For the 10th London Design Festival 2012, Marion Friedmann Gallery will be curating Recollections, a show that touches on the sustainability of the past and its potential inherent treasure. The past as being stored in our memory and being treasured in our deep emotional senses and how it can be transferred into objects.
Two Austrian designers, Gisela Stiegler and Dejana Kabiljo, will be featured with scultpural furniture pieces, alongside four Mexican designers. For each individual and the designers the PAST and our reminsicences can be represented in various ways:
It can be forgotten or overlooked materials; a re-interpretation of something that has eventually been neglected or overlooked. Something dead brought back to live, something archived or stored, kept secret or secure, something rotten, old, damaged, something lost or out of fashion, a celebration and valuation of old traditions and techniques, old habits, customs...
Austrian artist GISELA STIEGLER has been working with polystyrene material since six years and has become a master in handling and transferring its materiality and status. She is going to create two monumental sculptural furniture pieces that take inspiration from historicist, forgotten graveyards with Historicism as an intrinsic reference to the past and its treasure. Also on show will be her acclaimed lamp series made out of polystyrene fish boxes.
Dejana Kabiljo works as an architect and designer in Vienna. She will present Occupy! Chair. This is a series of unique seating objects made out of mattress-springs from military beds from former Yugoslavia. The material will be given a special treatment with gold foil reflecting the delicacy of war-time, the perilous life of soldiers and those inherent heroic memories.
Mexican designer Ariel Rojo is a highly versatile, humorous and very political emerging design star. He will present a limited edition carpet with an aerial view of Mexico City by night. The project called 'Foco Rojo' refers to Mexico City's alertness being a focal point and hot spot for social and creative activity and change. His second piece will be an amphora family handcrafted in the famous ceramics technique and tradition from the city of Puebla, the so-called 'talavera'.
Thierry Jeannot, French-Mexican designer, has been working with plastic bottles since six years. Ever since he started designing in the 1980s (e.g with Thierry Mugler) he was attracted to unconventional materials. After last year's success of his magnificent PET-bottle chandelier, this year he will create a spectacular coffee-table, made out of thrown-away plastic and metal materials.
Other designers represented with small objects: Martacarmela Sotelo (Mexico City), Carla Fernandez (Mexico City), Valeria Florescano (Mexico City).
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MARION FRIEDMANN is London based curator and gallerist specialising in promoting designers from Austria and Latin America in the UK, with the intention of creating an axis and exchange structure between the continents.
For more information visit www.marionfriedmann.com
