A FOLDER
Soft Baroque

30 December 2020, 6.30 pm
#Agora

A Folder is a digital talk in which the guest shares their screen to narrate a specific collection, random obsession, sustained inspiration, or longterm research found within a specific folder living on their laptop.

 

Soft Baroque’s folder contains a collection of images harvested online over a long period of time, accompanied with original ‘Tag Poems’. These are inspired by the titles and descriptions of product listings online. Distorted, surreal and wonderful caches of words, normal collected enhance search optimisation and promotion of products.

Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin work simultaneously in object design and art. Their London based practise focuses on creating work with conflicting functions and imagery, without abandoning beauty or consumer logic. They are keen to blur the boundaries between acceptable furniture typologies and conceptual representative objects, rendering a new set of aesthetic and functional values.

 

Making plays a central role in their practice. They are designers and manufacturers of their objects. Their interest in various materials results in a diverse body of work. The refined, simplified forms of their works reflect principles of mid-century design, but the pieces also veer toward conceptual territory by evoking the malleability of how objects are seen and mediated today. Traditionally a craftsman’s practice would be in proximity to the raw material used to fabricate objects. In the same fashion, Soft Baroque produces work in the context of metropolitan environment: processed materials manufactured for the domestic interiors are manipulated to unconventional ends. These new raw materials are converted into objects that still possess an echo from their intended use.

 

So far they’ve been showing work at the V&A, Christie’s and Somerset House in London, Swiss Institute, Friedman Benda, Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York, Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, A Palazzo Gallery in Brescia, Etage Projects in Copenhagen, Design Miami in Basel and Miami, Collective Design in New York, Nomad in Monaco and St. Moritz fairs and at Milan, London, New York, Stockholm and Dubai Design Week.