Aldo Bakker at mudac
Lausanne’s mudac is hosting Dutch designer Aldo Bakker’s first exhibition in Switzerland, and calling for participants in a unique Domaine de Boisbuchet glass workshop.
“My products are not designed for one person or for one interpretation, they are made for everybody, to open up the mind and the senses,” Aldo Bakker once described his work to Domus magazine. The singular Dutch designer’s PAUSE exhibition accentuates these conceptual, sensual qualities of his work by inviting visitors to slow down and see. Curated by Bakker’s studio and mudac curator Susanne Hilpert Stuber, the exhibition is a choreographed landscape of his unique forms.
“Over the last 30 years,” reads the exhibition text, Bakker “has built up a radical body of work. It is driven by painstaking and applied research into form, and is very personal and often unclassifiable in its stylistic vocabulary. He has turned his back on functionalism and post-modernism alike, and is not aligned with any other movement or trend.”
Following the first phase of the exhibition at the Centre for Innovation and Design in Grand Hornu, Belgium, in early 2016, the mudac exhibition has been completely reconsidered to fit the museum. Bakker’s studio has staged the work to emphasise his methodology of evaluating, comparing and combining objects over years before maturing enough to leave the studio. The result is seen in his objects that seem simultaneously familiar and never seen before, almost material archetypes. Forms are reduced to verbs, colours to essences, creation to forces, objects to personality, materials to pictograms, thought to pauses… ultimately blurring the distinction between art and design.
Simultaneously, mudac is also calling for participants for its Ol-Factory workshop from July 19 to 29. To be held at Domaine de Boisbuchet, the workshop will be led by Studio Glithero from the UK and two glassblowers from the Corning Museum of Glass in New York (who were previously involved in the Glass Is Tomorrow project). Participants will have the opportunity to use Boisbuchet’s experimental wood-fired kiln that makes it possible to create objects with an unprecedented scent experience. The aim is to produce glass and ceramic prototypes for inclusion in an exhibition at mudac in 2018.
“The participants of the workshop will be facing many creative challenges – they will need to please the visitors’ noses and eyes in shape and touch, find original ways to contain scent while allowing it to develop and finally make sure to provide a secure display for an exhibition’s installation,” underlines mudac co-director Claire Favre Maxwell. “We are sure that these ‘limitations’ will trigger the participants’ imagination and we can’t wait to see what they come up with!”
To be one of the four lucky participants, enter through the Boisbuchet’s Instagram account before March 15, using the #OlfactoryContest hashtag.
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