Background
The Direktorenhaus’ annual exhibition, “Radical Craft”, presents 60 designers and artistic craftworkers, who show how important artistic craft is today in creating future designs for society. For modern consumer products the market is no longer trending with static goods, but only with improvements – not with fixed features, but only with product enhancements and superior qualities. The exhibition “Radical Craft“ shows how contemporary product design escapes this spiral by drawing on its origins: on the experimental forerunners in conceptual art and in radical artistic craft. These critical approaches demonstrate how important the quality of the products we use every day is: it represents a necessary condition for a comprehensive economic transformation, which is ultimately a cultural one.
The way in which we produce and at the same time consume things is the key to technological, economic and social transformation. The dynamic of change is being initiated and promoted by designers, artistic craftworkers and manufactories. Many of them are already working sustainably and anticipating the future.
The Direktorenhaus shows in its annual exhibition that a real distinction between designers and artistic craftworkers hardly exists: For the ancient Greeks, the idea of the techne encompassed both craftsmanship and technical ingenuity, a problemsolving behaviour, which we recognise today as design. The difference between design and craft lies in the way of thinking, between the conservative and the innovative individual. Both, designer and craftworker, are actively engaged in the debate about the transformation in consumption and prosperity – by means of products that can be sensually experienced, whose value does not decrease with time, but increases every year due to their intrinsic worth.
The exhibition is curated by Pascal Johanssen.
