LDF Diaries 2023: Day One
Fish Table by Rio Kobayashi and James Hague (image: James Harris).
The London Design Festival (LDF) has begun in earnest, and this week will see the Disegno team visiting exhibitions, launches and projects around the capital. Each day, we will publish a small selection of reflections on what we’ve seen so far. Our first dispatch follows below.
Manus Manum Lavat (One Hand Washes the Other) by Rio Kobayashi and collaborators (Image: Stagg Studio).
A convivial space
Amongst the maelstrom of the wider festival, Brompton Design District has always benefited from the tight curation of Jane Withers Studio, which sets a theme to which all of the district’s participants respond (some, admittedly, more comprehensively than others). This year’s theme, “Conviviality – The Art of Living Together”, is a compelling one, not least because of the extent to which “conviviality” and “collaboration” are terms that are clear darlings of design discourse, but which have a tendency to slip into vagary – what, exactly, does it mean to live and work together, and why is the design world so fixated on these ideas? In his first solo exhibition, designer and maker Rio Kobayashi has responded superbly. Manus Manum Lavat (One Hand Washes the Other) is a “convivial living space”, filled with pieces that Kobayashi has developed in collaboration with different designers, artists and manufacturers. There is a superb wooden table, decorated with a colossal fish painted by artist James Hague; cheeky hand-shaped soaps made with Walde Seifen; strange and beautiful wooden speakers, executed in conjunction with WLM; and a modular sofa designed with Flavia Brändle and upholstered in beautiful, swirling fabric designed by Peter Pilotto and Christopher de Vos (who are exhibiting their own wider work in the same building – a display also well worth visiting). The room is full of strange treasures (Disegno particularly enjoyed a wooden chair that featured broom heads within its structure) that both clearly belong to Kobayashi, whose expert joinery is present throughout, but which pick up different flavours of expression and form through the partnerships that he has made. Collaboration can take many forms, but it’s obvious the value that it has had within Kobayashi’s practice – cultivating his own virtues as a designer, while allowing others to also come to the fore as a complement. It all makes for a warm, welcoming and witty installation space – highly recommended.
Manus Manum Lavat (One Hand Washes the Other): Cromwell Place, 4 Cromwell Place, SW7 2JE
The Farm Shop, presented by Fels (image: Stagg Studio).
Inspiration hits differently
The Farm Shop – a project developed by Marco Campardo, Guan Lee and Luca Lo Pinto, and supported by Fels – has a simple premise. A series of architects and designers were invited to Grymsdyke Farm, a rural research facility run by Lee, in order to develop site-inspired dining homeware. The results are predictably beautiful, but what is fascinating is the sheer variety of responses on offer: Grymsdyke Farm has been interpreted in countless different ways, demonstrating that the same site can admit of myriad characterisations and points of inspiration. Parti has designed contemporary lighting that manifests as 2D pools of seemingly liquid metal, suspended fabulously strange and alien above more traditional pieces such as Campardo’s beautiful walnut bench and console, which relish in their natural materiality. Andu Masebo’s floor lamps curve sheet metal into fascinating, machine-like forms, while Nathalie Bagnoud’s linen aprons are dyed with plants local to the farm and coated with beeswax from nearby hives. No two objects seem alike in expression or intention, and yet all of the pieces on display somehow feel as if they belong together and, in conjunction, amount to a portrait of the place to which they owe their origin. It is a communal feeling that is emphasised by the curatorial decision to not display specific captions for individual pieces – visitors to the space are left with the sense of the collective effort and overall creative output, rather than focusing on individual authorship. It all culminates in a fascinating project that displays the complexity of site-responsive design. Grymsdyke Farm, clearly, is a space rich enough to be taken in countless directions.
The Farm Shop: Fels Gallery, 209 Brompton Road, London, SW3 2EJ
Lupita Lounge Chair by Mariángel Talamás Leal, the emerging designer selected by A Rum Fellow for 11:11 (image: courtesy of Jan Hendzel Studio)
A Wish for New Connections
When your clock ticks to 11:11, you might join the many people who routinely make a wish at this time. Deriving from New Age and numerological beliefs that synchronised number sequences are full of spiritual potency, this moment in the day is supposedly imbued with the potential for chance and new connections. As superstitions go, it’s a nice one. If nothing else, it provides two opportunities every day to reflect on the hopes and desires you have for yourself or others. For LDF, Jan Hendzel Studio has played with this number, creating an elongated moment for making (and realising) wishes and fostering new links through the exhibition 11:11. The show asked 11 leading designers to select 11 emerging designers from an open call centred on the Southwark region, and then displays their works side-by-side – the experienced practitioner alongside their nominee. From the quality and strength of the craftsmanship on display, however, it is delightfully difficult for a visitor to pick out who has been working for five years or less and who might have been working for many years more. The exhibition grew from Hendzel’s ongoing desire to put the Southwark region, which he feels is underrepresented, on London’s design map and to provide a new platform for grassroots designers. The result is a lovely pairing of works that explore similar and subtle interests, which Hendzel explains were largely serendipitous given that most of the works were created new for the exhibition and that the selected designers did not know, until the opening night, who had selected them. Martino Gamper’s ash and walnut chairs and the F2 plant display units by Moss, for example, speak to a similar fascination for joining materials. Woo Jin Joo’s Thoroughly Odd sculptural monster constructed from layered fringes of thread shares a similar sense of humour and whimsy to Charlotte Kingsnorth’s BUWT collection of mirrors, fames and lamps which playfully celebrate the nooks and imperfections of wood. Fizzing behind the exhibition is a sense of energy generated from the questions of whether these pairings may lead to further collaborations, how the district might develop further, what grassroots design might have in store in the coming years, and how established designers are actively supporting future generations. Next time your clock hits 11:11, perhaps wish for an opportunity to see this joyful show at the independently run project space Staffordshire St (which, indecently, measures almost 11x11m) before it closes, after an 11 day run.
11:11: 49 Staffordshire Street, London SE15 5TJ