Last week, I curated a retrospective exhibition for the design agency Kokoro & Moi at Utrecht’s NOW IDeA gallery in Aoyama, Tokyo. The exhibition revolved around two events: organising a paper airplane workshop of the printed exhibition material with Mr. Takuo Toda, a local aerogami expert and the holder of the world record for the longest paper plane flight, and cooking Finnish food for Tokyo Design Week visitors at the gallery with Apartamento magazine. Focusing on people, the events depict a change of focus from strategies of display to strategies of participation.
Everyday life recipes. Photo by Paavo Lehtonen.
1. Food
I sat down with Apartamento magazine’s Omar Sosa, Marco Velardi and Leen Hilde Haesen to talk about their magazine and TASCA – Everyday life recipes cooking event at NOW IDeA gallery.
Apartamento is a bi-annual post-materialist interior magazine based in Barcelona and Milan. It shows people organising their daily environment with a focus on personal expression rather than top-down design, and old stuff rather than new stuff. “We don’t portray designers just because they’re designers, but only if they’re interesting – like anyone,” Omar explains. “Nowadays, people can make more and more things for themselves with the ever developing materials and tools.”
Founded only a couple of years ago, Apartamento is more than the magazine. Their plan is to make books, organise collaborations and curate exhibitions. In Tokyo, the team consisting of a designer, a photographer and a journalist was turned into chefs and waitresses, cooking and serving lunch for the NOW IDeA visitors during Tokyo Design Week and our exhibition. “We like to do things ourselves, something engaging for both us and our readers,” Marco says. “We like to hang out with people on a daily basis and organise things like TASCA. Here, people can actually taste and discuss what we have cooked instead of only reading it in the magazine’s cooking section.”
The TASCA event not only celebrated the release of the fourth issue, a Japanese edition of the magazine, but it also demonstrated the Apartamento lifestyle that sees beauty in everyday things. This lifestyle has earlier been explored through a London exhibition on the pottery collection of an “everyday life collector”, like Marco describes Richard Lamb, an unknown collector of pottery from garage and jumble sales for 15 years.
Just like The everyday life collector exhibition, TASCA brought people together around the art of mundane activities. Cooking food, sharing recipes and meeting people over for lunch must be the most everyday strategies of participation there are. Food sparks discussion, like we found out when taking part in TASCA with Kokoro & Moi to cook Finnish wild mushroom soup to puzzled Japanese. “You usually end up in interesting conversations as you have to sit down, not only going around with a drink in a party,” Leen says. “And, from the cook’s perspective…” Marco grins, wearing an apron “… people will remember you for what you do – for sharing your personality with them.”
“People will remember you for what you do – for sharing your personality with them.”
Tokyo hands. Photo by Teemu Suviala.
2. Aerogami
The Air Current/Past exhibition was to present the graphic works of Kokoro & Moi, my second home, from a new perspective. Depicting a journey instead of the destination and exploring the elements of variation, collaboration and play in the design agency’s projects over the past eight years, the exhibition took on a participatory format. It featured an aerogami workshop by Takuo Toda, the head of the Japan Origami Airplane Association and the holder of the world record for the longest paper plane flight, 27.9 seconds.
We ended up gathering at the NOW IDeA gallery with a group of aerogami apprentices and a stack of A4 prints that presented a retrospective take on Kokoro & Moi’s work. Led by Mr. Toda, our sensei, we then set out to the nearby Farmer’s market for the outdoor workshop.
Changing his grey suit to the Origami Airplane Association’s blue vest, Toda looked professional as he is. He explained his plans to go transatmospheric, flying a paper plane to earth from outer space (an idea actually being tested with the Japanese space agency JAXA) and demonstrated the making of his signature planes. After folding their own aerogamies out of Kokoro & Moi prints, the workshop participants could fly them at the market, jointly producing an exhibition in the air.
An exhibition in the air. Photo by Teemu Suviala.
Like TASCA, the paper airplane workshop was an experiment in participation. Only this time, the strategy was in the making, or learning by doing with expert instructions. Be it a free lunch or free know-how, both strategies of participation resulted in new situations and collaborations – post-materialist content for everyday life.