LDZIGN 2011 - Lodz Design Festival - Poland's Official Travel Website

Zobacz

Mark in:

Lodz1

The first major festival in Poland devoted exclusively to design enjoys its 5th edition this year with a motto inspired by the drive for Change.

Taking place between 20-30 October, the motto of the festival - Change! - is meant to draw attention to changes in the thinking about design against the backdrop of both art and society. Designers are now facing new challenges: to produce less, but wiser, locally instead of globally, universally rather than according to trends.

The main programme of the festival centres around two exhibitions: Redirection and Neofarm. Curators Centrum Architektury and BCXSY treat these projects as an opportunity to put forward important theses and ask questions. Some answers are already given to us, while others still have to be found in the exhibitions.

The Redirection exhibition presents changes in architecture, examining how a rigid, monumental field of design, meant to last as long as possible, is affected by grass-roots initiatives. To what extent is it flexible and ready to cope with overpopulation, resource crisis or environment devastation? To what extent is architecture prone to experiments? Are the changes caused by architects, or are they a bottom-up phenomenon to which the architects must react?

A building, an urban complex, when it is handed over to its users, starts to live its own life, more than any other work. The Redirection exhibition will not provide ready recipes and answers, but it will show the directions in which to look for them. It will show how to look and read in order to understand the nature of unavoidable changes with which architecture must and will have to cope.

The NeoFarm exhibition refers to changes in social structure. In spite of industrialization and migration of a considerable part of the society to cities, society still longs for rural life, hand-made objects and crafts, natural materials, etc. However, even if we go to the countryside, it is hard to find them. Nowadays, the quality of life in the countryside does not necessarily differ from the life in the city. Villages are mechanized. The land is cultivated, and animals are ‘bred’ by computers, which are operated by people, of course. Yet, computers, the Internet or access to knowledge and technology – undoubtedly valuable and needed – have deprived the humankind of other values connected with rural life.

Unification and industrial repeatability are an unwanted side effect of the development. It is a change, new and irreversible. However, many designers strive to fill this gap. Instead of suggesting artificially ‘natural’ objects, they play with tradition and in this way they satisfy our emotional needs on the one hand and make light-hearted and rather warm fun of them on the other hand. They balance on the verge of kitsch, joke, pastiche, but their suggestions are quite serious. They encourage us to establish a new connection with nature and simple life, and establish new conditions, favorable for both sides.

The festival also includes its well-known and already tested elements: a review of international design schools, make me! contest, portfolio review, lectures divided into thematic blocks, films and discussions.