Formafantasma, when style is an attitude Interviewing the designer duo starring in Prada Frames, one of the Fuorisalone's sustainable art events
From 17 to 19 April Prada will stage the second edition of the Prada Frames symposium at the Teatro dei filodrammatici, a building re-designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni in 1964 that will host numerous artists, anthropologists, scientists, and philosophers in three days of expansive and multidisciplinary talks. On the occasion of Fuorisalone, the conference theme "Materials in Flux" will analyze the holistic treatment of waste through six meeting sections developed around the studies of British anthropologist Tim Ingold, an advocate of how matter is a living, interconnected, and perpetually changing entity. A week before the opening, we met Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, two of the main protagonists of Prada Frames, founders of Formafantasma, the design studio that, straddling Milan and Rotterdam, bases its research on current ecological, historical, political, and social issues.
The practice of their design studio, which flees from a predefined and all the more definable image of style, permeates the unexpected and develops it into a vocabulary of multitudes always open to neologisms. A language in perpetual expansion, contrary to the flow of a design koinè in which the result is always and in any case, a solid starting block, Trimarchi and Farresin demonstrate a constant commitment to being contextual, to reacting to reality, not much so in the geographical sense of the term, but more precisely in the historical moment in which we are living. In action, their focus is dialogue, not design, to ignite an ongoing conversation of inquiry into things, a true motion of questioning that maps our dimension and leads an idea to become a prototype. Eluding the form-like, they create tangible evolutions of a diatribe whose bases are known, but whose possible conclusions mature only after a paradigmatic dialectical labor lime.
Formafantasma's style is an aptitude for going beyond the barriers of simplification, in itself synonymous with circumscribing and ghettoizing. Trimarchi and Farresin move in a thousand directions beyond the limes of relative concepts such as elegance, they evade the system of declared codes and prepare themselves for the questioning by finding clarity in the varied, in the multitude, and in the scanning of their progress. «Design is the human attitude of making changes to the environment where you live, where you exist, to make it closer to your needs.» If, for British design critic Alice Rawsthorn, design can be understood as an attitude, and if the memoirs of Germano Lucio Celant and before that, the historian Szeemann remind us that there are moments when attitudes become form, Formafantasma in the complex contemporary highlights how there is no limit to the flexibilities of design, the use of matter and creative outputs.
