Beyond Language

“Beyond Language is a unique installation displaying new, never-before-seen works in glass and acrylic by Jumbo (New York, USA), Müsing-Sellés (New York, USA), Objects of Common Interest (New York, USA / Athens, Greece), Ries (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Rodrigo Bravo (Santiago, Chile). Design, by etymological origin a humanist concept rooted in the act of projecting, speculating, and ordering, has been historically bound to concretize the intangible, the abstract, into a set of logical hermeneutical signs to be deciphered. Defined as a communicative field that sets traps in our way, pretending to be part of a syntax that needs to be mastered, what happens when design is no longer interested in hylomorphism and the fetishization of form? Chamber commissioned a series of works that focus purely on techne, understood here in a new way as a perennial activity interested in the manifestation of differences and new realities. Beyond Language focuses on the act of making and not designing; not with deceits, appearances, representations, but with the knowledge developed through direct, practical and sensual contact with the material world. This new interest in practice rather than theory escapes the limits of virtuosic craft and champions instead the aesthetics of the anonymous, egoless, effortless, incomplete, imperfect, primitive, humble, miserable, impoverished, (de) sign-less, comfortless, irregular, naive, rough, obscured, improvised, worn, mismatched, amateur, and finally, the singular. What is at stake is the revaluation of western culture by which concepts of high and low are questioned. We hope to re-position Design as a confusing array of surfaces that refract blurred visions. We intend to reconceive Design in Foucault’s words, as a heterotopic space “where surface gives way to depth and depth is revealed as illusory”. All five studios creating all original works, North and South of the Equator specifically for NOMAD Venice, use glass and acrylic as materials to express gestures that, as Anne Holtrop has pointed out, surround actions with an ‘atmosphere’ and in this case, disclose a rich, heterogenous global landscape with diverging sociopolitical and economic implications. What might have been considered failed experiments in traditional circles of past eras perhaps reveal a fundamental relation with the material, form and the act of making that grounds us deeply in physical reality.” Juan García Mosqueda