Marking sixty years since the inception of the Ljubljana-based BIO – the first design biennale in Europe – BIO28 entices us into the perfumed world of flowers. Long associated with allure and desirability, the symbolism of flowers has been used to codify, conceal and communicate issues of colonialism, sexuality and gender, as explained by artist-curator and professor Alexandra Midal
FEDERICA ZAMBELLETTI / KOOZ Alexandra, let’s start from BIO28’s intriguing title this year: Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? What prompted this theme and what is the significance of such a topic upon BIO's 60th anniversary?
ALEXANDRA MIDAL In fact the title is twofold. The first part, ‘double agent’, is somewhat mysterious as a name while the second one, ‘do you speak flower?’, might be even more so. What is really at stake with this edition of BIO is that it's more like a manifesto rather than an exhibition of what’s on the market; it is intended to challenge the idea and field of industrial design. The message of the title is to really deal with the notion of hidden languages. The terminology, in fact, is coming not from cryptography – meaning that a text is mysterious and which cannot be deciphered – but more from the ancient art of stenography, whereby it is images and patterns that carry secret messages.
So why do we deal with secrecy now? The topic, in fact, addresses the way that women or female designers have been cancelled, eliminated and redacted from the history of design – alongside other minorities, or even majorities. It has to do with rewriting the history of design, something that I've been working on for several years, as per my book Design by Accident: For a New History of Design (Sternberg Press, 2019). It also comes from a passing conversation I had a few years ago with the artist Thomas Demand, in which he told me about something that was puzzling him. Allegedly – it was not confirmed – that instead of using photographic portraits in public space, politicians in North Korea were being represented by images of flowers. Right away, I was struck by the idea. I imagined that if one is killed, for instance, people need not know; citizens could believe that they are still alive, allowing for the development of propaganda and a particular telling of stories. As a strategic move, I found it interesting – even if it was also frightening.
The topic addresses the way that women or female designers have been cancelled, eliminated and redacted from the history of design – alongside other minorities, or even majorities.
These questions of hiding, secrecy and coded messages arise from lots of things, but maybe the most crucial one that we are talking about at BIO is the question of women in the design discipline, among other things. I don't like to use the word invisible; if not invisible, it's the status that women have been given. Even if we consider that we are getting more power, more freedom, and that we feel a sense of progress in the representation and the work of women, I'm very worried about what has been happening over the last couple of years. That really shows how fragile things really are, for things that we thought we had won across several fights over time. Working on the history of the presence of women, I learned that there are several periods – all the way back to the Middle Ages – where women had way more power; then they lose it, they get it and lose it, and that happens all the time. Nothing can be taken for granted. Today, we could talk about femicide; in France, for instance, one woman is killed every three days. I think we are very much in danger in many countries across the world, some in which you cannot speak in the street, where you cannot sing. I'm not talking about the larger abstract ideas or structures; I'm just saying that there is a danger there.
Questions of hiding, secrecy and coded messages arise from lots of things, but maybe the most crucial one that we are talking about at BIO is the question of women in the design discipline
As a scholar, I've always worked on the relationship between politics and design; for me, design has less to do with the question of form and standardisation of goods for a market than it has to do with political issues. I have two examples to give you. One is that the beginning of design as a discipline was not invented by white men in Great Britain, as historian Nikolaus Pevsner claimed in his book Pioneers of the Modern Movement, published 1936 and reprinted many times since. For me, it has much more to do with American female thinkers in the 1840s, such as Catherine Beecher, who explained that proper domestic organisation would not only save time and fatigue – since that was one of the key concerns of the time – but also that it would also help to stop slavery, as you would not need to have slaves working in your home. This is before the 1861 Abolition of Slavery, mind you. That's one thing that is extremely important as a background of this Biennale. The other intention is to show that for a long time, design is a discipline which relies not only on politics, but also on intermediality. From a very early stage in its development, design has been linked with films, for example – but I'm not talking about the way that cinema is linked with photography. Designers have used so many tools and mediums in order to express themselves; I thought it was really important for the 60th anniversary of BIO to remind us that design is the discipline of the modern time. Design is dealing with important political issues that are about our life today; it’s not about making chairs and vases – which are fine – but way more broad, more interesting, more exciting.
KOOZ Going back to that origin story, it's interesting that flowers are associated with male political figures; at BIO, the flower is used to imply the woman. Can you get into how the flower relates to the figure of the woman, both within a larger feminist theory and in terms of this specific exhibition?
AM If we look at ancient Greek mythology – when we read about the metamorphoses of flowers in Ovid, for instance, the male characters become flowers. This differs from the 19th century, starting with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; we see a transformation of the figure of the woman that is really aligned with notions of nature and of flowers. You can find it in poetry, in the arts, and of course, in design and applied arts. In every segment of the arts, the female figure comes to be defined by the flower. It's extremely evident, not only in literature and poetry, but through the eyes of the Art Nouveau movement. As one example among others, in Art Nouveau paintings, illustrations, decorative arts everywhere, there is always this idea of women as flowers, which puts them in a very specific situation. They are the muses inspiring artists; they are also condemned to a timeline that is as ephemeral as flowers. Art of the time also shows women depicted in their gardens or surrounded by flowers, implying where one belongs in terms of social life – that is to say, better there than in public space. All these layers tell us so much about what has happened since the 19th century – from the Victorian era until today – about this representation of the woman embodied by floral aspects. One of the platforms for BIO is called Cattleyas – which are a type of lily, as mentioned by French writer Marcel Proust in his description of the relationship between two main characters in his famous work, In Search of Lost Time, itself a major title in literature. The fact that intercourse between two people is illustrated by cattleyas – you can find things like this everywhere in language; if you question your vocabulary today, I'm sure you’ll find the same thing: an interchangeability between flowers and vocabulary around the floral and what woman is. This ranges from decay to blossoming – language says it all.
If you really look at things, you realise that women have been associated with the idea of flowers mostly as a means of commodification.
If you really look at things, you realise that women have been associated with the idea of flowers mostly as a means of commodification. That's why we also show some commodified bodies in the exhibition, such as those by the architect, designer and photographer Carlo Molino. I've been working a lot on Carlo Molino, and it's revealing to see that such questions seem never to have been raised; the position of the woman in his work and writings, including but not limited to his two published novels, is really something that should be scrutinised.
Women, too, have been using this floral coding; not only to express their emotions, as in the floriography of the 19th century, but also as a hidden language: Victorian lesbian women, for instance, used a specific colour to express their identity, namely lavender or violet – both also the names of flowers. At the same time, Oscar Wilde, deployed a green carnation to demonstrate his homosexuality to those who knew how to read it. Beyond these significations of identity, one aspect I would highlight for this Biennale is precisely that this floral modality – intended and supposed to imprison women to a certain role or position – became the means that women used to express their political struggles, towards developing a sense of freedom and power. One example from the exhibition is not by an artist but rather a politician: Rosa Luxembourg. The first name already says a lot; Rosa from Rosalia. She was originally from a wealthy Polish-Jewish family; interestingly, in 1897 she defended her PhD on the outcomes of industrialisation on the environment. She's also one of the few who really called out Karl Marx, as in his criticism of capitalism, he never mentions the spectre of colonisation.
This floral modality – intended and supposed to imprison women to a certain role or position – became the means that women used to express their political struggles.
What really interests me with Rosa Luxembourg is that although she's very well known, she maintained this botanical interest for many years. Before she fell into politics – and I used this word deliberately as she claimed to have found love and politics at the same time – Luxemburg was working on matters of zoology and ecology. It's well known that she ran an herbarium for many years, with more than 70 notebooks full of dried flowers and a rich correspondence on the same matters while she was in jail. For years, everything I've read – by scholars from all over the world – implied that she was inclined towards flowers because she was a woman and, moreover, a bit depressed. Her interest is reduced to the assumption that flowers would soothe a difficult life, and that’s why she studied them.
Yet in fact – as I discovered through more deep scholarship – she was still in charge of the Spartacus League, a political group which she helped to establish; in fact, she used flowers in correspondence with the secretary, Mathilde Jacob, and with all her friends. She renamed her friends with the names of flowers such that, in fact, the herbarium she maintained in jail became a way for her to give instructions for writing a manifesto, taking a strong political position. Under the scrutiny of the jail, she couldn't speak out. However, despite the fact that no one has fully deciphered it, it is clear that she was using flowers in coded communication; working around censorship through a language of flowers. That story expresses exactly what is at stake with this project. You might say this has nothing to do with design and I would agree: that's why this show is broader than that.
But if we look, for instance, at another work by Ray and Charles Eames, also exhibited in the show, similar and parallel questions arise. For instance, at a certain point the firm Hermann Miller approached the Eames to design a secret visual system or symbol, to be used as a certification of authenticity, as well as to float their company on the Stock Exchange. The Eames then instructed the secretary of the director to go pick flowers from the gardens at New Zealand, Michigan, where the Herman Miller headquarters are located. The Secretary made a bouquet, sent on dry ice to the Eames office in Pasadena. On receipt, Ray Eames then asked Charles to take a photo, and this photo is what becomes trademarked, copyrighted – almost like an NFT.
It’s really about codes and secret languages. Really, even the Eameses declared that they want to focus on information design. You might recognise images from the seven-screen display of the film ‘Glimpses of the USA’, designed for the 1958 American National exhibition in Moscow. Supported by the American government, this event was certainly an act of propaganda, expressing the grandeur of the United States to the Soviet nation. For the last image, the US government wanted to display seven American flags floating in the air. The Eameses refused to do that, ending instead on a close crop of a blue flower commonly known as the Forget-Me-Not. It really extended an open hand to the people in the USSR at the time, offering a dialogue; there is a subtlety in the way that this symbol was used. I'm taking the Eames as only one of many, many of the various projects shown within this Biennale.
KOOZ It's beautiful to hear you threading these topics together; from a question about speech, moving to manifestos, through vocabulary and representative ideas, even to philosophy as a form of language. How is this language rendered accessible through the exhibition? And how do all of these stories – some historical, others political; some rooted in an object, others ephemeral – come together in space; how are visitors invited to relate to them?
AM I'm very happy that you raised this question, as what I'm telling you is absolutely not the way you would enter the exhibition. As a curator, what I want is to create shows that are not necessarily chronological or thematic collections, where one travels from one room to the next. When you enter the show at BIO28, you will encounter a sculpture by Anna Zemánková of a flower, speaking to you. A voice in English, then in Slovene, welcomes you and tells you what is at stake there. That's how you enter each of the three main spaces. The second thing is that you don't have to read everything; it's not an exhibition to read, it's an exhibition to see and with which to interact. The third point is one I'll explain in a little more detail: overall, this is an exhibition where, as a visitor, you're invited to do your own investigation; (some) answers are revealed at the end. It's like a mystery story or adventure in which designs act like the ‘McGuffin’. To be very explicit – let's do it, let's be generous – at the end of the show, there is a big room titled Hidden in Plain Sight. You would have seen some flowers of Rosa Luxembourg in other parts of the show; they might seem pretty or even beautiful; you might note that it’s nice that she had an herbarium. But then you have the reveal: you've been fooled if you thought, for example, that this herbarium was a distraction from her depression. In fact, through this herbarium she developed these coded messages.
Yet another work from the last room is a huge carpet designed by Kapwani Kiwanga, who presented their work at the Venice Biennale, in the Canadian pavilion. The monumental carpet, seven metres long, depicts the baobab flower; in fact it was produced for display alongside an exhibition of the Belgian designer Victor Horta’s art nouveau. In Kiwanga’s work is a critique of the Belgium art nouveau and the motifs used by Horta. In fact, the flowers and lianas represent the colonisation of the Congo, perpetrated by King Leopold II of Belgium. Specific flowers and plants, including the baobab and the rubber liana, were brought back from the Congo, later becoming prominent motifs in Belgian Art Nouveau. The last room shows how such a mundane topic as flower – such an everyday part of life, need not stop at a discussion of sustainability. In fact, the biggest secrets and the most interesting things lie hidden in everyday life, rather than in the extraordinary. The Hidden in Plain Sight room tells you that what is visually obvious is not so easy to decipher; at the end, we unveil everything. Hopefully, some of the works that you’ve seen so far – which may have seemed cool, beautiful, intriguing – have remained with you. The final treat is giving the visitor absolutely all the tools to be in charge of deciphering these things; that’s what it’s about, how to decipher things.
I'm not interested in doing a show of products. I'm much more interested in intertwining things, in intermediality.
I've been asked about the fact that this Biennale is not about product design. I have nothing against that, but I'm not interested in doing a show of products. I'm much more interested in intertwining things, in intermediality. I think it's really interesting to see a whole generation of young designers who were raised in the design world; truly they understood that if there is a place where you can really produce work and be extremely investigative, the art world might be a platform with the same work. It's extremely interesting to see these moves; in the design world, you're often not supposed to do things that are outside of very narrow bandwidth – which has nothing to do with what history tells us about what design was and still is. The art world is much more permissive; it's a question of power, of status, of institution – and I think it's not by chance that I'm talking about that while I'm dealing with these issues and presenting them at this Biennale.
I am very much interested in the definition of design in its grey zones. I've even been writing a book about design and serial killers – not that I advocate designers as murderers! But there is a sense of treachery in the sense that Vilem Flusser said about the designer as a perfidious person that is not interested in the rules. And one of the examples he uses is to say that when a designer invents a tool – for instance, a lever – you are trying to defy a law of physics; to lift a stone, you have to defy gravity. In this kind of intelligence, this kind of “cheating” – albeit not in a moral sense – he uses a moral vocabulary to define what is the position of design and designer. And I think the question of intelligence and defying rules has been taken out of the game. The modernist idea of designer as hero is highly problematic. Don't get me wrong; I don't want to say designers are bad. It’s more profound, more philosophical than that. Designers are not here to save the planet; if they had that power, we would have known about it by now. I think, on the contrary, that designers can have great reflections about the world and the way things are, and that’s way more important from my point of view.
KOOZ Throughout our conversation, you have layered so many narratives, so many histories crossing time, scale and geography. You started off the conversation talking about the exhibition as a manifesto. How do these multiplicities come together in a manifesto?
AMMy hero is Philip K Dick, the sci-fi writer who shows us how fiction can be a way to interpret different strata of what some people call reality. Let me give you an example, before I answer more precisely. In an interview, he talks about the fact that one day he was sick on his couch. He went to his bathroom, he was looking for medicine; he was looking for the light switch to find the medicine. He couldn't find the switch. He realised that it was a little cord, the kind you would find in the US at that time, switched it on, took the medicine and went back to his couch. He said most people might not have paid any attention to that. They might say, Okay, I was tired anyway. For him, it meant a lot; it suggested that, in fact, he was coming from one door to another one through a multiverse; there is an idea of the multi-layering of what quantum mechanics has agreed upon as eleven dimensions. It's very fictional and scientific at the same time. I think that to embrace the complexity – the grey zones, as I said – of our world, design included, is a very realistic mode of dealing with things.
In terms of a manifesto, I'm not entirely comfortable with that word. I should have said that the show is more like a political flag. This show is about political issues. It's not a demonstration of knowledge; it’s not an additive display of objects; it is not even about process. I'm not a designer, and I'm addressing myself to non designers, to a larger audience. So maybe I should have been more precise and say that rather than a manifesto, it is like a shout in the dark.
This show is about political issues. It's not a demonstration of knowledge; it’s not an additive display of objects; it is not even about process.
KOOZ The exhibition is a response to what’s at stake today so it is inherently political. You mention spending time in Ljubiana to really engage with the city – could you share a bit about this experience and how it informed your curatorial approach to BIO28?
AMOne super important thing is that when I arrived in Ljubljana, I spent a whole month there. I was the first curator to do that. I had already visited several times, trying to grasp a little bit of the country and its history, but that's how I found out some things, which would not have revealed themselves to me right away. The first thing I realised is that when the country was founded in 1992 – in this modern version – some people, born in the former Yugoslavia, lost their citizenship completely. They are called the erased people. I was extremely shocked to learn that the government has no plan for the thousands of people who are now dying without citizenship in this very tiny country. So I invited a duo of designers named dach&zephir – who work mostly on questions around the West Indies and racialised design linked to craftsmanship. I asked them to develop a project with young Slovenian designers about embroidery, which has a specific tradition in Slovenia, to create and to give some space and visibility to these so-called erased people. So the whole Biennale is really tackling many things, I may say.
KOOZ It seems deeply political, but also beautiful – especially to hear about how it has rooted itself in its context. Alexandra, thank you for taking the time and trusting us with your voice.
AMI do believe in collaboration. That's why I've been inviting so many people to create specific work for this Biennale or for other things I'm doing. Writing can be very lonely work; that’s why every occasion to create collaborations in a horizontal way is so important. So I do trust you. Otherwise, there is no way forward.
When we talk about women, we are committed to including all women, embracing the diverse identities and experiences of cisgender, transgender, and non-binary individuals.
Bio
Alexandra Midal is a professor at the University of Art and Design HEAD in Geneva and Head of the Department of Critical Thinking at Ensci-Les Ateliers in Paris. A distinguished art and design historian, she combines practice and theory-based research as an artist-curator, theoretician and film essayist. Her research explores the blind spots and grey areas of design history, as evident in her two latest books, The Murder Factory (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Design by Accident: For a New History of Design (Sternberg Press, 2019). She studied literature, architecture and art history at Princeton University (NJ) and in Paris, completing her doctoral thesis at Paris Sorbonne while a Rome Prize recipient in architecture at Villa Medici. She has curated a number of international exhibitions about visual culture, design, and politics, such as Top Secret: Cinema and Espionage and Tomorrow Now – When Design Meets Science Fiction. Her films, including Mind’s Eyes, Possessed, and Heaven is a State of Mind, have been screened in museums across the globe.
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.
