Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne
This year the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne is celebrating its 10th edition focusing on the mutations and shifting paradigms of work. The Biennale aims to introduce design from around the world prompting conversations that question our present and future ways of life.
This edition will present a giant experimental workshop focused on the changes in the way we work. A third generation of the Biennial will be launched in 2017 to create a new dynamic for transforming Saint-Etienne into a pace of experimentation in new uses.
Detroit, UNESCO city of design is this year’s guest of honour, where AKOAKI collective will highlight the mutations of the resilient city through various presentations. This will be presented through The Discovering Detroit UNESCO: City of Design that seeks to revitalise perceptions of the City of Detroit to reflect its urban transformation. The Akoaki studio, based in Detroit, explores the new resources available to design to catalyse positive, fair change. By setting up social and collective initiatives in complex and economically unstable urban scenarios, the studio works to alter people’s perceptions and outline new methods that bring back to life the hidden places and stories that have gone untold. Thanks to radically collaborative processes, research specific to the places involved and concentration on locally rooted cultural activity, Akoaki reveals how the inhabitants of Detroit are reinventing the ways they live and work. The studio’s recent activities, conducted in collaboration with musicians, artists, urban farmers and cultural players, are being transported to Saint-Étienne, where this public process is ongoing.
The event Human Cities: Challenging the City Scale was led by the Cité du design from 2014 to 2018 as part of the European Union’s Creative Europe/Culture program. The project challenges the “urban scale” and looks at the co-creation of the city. Saint-Etienne is distinguished by its nature as a creative laboratory, where the players working in the field develop action and methodologies with local people to transform the city. The Cité du Design has created a tool for stimulating and fostering contacts between all the local sources of energy and creativity. A handful of collectives have proposed initiatives including Ici Bientôt which aims at revitalizing vacant and active shops with the involvement of design agencies, recycling collectives, and educational organisations. Hypermatière will see co-creation schemes with the inhabitants of the Crêt de Roch neighborhood to support the developments in Rue Neyron, which has seen much demolition in this main street.
Christophe Marchand, a designer from Switzerland presents Best of Métier. He will put together an exhibition with 60 tools that demonstrate why they exist, who they are aimed at and how they are produced. By selecting the best tool for the best results, he will look at the tools for producing certain objects. This selection will appear in the exhibition which will highlight their usage and the tool of ‘excellence’ will be presented as the best product for the best result. The object for the user as the equipment for his own performance, explained Marchand, is a theme that emphasises the effect of the product designed, taking a fighter pilot’s helmet as an example.”
Design & Cinéma sees a collection of art, design, objects from the Musée d’art moderne et contemporaine, films by designers, installations and more. Curators Alexandra Midal and Sébastien Delot focus on four close-ups revealing the directions taken by designers in relation to cinema. Four areas will be explored including Cinéma – Usine, which looks at viewing contraptions created during the 19th century; Vers la Lune, looks at a freeze frame on Georges Meliès’ A trip to the moon (1902), the first science fiction film. The moon is presented as a poetic space. Leçon de cinema sees designer Roger Tallon discussing the importance of cinema in his training, and design d’art et d’essai will involve a miniature cinema films made by designers will show the extent to which the language of cinema can be used to reactivate a distant territory to stimulate creativity and refresh design.
Les Scènes urbaines is a new look at ongoing changes in the landscape and social developments.
During the Biennale, the town of Saint-Chamond will bring its urban fabric to life with a mixture of diverse cultural events. This project will accompany the vast urban renewal project that is underway in the town, inviting audiences to see the changes in the landscape and the ongoing social developments with new eyes. From street art, to choreographed hip-hop at the old naval steelworks site, this event will reveal the connections that the town has with the past and how design is serving a great purpose for transformation in Saint-Chamond.
The 2017 Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne presents a powerful platform to demonstrate the importance of design on a transforming city and the role of design in our daily lives, from the very small to the very large.
Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne 2017 commences on Thursday 9 March 2017 and concludes on Sunday 9 April 2017.
www.biennale-design.com/saint-etienne
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