Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam announces international programme for Spring/Summer 2023
Droog30. Design or non-design? at Triennale Milano, Milan Design Week (15 - 24 April 2023)
Commissioner of Dutch Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (20 May - 26 November 2023)
Artistic Director at London Design Biennale, and commissioner of its Dutch pavilion (1 June – 25 June 2023)
Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture, reveals details for their international programming in spring/summer 2023. Following the March opening of Garden Futures at Vitra Design Museum, an exhibition co-organised by Nieuwe Instituut, the Rotterdam-based museum will appear at Europe’s most important design events - Milan Design Week, Venice Architecture Biennale and the London Design Biennale.
In April for Milan Design Week, the Instituut will launch an exhibition dedicated to the influential Dutch design collective Droog in its 30th anniversary year, curated by Maria Cristina Didero and Richard Hutten and conceived in collaboration with Triennale Milano; whilst in May, Nieuwe Instituut will continue its role as commissioner of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; shortly followed by the London Design Biennale, where the Nieuwe Instituut will act as both the Biennale’s Artistic Director and commissioner of its Dutch Pavilion.
Aric Chen, General and Artistic Director of the Nieuwe Instituut: “We are excited to continue our international programme this spring and summer with projects and events that revisit design’s role in changing how we see and think, while attempting to enact this potential by rethinking the nature of these events themselves. After returning to Milan Design Week with a reflection on 30 years of Droog, with Triennale Milano, we will test different approaches to biennales through our commissioning once again of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale and through our role as the first institutional Artistic Director of the London Design Biennale. Our work, both in Rotterdam and further afield, allows us to further our collaborations, try new ideas in changing contexts and create testing grounds for design experimentation.”
INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMME
Droog30. Design or Non-design?
Salone del Mobile, Milan
15 - 24 April 2023
Droog30 – Design or Non-design? celebrates 30 years of Droog, the loosely-formed Dutch design collective led by Renny Ramakers and Gijs Bakker that made its international debut in Milan in 1993.
Meaning ‘dry’ in Dutch, Droog subverted the norms of form and function to push the boundaries of design by reappropriating found objects, making the ordinary extraordinary and introducing new approaches to designing that redefined design itself. Often employing a ‘dry’ wit that has now become mainstream, Droog was arguably the last of what might be considered a movement in design—a claim predicated on the fact that what soon followed was the rise of the internet and its decentralising effect on design discourse.
Curated by Maria Cristina Didero and designer Richard Hutten, a founding Droog member, Droog30 includes a selection of Droog objects by Tejo Remy, Marcel Wanders, Hutten and others within an installation of comments crowdsourced through social media that together help tell the collective’s story. In this analog representation of today’s online environment, Droog30 reflects on the group’s impact on design while implicitly asking if such a collective influence would be possible within today’s cacophonous digital landscape.
Following Milan, Droog30. Design or Non-design? will open on May 2, 2023 at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
Plumbing the System
Dutch Pavilion at Biennale di Venezia Architettura
26 May - 26 November 2023
Responding to the biennale’s theme of ‘Laboratory of the Future’, this year’s Dutch Pavilion, which has been commissioned by Aric Chen and curated by Jan Jongert of Superuse Studio, aims to demonstrate how alternative systems for a more sustainable future might work at a macro scale, while attempting to enact and test real changes on a micro level using the Gerrit Rietveld-designed pavilion itself as a trial case.
On the one hand, Plumbing the System, as the Pavilion is themed, will present The Waterworks of Money, a series of drawings by architect Carlijn Kingma that intricately translates our complex economic framework into a spatial environment, using water as a metaphor. Kingma has collaborated with leading thinkers in economics to develop and illustrate tangible alternatives or “road maps” that can lead to a more socially and ecologically regenerative economy. By mapping the flows and pipelines of resource distribution, Kingma illustrates the workings of capitalism and its deeply embedded mechanisms that can both hinder and enable change.
Meanwhile, continuing with the metaphor of water, Jongert will attempt to implement an actual systemic change by addressing Venice’s severe water shortages and installing a low-tech rainwater retention system to supply the needs of the Pavilion and its surrounding gardens. Visitors will be able to witness the process and the technical, bureaucratic and other challenges of undertaking this seemingly simple task–thus providing a tangible road map for realising change on a local level while prompting the question of whether cultural events can move beyond discussing, debating and proposing changes towards becoming testing grounds for enacting them.
Plumbing the System will be accompanied by a research program in collaboration with the Creative Industries Fund NL, alongside workshops and other programs with local partners.
The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations
London Design Biennale, Somerset House
1 - 25 June 2023
The fourth edition of London Design Biennale, titled The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations, will take place at Somerset House from 1 - 25 June and continue the Biennale’s mission to demonstrate how design can better the world we inhabit. Nieuwe Instituut is the biennale’s first institutional Artistic Director and has initiated The Global Game, a web-based collaboration game, developed by Amsterdam studio Play the City, that “hacks” the biennale’s format of national and territorial pavilions. Under the assumption that global challenges require global cooperation, the more than 40 international exhibitors representing different countries and territories have been asked to not only respond to the biennale’s theme of collaboration but, with the help of the game, to in fact collaborate with each other–thus forming an alternative geopolitical landscape driven not by conflict or competition, but rather cooperation.
The Dutch Pavilion, titled Out of Joint and commissioned by Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with the Embassy of the Netherlands in the United Kingdom, is curated by Colin Keays. It will respond to themes of societal disorientation in an ever-changing site-specific installation of functional architectural modules that can be borrowed by other pavilions and distributed throughout Somerset House, the biennale venue. Responding to new narratives, attitudes and frictions that have arisen in the face of global crisis, the Dutch Pavilion aims to manifest a process of disorientation and reorientation, and through the dissolution of its parts, support moments of gathering, assembly and reflection amongst other participants.
About Nieuwe Instituut
Nieuwe Instituut is the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture. Based in Rotterdam, a global centre for design innovation, the institute’s mission is to embrace the power and potential of new thinking, exploring the past, present and future ideas in order to imagine, test and enact a better tomorrow. Encouraging visitors of all ages to question, rethink and contribute, the institute’s exhibitions, public programmes, research and wide-reaching national and international initiatives provide a testing ground for collaboration with leading designers, thinkers and diverse audiences, critically addressing the urgent questions of our times.
In addition to housing the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, the institute manages the 1933 Sonneveld House, a leading example of Dutch Functionalist architecture, as part of its campus in Rotterdam’s Museumpark.
In 2022, the Nieuwe Instituut became the world’s first Zoöp, a groundbreaking model through which all areas of the museum’s operations and programming are informed by its impact and benefit to other forms of life. The institute also serves as a commissioner of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and in 2023, will act as the Artistic Director of the London Design Biennale. In 2022 Het Nieuwe Instituut curated the official Dutch entry to the Triennale di Milano, winning the exhibition’s Golden Bee Award.
Francesca Formenti