Design as we speak
[PAST EVENT]
22.06.19 → 28.09.19
Design as We Speak by the artist and designer Stephane Barbier Bouvet is the first exhibition in a series of projects at
Grand Hall in Zaventem Ateliers, curated by Dimitri Jeurissen, with the aim of critically approaching art, design and craft.The exhibition develops from Barbier Bouvet’s ongoing engagement with design as an application, a form of knowledge and a critical comment on the field of art and design. His design approach is reminiscent of En rachâchant, a 1982 short film, based on a work by Marguerite Duras, by Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
The film is a humorous comment on education: its lead character, the child Ernesto, decides to remain a minor, to persist as such, by refusing to learn anything that he does not know already. When his teacher points to a pinned butterfly under glass on the classroom wall and ask the child to name it, he replies: ‘It is a crime’. As the scene suggests, the refusal to learn, or the processes of non-assimilation and unlearning, can reorganize visual consensus. Or, as Proust put it, ‘The only true voyage (…) would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.’ Barbier Bouvet works along those lines, upending the market logic that maintains that the purpose of knowledge is the generation of economic value – a logic that dominates not only the field of education, but also those of art and architecture.
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Stephane Barbier Bouvet
© Lydie Nesvadba
