Croatia will be presented at the first London Design Biennale this year, administered by the Croatian Ministry of Culture and the Croatian Designers Association (HDD). The curator of the Croatian concept “Utopian Collective” is Maša Milovac.
London Design Biennale, organized in partnership with Jaguar, will take place at the Somerset House in London from September 7-27, bringing together representatives from over 30 countries around the world. This is the first edition of the event which has the ambition to become the most representative European exhibition in the field of design.
The theme of the first biennale is associated with the anniversary of the first edition of the book “Utopia” by Thomas More (1516). The organizers have invited participants to collectively design under the theme “Utopia by Design” through which designers will examine the timeliness of utopian ideas and tackle one of the fundamental questions of humanity today.
The curatorial concept by Maša Milovac and her team is titled “Utopian Collective” – based on the deposition of the expected and known. “Utopian Collective” was conceived as an unconventional experimental process with an aim to explore the work collective and the work in a collective – with synergy and cooperation as one of the formats for design.
“Collectives have long been a source of utopian principles and practices — and Croatia has a history of producing them. Curator Maša Milovac invited eight emerging designers to join forces and form the Utopian Collective to draw on this ethos of cooperation. As well as presenting a set of objects produced by the designers, the result of a series of workshops, the collective interprets the process itself as an end result. It explores collaborative design as a possible response to the individualistic practices set up as imperatives of competitiveness in consumer society and a neoliberal market environment,” states the London Design Biennale website.
The team of designers for “Utopian Collective” are Maja Čule, Mauro Ferlin, Hrvoje Hiršl, Maja Kolar, Mauro Massarotto, Maša Poljanec, Oleg Šuran, and Hrvoje Živčić.
More information can be found here.
