The ‘Object Lessons’ on show in this exhibition also comprise an article in Archivio No.10, the latest issue of the magazine about archives. The exhibition heralded the launch of the magazine, which was devoted to design and had Marco Sammicheli and Jasper Morrison as guest editors.
Forget about Time, forget about Place, forget about Type, Material, Value, Quality or Condition, an archive can be anything you want it to be, there are no rules. From the Italian ‘round’ archive (the waste bin) to the Austrian State Archive there are different levels of formality too. An archive might be irrelevant to all but one person or appreciated by many.
These images have been prepared for the Italian magazine Archivio as an imaginary archive of everyday objects from different places, made at different times, related by character perhaps or a shared understanding of what it is to be an object. Subjective you say? Certainly! But as all good objects are related by the common goal of human intention to make something both useful and beautiful, and one good object can feed the creation of another, these combinations may also be inter subjective, and even objective if, like me, you believe that these things choose each other.
