Dead Meat was born with the intent to transform the t-shirt into a canvas. This young italian brand which is based on poetry, will present a new collection on the next  “Pitti Immagine Uomo” at Florence.

Dead Meat Manifesto

Dead Meat means dead meat. It would not be correct to declare that this refers to the title of W. Burroughs’ novel; it’s more coherent saying that by that time it was just a sound. As often happens  the young designer realised that Dead Meat was the real object of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch only few months after.

I know it might sounds stupid, I am aware of that, but the truth is that generally in arts or even worse when fashion steals from arts, things are almost empty from a conceptual point of view and that’s an “Open Door”
to say and justify anything. And here it comes the Art critics.

They use a vague language, absurd from a logical point of view and often auto-referential. In other
words it might look like the Wittgenstein post-mortem nightmare or the reason why I deeply hate art critics, some artists and I love David Foster Wallace, whose bibliography is something I strongly suggest discovering.

But before going into its meaning you should know something about W. Burroughs. He was a gay student
(fundamental information) at Harvard where he graduated in anthropology with the best scores and started to become heroine addict. He also started writing a lot of stuff such as notes and hallucinated and visionary tales about bleed sucking monsters or centipedes producing drugs. San Francisco was a real mass at the time and something which was about to be called the Beat movement was making its way through.

A Mr. Jack Kerouac read Burroughs’ notes and said “Fuck, make a book out of it. It will be called Naked Lunch. And he made this trip: naked lunch is a freezing moment where you realise that what’s on your fork is a naked lunch. It’s a living metaphor of the American society, it’s the amniotic drug of television shows.

Television makes a passive society. People are influenced by media, they eat and metabolise media as
they would do with a piece of meat. And the meat is a dead meat. The thing is that when you eat it you don’t think about it.

You Just eat because you are hungry. You satisfy your need. Full stop. Dead meat.

The young Belgium designer Pascale De Backer showed us the great projects on Salone Satellite 2009.

Beach Cocoon is a relax chair. It is selfinflatable with a battery or electricity in five minutes. You can take Beach Cocoon easy with you in two compact bags. Beach Cocoon is made of transparant pvc so you can see the structure inside. The design is based on the optical art (years 50). This chair can be used at the beach, the garden, the swimming pool and in the house.

Night Cube is a night table and can be used at the right and the left side of the bed by turning it 90°. The under part is made of light and soft framefoam with a color coating. The upper part is made of colored polyester and is a spherelight. Night Cube can be produced in different colors.

www.pascalina.be

The collection of micro Sparkling Kitten born  from a combination of precious materials, made of soft cashmere made in Italy, are embellished with crystallized ^TM - Swarovski Elements in luminescent colors.

With the Sparkling Super Heroes, through the galaxies, you could travel back in time. Curious by the lights of the ’50s and American Celebrities they decided to make a stop at this historic time for us to relive the magical atmosphere of the lights of Hollywood.

In this travel through time, the Kittens are not alone, Borsalino is  their guide.

Dressing through the decades the major Hollywood stars, today Borsalino gives a new look to the Kittens, opening the doors  to their homes and sharing their greatest  treasures. This gave birth to the micro collection ‘Kikka & Kitten Goes Hollywood with Borsalino”.

The devotees of the hat say about Giuseppe Borsalino: “His were the most skillful hands hatter who had ever seen.”

Fine hats, worked exclusively by hand with the best materials. The production of felt was developed over  time, but the craftsmanship technique is still the one from the beginning.

Thanks to the secrets that the masters Borsalino put at the disposal of  new generation of designers, Kikka&Kitten has been able to give an added value to the new artworks,  for this occasion Kikka & Kitten for the first time evolves from the accessories on the design and decoration to give birth to a capsule collection of fashion accessories .

The tiles, made from recycled materials, serve as planters and their unique shape allows them to interlock, thereby creating different patterns depending on the vegetation planted.

This is the project of  young designer and architect Maruja Fuentes Viguié from Puerto Rico. Her approach to design emphasizes movement, adaptability and material exploration. Such exploration has led her to a passion for sustainable design and to try to make most of her work as eco-friendly as possible.

The initial idea was to start playing with basic geometric forms. Since the goal was to build a rocking chair, the iconic shape related to rolling motion was picked - the cylinder. Here comes the core of this project - two cuts are made along the surface and by pressing inwards the central section of the cylinder (the one between the two cuts), the seating part is created. Voila, the functional object! And with just one intervention form the designer

Same principle was used both for the armchair and for the puff, only the central parts were shaped differently. Everything else, like reinforcement inner and outer ring slices, rocking motion dampeners, perforated sheet and all the little things that came later were just additions to help the idea behind it come alive.

www.markostanojevic.com

On the occasion of Design Week 09, we were chatting with one of the most creative designer who is focused on furniture, lights, materials and surfaces for wallpapers, carpet and laminate industry.

Where do you live?
Munich & Milan.
Your last trip…. and next one will be?
last: Paris next : NY &Teheran.

What is inspiring you at the moment?
The wake up atmosphere-ccreative caos.

Describe your personal style?
Investigative , curious, couragious- i dont care about the fashion of the day.

Where do you work on your projects?
Preferedly in restaurant scribbling on napkins.

How would  you describe an evolution in your work, from your first projects to the present day?
Once I reach one step I move to the next - things get more complex in designing but the appearance or final result more simple.

Your favourite product designed by you, why?
Rapoxy resin coating - because it allows everybody to go crazy on their floors or make their own furniture. Its more a tool.

What advice would you give to the young?
Be curious, openminded and explore.

Where do you see yourself in ten years time?
Working - I like to work.and being in the shade in a hammock and playing with my kids.

www.markusbeneschcreates.com

Where do you live?
I am a citizen of the Global World, but I reside in New York City.

Your last trip…. and next one will be?
I travel about 220 days out of the year.  I am on a trip right now!  I am on my way to Milan for the 2009 Salone.  I will be showing nearly 50 new pieces this year.

What is inspiring you at the moment?
Inspiration is accumulative. 

Describe your personal style?
It is hard for a designer to see ‘their‘ own style and define their place in the world themselves. I have always referred to my work as sensual minimalism, but also technorganic and infostethic. I try to always have some level, even a nuance, of originality or innovation in my work whether it is a new material, a new human behavior, new form, new production method, new market, new message (be it wit, humor, emotion, meaning, social or political agenda), new experiences, or completely new concepts.

Where do you work on your projects?
I sketch profusely. I draw a 20-30 pages a day. I love drawing on planes where I can really focus on projects. I can fill a sketchpad on a single European flight (about 100 pages). I write proposals, answer press questions, strategize, and develop ideas, directions, and dream about what I really want to do - not what I think I must do.

I travel about 220 days a year. I have crazy days in the office. I probably review / work on the design of 20 projects in a day with my staff - I have about 40 projects going so I manage to get to each project every other day. I perpetually multitask. The projects cross over so much. One minute in the office we’re working on another wastebasket or garbage can and suddenly you realize that some concept I’m doing with that garbage can is perfect for the hallways of a hotel in Spain. It happens a lot. I’m juggling 45 projects simultaneously.

How would  you describe an evolution in your work, from your first projects to the present day?
I decided when I opened my own office in 1993 after working 10 years in other offices that I would be a pluralist - I would design from the micro to macro (as Tarfurri termed ‘the city to the spoon‘). Therefore I have kept touching, investing and working in all aspects of the built environment from eyeglasses to televisions to furniture to shoes and the list goes on.

There is nothing more satisfying than one minute in my office I am working on chocolate for Solen then I turn around and work on a new hotel in Berlin.

Your favourite product designed by you, why?
I am so proud of the OH chair and Garbo can for Umbra. They have sold millions in the US and proved to me that Americans want design but at an affordable price. In fact the Garbo was just inducted into the permanent collection of the MoMA. Paul Rowan of Umbra asked me to study waste baskets and I remember drawing about 50 ideas.

At that time the ubiquitous plastic wastebasket on the market was a rectangular black can with absolutely no character and there was little alternative. I thought that banal objects need life, they need presence, but they also need to make awful tasks more pleasant. I immediately thought about a more sensual object, an object that is wider at the top than the bottom to peak semantically about a mouth for garbage, and then raised handles in order to make it function better.

The scoop top prevented you from touching the garbage when picking it up, and the rounded inside double wall bottom prevented coffee and other liquids from getting caught in the interior. I used recycle polypropylene in various colors to give a lightness, a ephemerally to the object - to make it sensual to float it, to de-stress a chore, to add color, simplicity and sensualness to ones space.

Who would you like to design something for?
There is so much to do and I would like to design for everyone I want to design cars, planes, condominiums, houses, architecture, robots, and shape the future. I want to create beautiful, forever dynamic, ever-vast changing human experiences, where everything will be cyclic, sustainable, biodegradable, and seamless.

Where do you see yourself in ten years time?
I see the future of our aesthetic world crossing all the aesthetic disciplines so that design, art, architecture, fashion, food, music, fuse together to increase our experiences and bring greater pleasure to our material and immaterial lives.

Our motivations should focus around our conscious collective memory and a desire to fill it with ideas that are seamless between art and life. As art takes its ideas from everyday life and I hope that everyday life will take its ideas from art.

I will say that in comparison to product design Interior design has a difficult role between convincing the world that it is critical that our human psyche, our well being, our evanescent experiences, our memories, and that our lives are shaped by the spaces we occupy. There is no real quantifiable translation between a better space and a better ‘experience’, a better space and a healthier life, a better space and business, that a better building can create great revenue and a more financially successful result.

There are few cases, but very few. Design is also the shaping of these spaces, of our physical environments, not just ‘decorating’ and applying finishes to an existing architectural structure.

The key is the human element, the human scale, and the human condition. Design touches us on every level, and it can continue to define and shape our dimensional interior environments and create new progressive human behaviors and new languages.

www.karimrashid.com

The event is curated by Elisabetta Scantamburlo,

for more information visit the web site www.artnhow.com