We are proud to introduce Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Studio Formafantasma as the Heads of a new master’s department.
The master’s department GEO—DESIGN is a further expansion of the GEO—DESIGN exhibition platform launched in 2018, which explores the social, economic, territorial, and geopolitical forces shaping design today. The master’s department will acknowledge the legacy of industrial production as a fundamental source for the expertise and agency of the designer. At the same time, it will problematise and address industrial production’s contribution to environmental and social instability and its incompatibility with models of sustainable or even survivable futures.
Italian design duo Andrea Trimarchi (1983) and Simone Farresin (1980) are the founders of Amsterdam-based Studio Formafantasma. Their interest in product design developed while studying at DAE in the Contextual Design Master (formerly IM), which they graduated from in July 2009. Since then, Formafantasma has developed a body of work characterised by experimental material investigations and the exploration of issues such as the relationship between tradition and local culture, the ecological responsibilities of design and the significance of objects as cultural conduits.
In conversation with Formafantasma
Anna Winston (former editor at Dezeen and student in the MA The Critical Inquiry Lab at DAE) sat down with Formafantasma to talk about their ideas and hopes for the new GEO—DESIGN department. You can find the interview here.
GEO—DESIGN course
As a department, GEO—DESIGN will grow as an octopus, with a complex central consciousness and individual far-reaching tentacles. Students will develop research and communication tools to facilitate a deeper understanding of today’s complex reality but most of all to propose transformative interventions through design and its material, technical, social, and discursive possibilities. In order to achieve this, GEO—DESIGN assembles a framework of diverse knowledge —from material histories to cultural world-views, from humanism to ecology, from plant and animal rights to artificial intelligence, from the Earth’s core to outer space. The department will be embedded in trans-disciplinary collaboration to increase the scale and depth of the research, but also to take an ethical position that respects the expertise, lived experience, skills, resources, or communal significance of individuals and institutions in other fields.
If you want to read more about the department please go the website.
GEO—DESIGN at The Arena
If you are interested in the new master's department, please visit the Arena on Sunday October 20 at 3pm as part of the Graduation Show 2019 (DDW ticket needed). Formafantasma will speak together with Creative Director Joseph Grima and GEO—DESIGN exhibition curator Martina Muzi.
They will discuss the methodologies that will be applied in the new DAE master's department GEO—DESIGN. Furthermore, they will talk about how GEO—DESIGN unfolds as a practice, about specific graduate work from the GS19 show and about examples of the exhibition 'Junk. All That Is Solid Melts into Trash'. This exhibition will take place during Dutch Design Week at the Van Abbemuseum.
The Arena is located at the Campinaterrein, Kanaaldijk-Zuid during Dutch Design Week. The full programme will be published here in the course of next week.
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