Formal exercise

The Blueproject Foundation presents Formal Exercise, the third exhibition of the call for artists 2015, by David Mutiloa. The proposal builds on a series of designs that Ettore Sottsass originally outlined in a catalogue in 1979. In it, Sottsass was thinking about his intention to retake the experiences provided by the Italian radical design of the previous decades, to get stock of them and explore new ways for the criticism from the specific field of design. However, at the end of his reflection, Sottsass also exposed some doubt, the possibility that everything would work in a different way that he was assuming.

David Mutiloa analyzed the work of Sottsass on the 80’s, as if, naively, instead of reactivating this critical capacity, he had achieved just the opposite, feeding the economical machine itself with new objects, textures and ornaments. He also understands time as a turning point in which modernity begins to dissolve when the happy face of creative utopia begins to change into despair and helplessness, in awareness that history is the history of irreversible automatism.

Formal Exercise presents a series of objects constructed from these fragments. Through his proposal, Mutiloa tries to retrieve Sottsass designs and, by subjecting them to a process of abstraction in a cryptic and decontextualized way, to put himself between the reactivation of a critical component of his political program and his trivialization or failure in its transformation, in a series of abstract volumes and outdated styles in an exhibition space.