Unnatural Practice

Conceived as a petrified fragment of the studio’s ongoing investigations, Unnatural Practice presents the profound insights gained from our ongoing research and development phases, which inform and shape our work. Showcasing the studio’s most recent works along with archival and “in progress” pieces that together create a Living Archive, the exhibition marks the studio’s debut at the Milan Design Week 2021.

The ephemeral installation at the entrance of the exhibition visualises the origins of Marcin’s work, his family history and the childhood memory of being surrounded by abandoned greenhouses. It leads to the main space of the exhibition, inviting visitors to pass through the ephemerality of nature. Inside, a collection of perishable works explores nature’s perpetual cycles of renewal and degradation, showcasing the process of decay of the artworks as much as their final results. The consistently manipulated materials and forms characterise a tangible nature inside Marcin’s objects.

From the Proustian sublimation of decay in the very first examples of Perishable Vases, to the Protoplasting Nature, where vegetal elements, petrified in metal or resin, provide a formal and material reinterpretation of the Art Nouveau period, advancing a new conceptual framework, natural elements are implemented into a series of narrative, rather than purely functional, objects. Exploring the dichotomy between perishability and permanence, the show is staged as a living environment where our projects transform in real time.

This process of temporal crystallization might seem an aesthetic path, but it is, in reality, an elegy of the intrinsic movement of life and nature, whose elements, though suspended in time, continue to decay with a slow trajectory that teaches us the passage of time and the value of its mutation, forming a great living ecosystem of objects that, with time, becomes the basis for a subsequent metamorphosis.

Tackling the topics related to the entire lifecycle of plants, their journey as commodities and potential as raw materials, the exhibition is guided by an invisible, olfactory path specially prepared by synaesthetic perfumer Barbabe Fillion. Commissioned to reinterpret the motifs found in the materiality of our creations, the scents of Flora, Zinc, and Decay were used to create a unique sensory choreography. Complementing the visual experience and enhancing the “living” element of the pieces, the scents are treated as if they were physical objects made of compositions of materials and processes.

Concluding the narrative, a short film directed by Aga Beaupre focuses on the artist’s poetic research and his persistent investigation of certain ancestral queries of human existence. Depicting the opposing concepts of origin and end, conservation and decay, it presents the extremities of metaphorical arc in tension, inside which the greater enigma of life is inscribed.