Oracles du design — Un regard sur la collection design du Centre national des arts plastiques — La Gaîté lyrique — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 3 → August 16, 2015

“Design can be seen as an oracle that reveals our fate to us. It is lightweight for easy travel, plump so as to protect us, bourgeois to provide reassurance, intimate to better entice us. It is meditative to appease us, figurative to delight us, absurd to challenge us, natural so that we form attachments. It is virtual so as to transport us.”

Lidewij Edelkoort, curator of the exhibition

10 themes, 10 narratives to tell the story of these objects-oracles

Each story communicates a lifestyle and a desire for self-expression : Simple • Humble • Curious • Inflated • Abstract • Naïve • Nomadic • Mutant • Organic • Archaic

Our world is changing, our lifestyles are evolving, technology is disrupting our daily life. What could possibly embody the metamorphoses of our epoque better than contemporary design?

Behind a chair, a table or a vase, there always hides an object filled with stories and symbols. Some become oracles, messengers capable of shedding light on our moods and our relationship to the world.

What if we were to lend an ear to these messengers of a new genre? “Ever since the dawn of time, people have been consulting oracles to make sense of the changes in their lives, to understand what is about to happen to them” says Lidewij Edelkoort. “And the CNAP’s design collection, because it brings together a great number of iconic works in the field of design, of objects that have achieved cult-like status, is perfectly able to play just such a role. The objects in the exhibit were born out of desire, progress or need. As such, they represent a small fragment of culture, part of an era.”

La Gaîté lyrique and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) collaborate and invite Lidewij Edelkoort, trend forecaster, to take a unique and original look at the CNAP’s collection of design and decorative arts.