The New Generation

About:

Can tenderness and care help us design a new beginning? Young designers have been looking for the ways of bridging the gap between the individual and the communal. As tender storytellers, mediators, and integrators of feelings, memories, places, and relations, they have been weaving the story of the world, becoming the center of the net.

Why should we be listening to the young generation of designers? They are the ones who can sense the change and absorb the new. Their fingertips, as if reading Braille, can feel the texture of modernity. This is the generation of people who refuse to compromise on their art, unyielding to the pressures of the market. Breathing in the world around them, they are trying to figure out how to navigate their lives, which is why they prioritize their own needs. What they create, however, if it is well conceived and executed, can quickly become of universal and lasting value.

The Anthropocene fails us. Of that, we are sure. And for the world to be in harmony, we need to listen to human and non-human actors alike: machines, materials, technology, fungi, microorganisms, flora, and fauna. This is a heterogenous and interdependent world, to use the words of the sociologist Bruno Latour, and designers seem to know it very well in their empathetic and attentive designing of and for the complexity of the world, trying to alleviate the egotism of the Anthropocene.

The New Generation exhibits the best and most appealing projects designed by students from seven universities: the School of Form at SWPS University, Koszalin University of Technology, Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology, the Academy of Art in Szczecin, the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and Sopot Academy of Applied Sciences. As I was selecting the pieces for the exhibition, I kept asking myself questions: What is good for us? What will help us find the balance we need? What will nourish us and give us strength?

This exhibition may offer answers to these questions. What we need is re-education. A change that starts with our own body, our own spirit – us, humans, tender narrators. Let’s turn to the microscale, the human scale, the scale of the neighborhood, the scale of the region. Let’s focus on the scale of the cell – the cell of the human, the animal, the plant, and the fungus. Tenderness protects. From the exploitation of the body and the exploitation of natural resources. From excess.

Designers:
Julia Buczkowska, Ewa Burda, Karolina Czyż, Zofia Dziubecka, Aleksandra Groblewska, Marta Grykałowska, Zofia Hernas, Patrycja Janiak, Agnieszka Jaskierska, Marta Kaiser, Weronika Karska, Kamila Knitter, Tomasz Kościelniak, Patrycja Kowalczuk, Weronika Lewandowska, Joanna Miler, Maja Marlicz, Aleksandra Niewiadomska, Magdalena Pigońska, Julia Olenkiewicz, Agnieszka Rosołowska, Przemysław Sokół, Jędrzej Surzycki, Magdalena Szatyńska, Karolina Wejman, Gabriela Zemlis

Coordinators: Arkadiusz Szwed, Daria Bolewicka, Magdalena Nowak, dr Justyna Matysiak, prof. SANS dr Magdalena Berlińska, dr Marta Gębska, dr Iga Węglińska, dr hab. Anna Szwaja, Ewa Protasiewicz

Visual design of the exhibition: Pełnia Studio.

Exhibition supported by Porsche Centrum Sopot.