicits both an emotional and intellectual response: empathy, reflection, discomfort, perhaps even outrage – but also a deeper understanding of the structural and ethical failures that underpin our relationship with the non-human world.

The goal is not to provoke guilt, but to awaken awareness and a sense of shared responsibility, and an impetus to change our habits (to meat, for example). By inviting viewers to confront the systemic ways in which human actions harm animal lives and degrade shared ecosystems, Why Look at Animals? aims to build a compelling case for reimagining how we cohabit the planet. The destruction we inflict on non-human life is ultimately a form of self-harm – an expression of greed, moral failure, and a profound inability to coexist with what is simply other than ourselves. If this project can spark meaningful dialogue, raise awareness beyond the art world, and contribute even incrementally to changing attitudes or policy, that would already be a powerful outcome.

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Taxonomic Trophies, 2005 – ongoing (detail)
Branches, wood and metal name tags
Dimensions variable 
Courtesy of the artist

Gustafsson & Haapoja Embrace Your Empathy, 2016/2025 (installation view) Installation, 20 Flags Dimensions variable Co-commissioned by EMSΤ Courtesy of the artists

Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Comrades in Extinction, 2020 – 2021 (installation view, detail), installation with wood, hardened oil landscape and gouache paintings. Dimensions variable, Production by EMST. Courtesy of Studio Jonas Staal

the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life | image © designboom

Paris Petridis Lagia, 2001; Imathia, 2006; Thessaloniki, 2021; Galilee, 2011; Dead Sea, 2012. Courtesy of the artist

(from left to right): Marcus Coates, Extinct Animals, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London | Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, hello, are we in the show?, 2012. Collection S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent | Anne Marie Maes, Glossa (bee tongue), 2024.

Marcus Coates Extinct Animals, 2018 (installation view, detail) Group of 19 casts, plaster Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London| image © designboom

project info:

name: Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives

curator: Katerina Gregos | @katerina.gregos

venue: EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art | @emstathens, Athens, Greece

exhibition design: Flux Office | @flux_office

dates: May 15th, 2025 – January 7th, 2026

The post ‘why look at animals?’ at EMST: katerina gregos on speaking for the voiceless appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

The Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris transforms into a mesmerizing aquatic and musical landscape with the unveiling of clinamen, an immersive installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. On view until September 21st, 2025, and curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Pinault Collection, the large-scale project envelops visitors in a multisensory experience where porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement. At the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water. This vast, tranquil surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky visible through the museum’s iconic dome. White ceramic bowls drift across its surface, propelled by gentle currents, producing unpredictable melodic chimes as they serendipitously collide. 

While this is not the first iteration of clinamen – earlier versions have been staged at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Centre Pompidou-Metz – it is the most ambitious to date. ‘This exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date,’ Céleste Boursier-Mougenot tells designboom. The museum’s architecture played a pivotal role. ‘My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work,’ the artist notes,‘I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ.’ Encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome, the Rotunda offers a rare resonance.‘The immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension,’ Boursier-Mougenot says.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, clinamen v.10, 2012-2025, courtesy of the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Galerie Xippas (Paris), Galerie Mario Mazzoli (Berlin) | photo by Nicolas Brasseur | all images courtesy of Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, unless stated otherwise

embracing unpredictability within the clinamen installation

Like many of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works, the Bourse de Commerce installation exists at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and performance. It also marks the culmination of decades of experimentation with sonic systems that operate independently of human control. A musician by origin, Boursier-Mougenot approaches sound as a ‘living material’ – as seen in clinamen, where the traditional constraints of music are shed, replaced by a self-regulating system that breathes and changes with each passing moment. ‘My systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms,’ the artist explains. 

The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random, unpredictable motion of atoms. For Boursier-Mougenot, this idea mirrors the elemental operations at play in the installation. ‘The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation,’ the artist says. He sees the installation as ‘a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears.’ The inherent unpredictability is central to the experience: ‘if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.’

clinamen takes over the iconic Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce

enveloping visitors in a multisensory experience

Boursier-Mougenot deliberately embraces unpredictability in his creative process, a practice he discovered when allowing external sounds to enrich his compositions. This openness led him to ‘think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.’ This philosophy informs the entire structure of clinamen, which runs on a self-regulating system akin to a living organism. The materials, too, are deliberately fragile and mutable. Porcelain, water, sound. ‘It was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe […] that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago,’ he recalls. Clinamen beautifully embodies a tension between apparent opposites: order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. The artist’s previous work, harmonichaos, which involved vacuum cleaners playing harmonicas, explored similar themes of unpredictable, self-regulating systems. ‘With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another,’ he shares, highlighting the interplay of chance and inherent system logic.

In a world defined by acceleration and distraction, clinamen invites a radical slowing down. Visitors become part of the installation simply by being present. ‘With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence,’ he says. ‘The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.’ Ultimately, clinamen is not only a meditation on matter, motion, and sound, but a quietly profound call to attention. ‘I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world,’ Boursier-Mougenot admits, ‘but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.’ Read our conversation with the artist in full below, and watch clinamen in action here.

porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement | photo by Florent Michel / 11H45

INTERVIEW WITH Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

designboom (DB): How did the architecture of the Rotunda in the Bourse de Commerce shape this version of the clinamen?

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (CBM): My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work. I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ. In this way, many of the installation’s parameters can be redefined by the characteristics and particularities of the venue. At the Bourse de Commerce, the immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension.

DB: The immersive installation has been shown before, but never at this scale. What new possibilities—or challenges—did this larger format bring?

CBM: You’re right, this exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date. At this stage, no one can say for sure whether everything will work as usual on this scale. It’s a challenge, with a multitude of technical issues to resolve in order to remain faithful to the work and its simplicity. To achieve this, I’m working with a team of excellent technicians, and it’s only at the time of the tests that we’ll know if everything is working. So it’s quite experimental, as I think any attempt at art should be.

at the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water

DB: The title clinamen refers to the random motion of atoms in Epicurean physics. How does this idea connect to the movement and behavior of the installation?

CBM: Clinamen, this word and its definition came to me in the summer of 1997, as I was leafing through the pages of a dictionary. I was looking for a title for my new installation that would describe the principle of the work. I had the word declination in mind and was looking for a synonym here and there. The cosmic connotations of clinamen immediately captivated me and I found many analogies between the phenomenon it describes and my work in progress. So I adopted the title. Shortly afterwards, in view of the installation’s appearance, the title clinamen seemed a little pretentious, and for the work’s first exhibition I called it untitled. In the years that followed, untitled enjoyed great success in France and abroad in many different versions. Around 2003, production of the inflatable swimming pool model I had been using came to an abrupt halt. I had to design my installations with floating porcelain by having raised floors made into which one or more round pools could be integrated. Later, for exhibitions in vast spaces without walls, the raised floor took the form of a platform with access ramps and surrounded by circular benches, virtually acting as walls. As versions of the installation became larger and more planispheric, I decided in 2012 to rename the largest of them clinamen.

The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation. For materialists, the clinamen is the minimum angle that leads atoms, those inseparable and eternal particles, to collide and assemble to produce, by aggregation, all the perishable matter of our world, which constantly disintegrates and reformates : atoms are to matter what the letters of the alphabet are to language and writing, and it is from the variety of their combination that everything exists. In my work, there is also a curved movement that leads the cells represented by the porcelain bowls to collide, producing a world of sounds and potentially all the occurrences of the elements present. We can contemplate clinamen installation as a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears. But if you try to trace the causal thread of a sequence, it’s impossible to do it live. In other words, if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.

unpredictable melodic chimes emerge as the bowls serendipitously collide

DB: The piece is guided by invisible currents, where ceramic bowls create sound through chance encounters. How do you work with unpredictability as part of your creative process?

CBM: I discovered the virtues of unpredictability for my music the day I accepted that outside sounds, totally unrelated to my own, such as those of the urban environment of the unspoilt place where I was producing my music, could mix with it and enrich it. Later, during a play by the company whose music I was composing, which was being staged on the roof of a campus building, the sounds of cars in the distance or the sound of the wind could be heard. The sounds of cars in the distance or voices, wind, planes passing in the sky and crows flying overhead mixed with my music for a noisy string quartet and reanimated it. It was all a question of sound levels and permanence of course, but it gave a “here and now” quality to my recorded and broadcast music. Later, I often used microphones to pick up sounds live outside theatres, reinjecting them and mixing them with my music. These experiences opened my ears and gradually led me to think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.

ceramic bowls drift across the water surface, propelled by gentle currents

DB: Your choice of materials—porcelain bowls, water, currents—feels deliberately elemental. What draws you to these fragile, mutable mediums?

CBM: One day, Jack, a friend of mine who’s a piano maker, said to me: the piano is a collection of different materials – metal, wood, felt, glue, etc. – which can be dangerous to each other, and which are also subject to phenomenal mechanical tensions capable of destroying them. Fortunately, the ingenious arrangement of these materials results in an almost living object that only awaits the tension of the pianist’s nervous system to become the alter ego of the player.
For my part, it was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe (inflatable pool, soft plastic, glass, porcelain, water, pump, electricity, heating element, etc.) that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago. In the field of art and installation, any object can be considered according to criteria that no longer have anything to do with its functionality.

as the bowls serendipitously collide they produce unpredictable melodic chimes | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: You’ve described sound as a ‘living material.’ How do you approach sound, not just as music, but as something sculptural, spatial, and physical ?

CBM: Rather, my systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms. As I relate with the harmonicaos work and the use of tuners immersed in a form of hesitation or doubt that I notice and exploit to thwart forms of off-putting repetition.

DB: There’s a tension in clinamen—between order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. How do you see these opposites coexisting in your work ?

It’s funny, towards the end of the nineties, I called an installation harmonichaos. It consists of thirteen silent vacuum cleaners, each of which plays a small diatonic harmonica, whose tonality, or tuning of the vacuumed notes, is different from the twelve other harmonicas. The operation and shutdown of each vacuum/harmonica module depends on a frequency analyzer built into the module. This is a chromatic tuner used by musicians to tune their instruments. It accurately identifies the sound frequency of a single note at a time, but its analysis becomes more than uncertain as soon as the device detects several notes or a chord simultaneously. The device reacts to surrounding sounds, hesitates, contradicts itself …
Observing this, I thought that a logic other than the one for which the device had been designed was at work, because the time division seemed “alive” to me. It was only a short step from there to imagining a specific form of life. I used the device because of its unreliability. With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another. Each module interacts with the twelve others in the ensemble ad libitum. What’s more, this low-tech system is disrupted by variations in the voltage of the electrical network feeding it, making any attempt at prediction even more highly improbable.

clinamen is encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: Your installations often invite the audience into a sensory, open-ended experience. What role does the visitor play in activating or completing the work?

CBM: When you visit an exhibition, aren’t you yourself sensitive to the presence of other visitors? If they give you the impression of not knowing why they’re there? It can be funny, but it can also be pathetic. If they only look at the works through their cameras or smartphones, and step back without paying attention to the other visitors to frame a masterpiece, I think that’s awful. With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence. When I succeed in doing this, I find it makes people more beautiful… I’ve also noticed that when I compose the spaces of my installations using circles or curves, it makes visitors’ trajectories more harmonious and their wandering more fluid than in orthogonal spaces. The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.

DB: In an age of speed and distraction, how do you see your work offering space for slowness, attention, and contemplation?

CBM: I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world, I don’t presume to know what anyone needs, but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.

the water surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky through the museum’s dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

the installation invites visitors to sit down and slow down | image © designboom

project info:

name: clinamen

artist: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot | @celesteboursiermougenot

curator: Emma Lavigne, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection

location: Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001, Paris, France | @boursedecommerce

dates: June 5th – September 21st, 2025

The post céleste boursier-mougenot turns bourse de commerce into immersive aquatic soundscape appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

At Berlin’s Aedes Architecture Forum, the exhibition ‘Five Working Spaces’ invites visitors to glimpse into Ai Weiwei’s studios across continents. On the occasion of the opening on May 23, 2025, designboom spoke exclusively with the artist, uncovering how each workspace embodies his political convictions, personal history, and creative vision. A central focus of the exhibition is Ai Weiwei’s most recent studio in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal, built using traditional Chinese woodworking methods. 

‘My studio is an extension of my body and mental state,’ Ai Weiwei tells designboom. ‘Of course it’s political. Anyone who sees the exhibition can understand — it’s not that I want it to be political. It just is political.’

all images courtesy of Aedes Architecture Forum and Ai Weiwei Studio, unless stated otherwise

ARTIST, ARCHITECT AND ADVOCAT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Rather than illustrating architectural typologies or design processes, ‘Five Working Spaces’ explores Ai Weiwei’s studios as existential conditions, rooted in the artist’s early experiences of political exile. Born in Beijing, Ai Weiwei spent his formative years in remote regions of China, where his father, the poet Ai Qing, had been banished during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Known for his outspoken critique of authoritarian systems and his advocacy for human rights, Ai Weiwei ranks among the most influential figures in contemporary art and activism. His wide-ranging practice — spanning art, architecture, film, and social engagement — merges traditional Chinese craftsmanship with global aesthetics and personal narrative.

Five Working Spaces on view at Aedes Architecture Forum until July 02, 2025 | image © Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk

FIVE WORKING SPACES AT AEDES ARCHITECTURE FORUM IN BERLIN

The exhibition ‘Five Working Spaces’ at Aedes Architecture Forum traces key chapters of the artist’s life through the lens of architecture, presenting five studios located in Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, and Montemor-o-Novo. Designed, commissioned, and inhabited by Ai Weiwei himself, each workspace mirrors shifting personal and political realities, documented through architectural models, photographs, drawings, and personal texts.

‘What’s similar is that all of them are tied to one individual – me – trying to fit myself into a working condition. But that condition is always changing. It’s more about connecting to my life, to the conditions I was given, the environments I lived in, how I grew up, how I became an architect, how I acted during moments of social and political change,’ he reflects in our conversation.

Ai Weiwei working on still life in his studio, Caochangdi, Beijing, 2000

His first studio in Longzhuashu, Beijing, redefined an austere concrete courtyard with a quiet gesture: planting Danish grass. The transformation was subtle, yet symbolically powerful — an act of reclaiming space through care. In the early 2000s, he designed his compound in the Caochangdi district, also in Beijing, which soon became a hub for artistic collaboration and large-scale installations. Both spaces would later be demolished by authorities, along with others: the Malu Studio near Shanghai in 2011, dismantled shortly after completion, and the Zuoyou Studio in 2018, destroying works still stored inside.

‘I’m used to irrational violence and no explanation. You cannot figure out the logic. You just take it and survive in it,’ the artist recounts, reflecting on these losses. ‘I grew up in that kind of environment. I was born into it. My father was exiled the year I was born. As demonstrated in the exhibition, I lived underground with my father — in a black hole.’

demolition of the Shanghai studio in Malu

In Berlin, Ai Weiwei established a studio in the cellar of a former brewery — an underground, introspective space that resonates with the years he spent in forced exile alongside his father in remote Xinjiang. Tucked away beneath the surface, for the artist, working underground is not only a physical experience, but also an emotional excavation, shaped by reflection and a return to memory.

Speaking to designboom, Ai Weiwei elaborates on this temporal shift: ‘I’m considered a contemporary artist, but my deepest emotions are connected to the past. I’m not familiar with German culture, because I don’t speak the language. I always relate my practice to the past. I appreciate human memory. Without memory, we don’t know who we are or where we come from. Then we can’t appreciate our current condition.’

inside Ai Weiwei’s studio in Berlin, 2018

The most recent of Ai Weiwei’s five working spaces lies in Montemor-o-Novo, a rural town in southern Portugal. The expansive wooden structure draws on traditional Chinese joinery, assembled without nails or screws. Designed with 100 regular columns and a rotated roof that echoes his demolished Malu Studio near Shanghai, the building stands as a monument to craftsmanship and cultural memory. This fifth studio, completed in 2023, resists categorization. Officially registered as a warehouse, it contains no defined program. 

‘Architecture is part of our body — our state of mind and physical condition,’ reviewing the decision to settle in Portugal, Ai Weiwei notes a change in pace and outlook. ‘I want a location that’s peaceful and quiet. A place where you can look at the sky and realize there are stars. In the morning, you can see the sun rays. In the evening, the moon comes up. That fits my psychological condition today.’

timberwork of the Portugal studio in Montemor-o-Novo | image © Yanan Li

Ai Weiwei’s Portugal studio in bird perspective

his fifth studio, completed in 2023

Montemor-o-Novo Studio, nine-part representation model | image © Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk

exhibition view | image © Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk

project info: 

name: Five Working Spaces

artist: Ai Weiwei | @aiww
location: Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin, Germany | @aedesberlin

dates: May 24 – July 02, 2025

The post ‘of course it’s political’: ai weiwei on working spaces in response to power, memory, and loss appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.