DESIGN TRUST: Critically Homemade, currently featured at the GEOSCOPE 2 installation at the Venice Biennale and upcoming at the Guangdong Times Museum Exhibition from 17th July to 29th August 2021.

25. 6. 2021

Last February 2020, Design Trust, a grant funding and community platform established by the non-profit registered charity Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design, along with collaborators prepared a new community platform to reduce our social distance, with new collaborations and to inspire on the role of critical making within the home and the domestic landscape launched DESIGN TRUST: Critically Homemade in September 2020, a micro-initiative conceptualised by Marisa Yiu (Co-Founder / Executive Director of Design Trust). Created with a desire to reconnect and to reduce our social distancing “distance” during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, DESIGN TRUST: Critically Homemade fosters the idea that design can enact positive change in this challenging context. By inviting designers from both Hong Kong and beyond to channel their creativity and inspiration into unique homemade prototypes. “Escapism” by Soilworm Lai, STICKYLINE in collaboration with Vanissa Law is part of this initiative that addresses a pressing societal need, enabling designers and makers to build a dialogue with one another and our surrounding communities. With the preview launch “DESIGN TRUST: Critically Homemade”, as a prototype exhibition of 76 prototypes, created by 132 designers and collectives working together, this micro-initiative has expanded, showcasing the humbling power of the community to come together to support each other. 

 

Ongoing and chosen based on how the objects embody Design Trust’s core values as well as how they responded to the curatorial brief, selected designs are now online available to continue our fundraising efforts during COVID-19 pandemic, all proceeds to support Design Trust’s ongoing research and grant programmes, we thank you for your interest and invite you to #GiveToGiveMore at https://shop.designtrust.hk/catalog.php

 

This summer of 2021, DESIGN TRUST: Critically Homemade initiative has generated its contemporary significance when re-imaging post-pandemic possibilities and invited to participate in the Exhibition “Uselessness as Usage: Operation Delta #4: Architects in Action” by Curator: Hou Hanru; and Associate Curators: Liang Jianhua, Zhou Zheng, the team from Guangdong Times Museum. “Escapism” refers to the severance of contact and communication. 

 

As an active critique of the quarantine protocols enforced during COVID-19, Stickyline presents “Escapism” in collaboration with sound designer Vanissa Law. Using paper and geometry as the media to create this interactive sound device, it allows one to take a short break and to have true solitude.

 

 

This summer of 2021, DESIGN TRUST: Critically Homemade initiative has generated its contemporary significance when re-imaging post-pandemic possibilities and invited to participate in the Exhibition “Uselessness as Usage: Operation Delta #4: Architects in Action” by Curator: Hou Hanru; and Associate Curators: Liang Jianhua, Zhou Zheng, the team from Guangdong Times Museum, “Escapism” refers to the severance of contact and communication. 

 

As an active critique of the quarantine protocols enforced during COVID-19, Stickyline presents ‘Escapism’ in collaboration with sound designer Vanissa Law. Using paper and geometry as the media to create this interactive sound device, it allows one to take a short break and to have true solitude.

Date: 17th July - 29th August 2021

Participating Architects and Designers: Atelier Bow-Wow, Didier Fiúza Faustino, Furii Studio, Grass Stage, Huang Xiaopeng, Ange Kayifa, Stickyline with Vanissa Law, Lei Lijie, NZTT Sewing Co-op X Display Distribute, O-office Architects, Yasushi Yamaguchi, Zhang Peili

Opening: Saturday, 17th July, 2021 at 15:00 

Opening Hours: Tuesday - Sunday, 10:00 - 18:00 (except official public holidays)

Address: Times Museum, Times Rose Garden Phase III, Huangbian North Road, N. Baiyun Avenue, Guangzhou, China

Times Museum, Guangzhou, China by Rem Koolhaas & Alain Fouraux

Photo by Iwan Baan

©Domus 926 June 2009

“Escapism” by Soilworm Lai, STICKYLINE in collaboration with Vanissa Law part of DESIGN TRUST CRITICALLY HOMEMADE programme.

Excerpt from Times Museum: 

About Uselessness as Usage: Operation Delta #4: Architects in Action

Ever since the Pearl River Delta was integrated into globalization, it has set off waves of rapid urbanization and radical lifestyle transformations. The Guangdong Times Museum is an institution born in such context. In terms of architecture and urban planning, this expansion process unfolded with stunning speed and creativity, essentially lending to pragmatic results that often appear unconventional. After more than a decade of growth and experimentation, now is the time to explore and apprehend the significance of this unique historical change. Moreover, the present is also a critical moment to envision what comes next, which allows us to imagine other forms of experiments: to open up a kind of possibility for the “impractical” and to explore ideas and practices of the “useless”.

In light of this, the team from Times Museum have invited three groups of architects from France, Japan, and Guangzhou area, all of whom will jointly initiated a design-related project in the Pearl River Delta. It will be an on-going exhibition that ultimately aims to provoke new modes of communication, dialogical behaviors, and creations of social and cultural communities.  

As a new extension of the Times Museum’s “Operation Delta”, this exhibition project follows the rapid and somewhat dramatic changes that have occurred in recent years in the Pearl River Delta, its surrounding regions, and the world at large. It emerges from the research, reflections, discussions, and new imaginings in response to this changing reality, and attempts to provide an open-ended, tentative “architectural answer”. Rather than seeking to be useful, effective, and “beautiful”, the exhibition creates conditions and structures that relate to, or even contradict, the new conditions of (self-)limitation derived from shifting realities, and to share them with the public in order to stimulate reflection, criticism, and reinvention of the utility and meaning of the architectural, as well as urban, social, and social conditions.

Further afield, “DESIGN TRUST: Critically Homemade” is also featured as one of the contributors in the installation GEOSCOPE 2 by Daniel López-Pérez & Jesse Reiser,  as an evidence of the diversity in how we think, act, and interact with one another.

 

Ranging from Pritzker Prize winning architect Kazuyo Sejima to radical ecologist and philosopher Timothy Morton. Visitors to the installation at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini will find themselves enveloped in a panoramic multimedia experience projected over 42 individual faces including: Marisa Yiu, Satyan Devadoss, Karl Chu, Ulrika Karlsson, Pablo Kobayashi, Urtzi Grau, AKT II, Cal Fires Technosylva, Nerea Calvillo, Ciro Najle, Reiser + Umemoto (with Julian Harake, Zaid Kashef Alghata and Yumi Chu), Tyler Armstrong, Elena M’Bouroukounda, Luis Muñoz, Daniel López-Pérez, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Timothy Morton, David Ruy, Forensic Architecture, Stan Allen, Jeffrey Kipnis, Kazuyo Sejima, Erhard An-He Kinzelbach, Elisa Iturbe. Comprised of an international cast of contributors, Geoscope 2: Worlds generates a complex, kaleidoscopic ecosystem, a tableaux of world-thinking on the edge.

 

Responding to the main Curatorial theme “How will we live together?” curated by architect and scholar Hashim Sarkis. “We need a new spatial contract. In the context of widening political divides and growing economic inequalities, we call on architects to imagine spaces in which we can generously live together”, Sarkis has commented. Responding to the theme Daniel López-Pérez, and designers Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architects and many more created Geoscope 2 – a split-sphere multimedia installation rethinking R. Buckminster Fuller’s geoscopes, it showcases contemporary voices inside and outside architecture.