The call for taking part in the 5th edition of the Venice Design Biennial is now open.
The theme of this edition, proposed by the curators and founders of the project Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei, is Extinction / Salvation.
We will all become extinct. Reluctantly or joyfully.
Or perhaps on the contrary, we will all be saved. Thanks to the magnificent fates of science, or the advent of a god adapted to the standards of the Anthropocene.
The apocalyptic tone is so diffuse that everyone defending themselves adopts their favourite conditioned reflex: nihilistic condescension, activist rebellion, messianism, denial, indifference.
Design is in a unique position. It has to face the neo-anti-capitalist imperative: do not produce, do not reproduce, do not consume. But it can only do so from an intrinsic residual belief in objects as bearers of meaning in everyday life (with an animistic afflatus well summed up by Emanuele Coccia when he says that 'home is the space in which all objects exist as subjects').
In this era of polarisation, design cannot embody either pole.
It can seek to rebel against certain productive/extractive logics, accompanying systems of production and fruition towards less exasperated logics. It can invoke a more intimate salvation, limited to the personal sphere, fulfilling but constitutively inadequate.
Less, better: is this the only, modest, way left open? Or perhaps it is the only one we can see here and now, and we need someone to make us look beyond our horizons (always too Western, ça va sans dire).
The fifth edition of the Venice Design Biennial, Extinction / Salvation, invites us to use extinction and salvation as polarised lenses through which to alternately observe contemporary design. Knowing that neither filter lets us see reality in all its wavelengths. And also knowing that the filters are interchangeable at will. Jumping from one side to the other, not fossilising, practising listening and ironic awareness, drawing up a manual of survival techniques and rewriting it again and again.
The exhibition programme of Extinction / Salvation will be divided into two sections: Venice Design Biennial | Glass and Venice Design Biennial | Collectible.