Tout est Chaos
On the occasion of Paris Design Week, Pli office presents Tout est Chaos. Seventy-five designers, architects and artists were invited and selected by curator Christopher Dessus to exhibit one or more objects that, in one way or another, resonate with the exhibition’s title.
Modernism and industrialisation carried a promise: that of an accessible, functional, democratic world, freed from material constraints through mass production. The Bauhaus, Scandinavian design and the Ulm School believed in it and, in part, kept their word: they envisioned an everyday life shaped by thoughtful design, pared-back forms and carefully controlled materials.
But today a threshold has been reached, and we are literally saturated with objects. Warehouses, shops and homes overflow with things we believed we needed, only to throw them away or leave them aside without a second glance. What was meant to free us now weighs us down; what was meant to simplify our lives paralyses us with an excess of choice.
The paradigm of optimisation has reached its limit. It is from this observation, and from this impasse, that the exhibition Tout est Chaos was born.
In ancient cosmogonies, chaos is not synonymous with disorder; for Hesiod, it is the primordial void from which all creation emerges.
In this exhibition, design and architecture are acts of resistance: ways of making claims, of questioning, of moving beyond the purely aesthetic. The objects on display do not seek to solve. They promise neither total efficiency nor absolute transparency. They offer something else: open-ended uses, incomplete forms, reversible functions, narratives.
Tout est Chaos is not just another exhibition: it celebrates design as a space of tension, of embraced saturation and of rediscovered creative freedom — a manifesto for emerging design, at a time when our systems of production are running out of steam.
