Offrir des fleurs

Accompanying the Agora du design Curator’s Grant awarded to Christopher Dessus, the studio designed and produced the Offrir des Fleurs exhibition at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal.

Exhibition / Curation / Branding

2021

The idea behind the project is to understand the new challenges of a design exhibition.

Sharing and informing

Prefigured by a call for testimonials and completed by the creation of a cultural medium, the Offrir des Fleurs exhibition compiles and composes with sensitive content. Both informative about the flower-growing context and generative of visitor reactions, the exhibition gathers a series of intangible information related to its subject. Organized in independent islands, each "table" visualizes the main research topics. These take the form of manufactured objects, inspired by the supplies the florist uses on a daily basis. Solid and hollow elements help to compose and organize the content, making the subject intelligible.

How does the thought and action of giving flowers become a research ground for design exploration?

About the exhibition

The exhibition is an allegorical form of the "agora", a space for exchange and sharing, to create a common territory made up of the richness of collective work and the imaginations of tomorrow. It marks the introduction of ambitious research into the consideration of flowers as a contemporary design object.

Context

Flowers may be on every table, but the flower-growing world remains in the shadows and suffers from an imbalance. Today, it teeters between poetry and pollution, tradition and technology, economy and fragility, hope and disillusionment. At present, the legacy of future generations does not look good. For all the pleasure they inspire, the French cut flower industry is at half-mast.

The flower, the bouquet, the culture of gesture

How does the thought and action of giving flowers become a research ground for design exploration? For centuries, flowers have accompanied our lives and punctuated the seasons; they please guests, decorate home interiors, mark blows - good or bad - and express feelings from "I love you" to "I'm sorry".

A call for testimonials, a first step towards research

Gathering testimonials - be they ordinary, incongruous, emotionally charged or economically or socially relevant - enables us to gather information on the act of giving flowers, from a wide range of actors: from different social classes, cultures and professions.

A multidisciplinary curatorial team to talk design

How can we account for this action, and consider this gesture as relative to a thought?

Prefigured by a call for testimonials and completed by the creation of a cultural medium, the Offrir des Fleurs exhibition compiles and composes with sensitive content. Both informative about the floricultural context and generative of visitor reactions, the exhibition gathers a series of intangible information related to its subject. We invite you to take part by following the instructions on this platform.for this exhibition, the device imagined offers the public the opportunity to question the habits and social constructions linked to flowers. It's a veritable experimental laboratory, capable of highlighting the methodology and research protocol adopted. The visitor becomes a player in the research and a member of the laboratory.

Fig. 1 [Exploded view of subjects A, B, C, D, E, F and G]

Fig. 4 [Axonometry of subjects A, B and D]

Fig. 5 [Axonometry of subjects A, B, C and D]

Fig. 6 [Axonometry of subjects A, B, C, D and E]

Fig. 7 [Axonometry of subjects A, B, C, D, E and F]

Fig. 8 [Axonometry of subjects A, B, C, D, E, F and G]

Fig. 9 [Axonometry of all subjects in several compositions]

Sharing and informing

How can we account for this action, and consider this gesture as relative to a thought?

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