CABANAmad

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LDW Highlights

Opening of a new exhibition: DIS.FUNCTIONAL DESIGN, VOICES OF DIVERSITY

This is how CABANAmad presents their project:
For a long time, design was governed by precise rules: utility, comfort, efficiency. Form was expected to respond to a function, the object to a defined need. This approach built an idea of progress that was linear, measurable, and apparently neutral. Today, however, these rules reveal their limits.

We live in an era in which the boundaries between design and art are becoming increasingly permeable. Function is no longer the only criterion of value and, in some cases, it is deliberately called into question. The objects in this exhibition do not necessarily ask to be used, but to be read: as signs, as positions, as testimonies.

In the past, what has been defined as "ugly design" often represented a deviation from dominant aesthetic and functional norms. Objects considered excessive, uncomfortable, or incoherent because they did not adhere to a shared idea of order and utility. Reconsidered today, these works reveal a latent political tension: the refusal of singular, standardized, universalizing models.

In the present, design no longer speaks with a single voice. Contemporary designers carry different experiences, cultures, and perspectives. Experimentation becomes a tool for questioning hierarchies, expectations, and systems of value. Dysfunction is not a failure, but a conscious choice: a critical space in which the object stops serving in order to begin meaning.

Through fluid, abstract, and ambiguous forms, these objects reflect a complex, fragmented, and transforming society. In their non-functionality emerge questions about power, normality, inclusion, and exclusion.
When the object stops functioning according to established rules, it becomes possible to imagine other uses, other bodies, other worlds. Perhaps it is precisely in this dysfunction that contemporary design finds a new form of meaning.

Artists featured:
GIAN PAOLO BARBIERI
JOAO BRUNO
MAYRA DEBERG
MATTEO DI CIOMMO
THEO GALLIAKIS
PAOLO GONZATO
JOVAN MATIC
FEDERICA SALA
NIENKE SIKKEMA
MAUD TEPHANY
VENINI
NANDA VIGO