At home: mobilising contemporary design history through curatorial practice

In April 2022 "At Home: panoramas de nos vies domestiques" opened at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne. Co-curated by three design historians and curators, Penny Sparke, Jana Scholze and Catharine Rossi, the exhibition explored the values and meanings of the home today and examined how designers, architects and artists have deployed these concepts in their work. This paper positions At Home as a case study in contemporary design history.

Based on a collaborative curatorial approach and focused on mobilising design’s past to interpret and communicate the present, the exhibition sought to show the relevance of design history to an international, local and non-specialist audience.

The curators organised the exhibition into five themed sections: Utopia, Shelter, Identities, Well-being and Connectivity. Through a selection of international artworks, designs, architectural projects, photographs and films showing design-based responses to these issues past and present, the curators set out to stimulate reflection on the ways the domestic interior interacts with its inhabitants and the external world. They sought to articulate designers’ and inhabitants’ growing concerns about the climate emergency, widespread inequality, the erosion of the boundary between the private and public self and the challenging aspects of today’s technological advances, and how these affect the inhabitants of the domestic sphere (Taylor et al., 2023).

Conceived before Covid-19, researched during it, and exhibited in its aftermath,
At Home also reflected on the home’s changing meaning in light of the pandemic.

The curators sought to include everyday and familiar design objects alongside critical, speculative and political projects in order to facilitate the audience’s engagement. The latter included examples of Italian design from the 1960s to 1980s.

Recognising the repeated citation of these designers’ practice in Italian design historiography, we sought to provide a different perspective by contextualising these architects’ work in light of contemporary designerly concerns.

This paper seeks to examine the relationship between the history of design and its contemporary interpretation, how the developing realm of curatorial research methods and approaches can further the relevance of design history today and how design history can inform curatorial practices and vice versa.