10th Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial: Working Promesse, Shifting work paradigms
March 9–April 9, 2017
Cité du design
3 rue Javelin Pagnon
42000 Saint-Etienne
www.citedudesign.com
Twitter / Instagram / Facebook / #biennaledesign17
The Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial 2017 will present a review of the current situation and a great experiment, a giant laboratory, entitled Working Promesse focused on the changes in the way we work.
Since its very first edition in 1998, the Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial has taken stock of the state of design and creativity worldwide and given its visitors food for thought on changes in society and new lifestyles. Work is one of the major preoccupations of our society. It provides us with both income and status, it promises emancipation and a future. An offshoot of the dream of full employment, it is central to political and economic concerns, but at this the beginning of the 21st century, it is in transition. From digital labor to the sharing economy, the world of work is being reconfigured, inventing new organisations, new services, but also creating new sources of suffering and new hopes. Designers, businesses and the entire Saint-Etienne district will be mobilising in 2017 around this topic to confront different views, ideologies, innovations and desires.
At the crux of the issues around the changing world of work, the Biennial will be examining three main themes:
–Digital Labor. The confrontation of digital tools with the crises—environmental, economic—that successively shake our social structures, is leading to multiple upheavals in our societies.
–A sharing utopia? The world of work is a space where exceptional technical and organisational inventions are occurring, but they are exploiting a part of the human race, leading to suffering as well as hope.
–Future existences. The intriguing questions that the Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial 2017 will be raising will provide opportunities to explore experimental forms of work through new production tools, but also some of the fictional and futuristic aspects of work.
#3 The Zanzibar (collective led by writer Alain Damasio) & Didier Faustino Tandem Are among the guest curators invited by Olivier Peyricot for this edition
Why #3? Because the Biennial next year will be a path with a beginning and an end, a path that queries the shifting work paradigms and this exhibition will be the 3rd exhibition!
Existences futures is one of the themes the 2017 Biennial will examine, at the heart of the question of shifting work paradigms. On this theme,Zanzibar & Didier Faustino have thought up a forward-looking, experiential exhibition that transports the visitor into the future, into an imaginary place where work is something altogether different. This something different is developed through stories, listened to and read, developed by Damasio and his Zanzibar collective.These two Latin characters, one born in Portugal, the other living in Marseille, come together to examine the place of the body in its physical, social and political dimensions, man’s place in a world saturated with technology.
#Biennial For The Stéphanois
#Experiments In The District
#Morag Myerscough & Luke Morgan, guest graphic designers
Why #Biennial for the “Stéphanois”? Because the Biennial wants to set up a programme that local people, the “Stéphanois,” can take an active part in: involving residents is one of the objectives of this edition.
To do this, Morag Myerscough & Luke Morgan have been invited by the Biennial to devise several graphic interventions across the district which will be co-created by its inhabitants: an artistic gesture in the public space. (Graphic interventions on containers, on the big squares or in other emblematic places around the city and on the concourse in front of the Cité du Design).
Morag Myerscough wasborn in Holloway in North London. She studied design at the Art University of London, then at the Royal College of Arts. At the beginning of the 1990s, she founded her own agency with designer Jane Chipchase. In 1993, she created Studio Myerscough.
