ŁÓDŹ, Poland — The international design community probably doesn’t need to learn to pronounce the name of this central Polish city before recognizing the creativity of its emerging talents. But those diacritical marks haven’t stopped a community of young designers and domestic manufacturers from convening here every year since 2007 for the Łódź Design Festival, on view through October 19. Yet given the concentration of local talent at Art_Inkubator, a former factory site where ŁDF is currently under way, it makes sense to start polishing (no pun intended) your Polish. Remember: It’s pronounced Woo-ch. And while the middle of Poland doesn’t stand to enter the Italy-Netherlands-Scandinavia-Japan cosmology of modern and contemporary design, there’s still plenty of reason to pay attention (and a visit) to Łódź. Below, we’ve rounded up the most interesting exhibits on view this year in Łódź.
Make Me! Design Competition
Some of the strongest displays belong to the Make me! competition, held annually at ŁDF for work created by designers under 35. Though pieces from contestants based outside of Poland are featured here, the majority of the 21 contestants are Polish designers (selected from a pool of 247 applicants), many of whom work with Polish manufacturers. As such, the competition offers an engrossing introduction to the contemporary design world in Poland.
The offerings range from the witty — human-scale doll furniture by Slovak designer Silvia Lovasova — to the inventively functional — a bicycle grip that cools the rider’s palms by the Warsaw studio Frivolous With Industry (Justyna Strociak and Magda Gasiorowska). The winning design is an algae-based ink that prints onto fabrics by Berlin studio Blond & Bieber. The studio’s founders created a movable textile printer that also makes the dyes it distributes onto fabric.
Brave Fixed World
The theme of this year’s ŁDF, Brave New World, is expanded at British curator Daniel Charny’s exhibition Brave Fixed World. With the maker movement having already overtaken the design world, Charny’s display suggests that a “fixer” movement should come next. With so many things having been made, some of them surely need fixing, Charny seems to suggest.
This section features various prototypes for a fixer hub, a space where citizens with handicraft skills can meet to repair broken objects, or refashion them into different things altogether. There are models for libraries, gallery spaces, and documentation of the relatively few fix hubs that are currently in operation. With the movement’s emphasis on collectivity, it naturally comes with a Repair Manifesto: “If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it,” reads the first “self-evident” tenet.
Taste of an Object
Located inside the Museum of the City of Łódź, this exhibition, which premiered at Milan Design Week last April, pairs design objects with foodstuffs devised specifically to render edible the material qualities of design. It’s an unorthodox, highly visceral approach to design display, one that might do well far beyond Milan and Łódź.
The geographical focus here is rather narrow — only designers from northern Poland are on display — but the objects and tastes presented are quite diverse. An aluminum chair designed by the Tabanda Group is paired with chocolate bark, which, according to curator Jacub Razy, has a flat exterior and a semi-solid interior just like the metal. While it doesn’t necessarily explain the geographical or cultural context from which these objects emerge, the point here isn’t cultural specificity. Rather, Razy insists that language isn’t really the best way to understand industrial design. Food, like furniture, is after all an almost universal human need.
