program

from 13 July to 13 September 2012

double track

2012 design contest: award ceremony and final exhibition

Innovation and creativity built on our forebears’ strong shoulders.
The sources and ideas for new European design in the winning projects of the tenth edition of the international competition promoted by Trieste Contemporanea. 
Award ceremony and opening of the final exhibition on Friday July 13th at 6.30 pm

The 2012 challenge from one of the most interesting initiatives dedicated to design in north-east Italy – the contest that the Trieste Contemporanea Committee has organised every two years since 1995 and aimed at the designers of 23 countries in Central and Eastern Europe – is demanding but stimulating.
After seeing several thousand designers coming together over the years in a stimulating international challenge, dedicated above all to the young, and tackling such themes as play, travel, food, luck from the point of view of their cultures, and after a number of editions spent exploring the possible qualities of European innovation to be combined with specific local skills, such as glassmaking at Murano furnaces, 200 European professionals and designers have worked in 2012 on the theme of ‘double track’.
In the past few days, the international jury has been convened at the offices of the CEI in Trieste with the difficult task of making a final selection of the best and winning projects. These will be presented in the concluding exhibition to open in Trieste at the Studio Tommaseo, at the awards ceremony on Friday 13th July. The exhibition will remain open for the whole summer.

The 2012 competition enjoys the patronage of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri, the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, CEI–Central European Initiative, the Provincia di Trieste and the ADI Associazione per il Disegno Industriale–Delegazione Friuli Venezia Giulia and has been organised with financial support from CEI, the Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Provincia di Trieste and the Fondazione BEBA of Venice, together with various collaborations, including one addressed to the 12 member states of the international Continental Breakfast network founded by the Trieste-based committee.

How did things turn out this year? We asked Susanna Legrenzi, who is coordinating this year’s contest. The Milan-based curator and journalist, started from the premise that we live in a crowded consumer market in which design is everywhere (and nowhere). She thus wanted the participants to look at things backwards, as it were. The competition therefore asked the contestant to identify a functional object from the recent past revealing a simple or complex but accomplished design process; an object that was in some way significant and that could provide the source for the design of a new object to be entered in the competition.
The candidates chose a wide range of at times curious objects as their sources: anonymous or everyday objects, some made in small numbers, some mass-produced. For example, utensils for the home, furnishings and also agricultural or professional tools, together with some elements for building and even items chosen from what we might call ‘archaeology of the mass-consumption era’, among which some examples selected from audiovisual technology of the recent past.

These were the 33 works selected by the jury, among which the three prizewinners and two special mentions:
Rob Aigner (Austria), Alessandra Barbato (Italy), Daniele Barosi (with Elisa Beghi and Leonardo Battistini, Italy), Tjasa Bavcon (with Katja Burger, Jasmina Fercek – OLOOP group, Slovenia), Enrico Bernardis (Italy), Silvano Bruscella (with Andrea Arosio and Roberto Sarzi Amadè, Italy), Saverio Cantoni (Italy), Giorgio Cattano (Italy), Gabriele Colombo (Italy), Beata Csortan (with Daniel Pifko, A. Benjamin Balla and Zsolt Korai, Hungary), Raffaele De Martino (Italy), Filippo Francescangeli (Italy), Alberto Galeazzo (with Andrea Sanson, Italy), Federica Ghinoi (Italy), Fabio Gigone (with Angela Gigliotti, Italy) – GILLO DORFLES PRIZE, Raili Keiv (Estonia) – SPECIAL MENTION, Paola and Anna Marinuzzi (Italy), Milena and Radivojc Markovic (Serbia), Fabio Meliota (Italy), Katia Meneghini (Italy), Iryna Olenina (with Oleg Vereshchagin, Ukraine), Moreno Onori (Italy), Meltem Özçaki (Turkey) – SPECIAL MENTION, Ena Priselec (Croatia) – INCE PRIZE, Martin Schnabl (with Sascha Mikel and Michael Tatschl, Austria), Elena Madalina Toader (Romania), Barbora Tobolova (Slovakia), Leana-Helena Toom (Estonia), Catalin Nicolae Ursoiu (Romania/Italy) – BEBA PRIZE, Markéta Váradiová (Czech Republic), Mario Viezzoli (Italy), Albina Yaloza (Ukraine), Tajana Zver (Croatia).The prize from the Fondazione BEBA of Venice, for the youngest designer selected, goes this year to the Romanian Catalin Nicolae Ursoiu, born in 1992. His project starts with an audio cassette of the sort that first appeared in the market in the early 1960s. From this classic early mass recording tool, the young Romanian recovered a gesture that we have all done if of the right generation when the audio cassette would jam – as it often did. His fresh and simple tool is a functional pencil sharpener.

The CEI prize is an extremely significant award for the identity of the competition which targets participants from Eastern Europe; it was set up by the Central European Initiative in 2006, with the first awards going to a Macedonian and a Serbian designer. In 2012, it has been awarded to a young Croatian designer, Ena Priselec. Her work looks at an electric coffee-grinder. The design approach of the winner was considered extremely interesting by the jury as it proposes a return to manual grinding. Hers is an invitation – highly topical in the present day – to recover a daily quality and simplicity that Priselec effectively elaborates in a formal design of highly refined synthesis.

The most important prize, named after Gillo Dorfles, the contest’s historic founder, goes to the Italian group put together by Fabio Gigone and Angela Gigliotti. Besieged by sophisticated software for design and modelling, including CAD (Computer-Aided Design), who still remembers the old drawing curve? This tool, together with the even more obscure stencil, was the tool for technical draftsmen. Starting with a plastic version of the drawing curve that once held an honourable place in the world of technical and graphic design, Gigone and Gigliotti have drawn out its graphic essence to form an innovative prototype of spectacles available in an infinite variety of colours and forms, and for every optical requirement.

There have been two special mentions in this edition: one for the delicate project by a young Turkish designer, Meltem Özçaki, who, drawing on the thousand-years-old Turkish tradition of pigeon lofts incorporated into the facades of houses, re-proposes the same idea today for public housing with the introduction of special bricks that can house nests for birds living in cities. The second mention goes instead to an Estonian designer, Raili Keiv, who invites us to preserve the classic fragility and lightness of porcelain by setting it in cement casts. In so doing, he offers an innovative use of traditional materials which, shown together, trigger a visual short-circuit and wholly unexpected significance.