Furniture
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At the Moselle Pompidou Center, an exhibition traces the relationship between creators and nature since the end of the 19th century, through 400 pieces of furniture and decorative objects imbued with modernism and biomimicry.
Dashing and impetuous, yet badly squared, the trunk of a young birch tree seems to stand up to the row of soot-black metal shelves that enclose it on the right and on the left. Its top even proudly exceeds the top of the piece of furniture and emancipates itself from it, leaving two small branches bristling to form a “V”. Like this play by Andrea Branzi (Tree 5, 2010), which sticks in the manufactured design object a stake of raw nature, the some 400 others, presented in “Mimèsis” in Metz, all carry, in one way or another, a part of the vivant (keyword which the subtitle could not do without). The exhibition follows this green thread by identifying bits of it in a variety of historical design movements. It therefore summons both Scandinavian modernity from the beginning of the 20th century and the Italian radicals of the 1970s, despite being fond of polyester, to finish and open up to the recourse of contemporary designers to materials derived from biological organisms, including algae or the mycelium of mushroom. These last rooms demonstrate in passing how much the Design collection of the Center Pompidou, from which comes all the contingent of the pieces of the exhibition, wants to green its approach to a discipline. Whose historians, recalls Marie-Ange Brayer, co-curator with Olivier Zeitoun, “still take too little account of the impact on the creation of designers of the evolution of the notion of nature, of its perception”. Design, which was born in the industrial era…