4 June 2010

June 2010: after being absent for some years. Alessi takes part in Designer's Days the Paris design week. From 9 to 14 June the companies involved invite designers to create special installation in their mono label shops on the Rive Gauche and the Rive Droite.
matali crasset has created the installation 'Topologies Affectives' for the Alessi Shop Museum on the Rive Gauche.

“Affective Topologies”
An installation by matali crasset for Designer's Days  - from 9th to 14th June 2010

Alessi Shop Museum
31 Boulevard Raspail - 75 007 Paris   

Topology defines a place and its properties.
Affective topology reveals three networks of affinities in the space created
by Alessi products year after year.
The items are organised around families that have nothing to do with the categories of the  Alessi catalogue and are not organised chronologically but rather in accordance with a more personal and subjective reading.
They can be discovered by following three colourful strings that extend across the entirety of the space. They zigzag between the shelves to offer a different perspective:
an invitation to see not just the result, that is to say the final products but more the intention that created them.
To subtly pass from the product to the project.
In order to let the connivance between the brand and the designers appear.
A very peculiar connection, like a ballad in the landscape, travelling down the path by letting one's glance slide along the length of the colourful ribbon and being overwhelmed with new emotions.
Discovering the place in a different light by amplifying its deepness and letting its contours vibrate.
The three-colour-path makes the space more dynamic; the colours are associated with names and punctuate the path.
A light graphic intervention that takes over the space and gives it an almost immaterial dimension.

The ribbons or threads recount three methods of understanding life:

1. to be directly attuned to life, to the objects associated with day-to-day life:
not great acts but rather actions made with homeopathic touches.
They are the infra-ordinary objects in sky blue; they represent Alessi's breath.

2: or to go through it with carelessness and lightness, regardless of time: a mentality that comes from lucid vision in terms of the things that surround us and the evolution of society. These objects are considered extraordinary and are connected by the colour orange; they represent Alessi's energy.

3. Lastly, life is only interesting if it is synonymous with sharing, gathering, or exchanging
with others. It represents a perpetual search for development through experiences; the objects are vectors of it. They are bunched around the fuchsia ribbon. They can be interpreted as ordinary affects and represent Alessi's openness and empathy. 


matali crasset