MITCH PAONE
Time is Form, Form is Time
17:00
Alexandra Midal is an independent curator, film director, and professor ordinaire at Haute école d’art et de design – Genève (HEAD). She also serves as the director of theory at ENSCI – Les Ateliers, the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle in Paris. Midal’s research explores the construction of design and intermediality, with a particular focus on the grey and obscure areas within these fields. She is the curator of the 28th edition of the Biennial of Design (BIO), titled Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana.
Murder is a Design Hobby
It is no coincidence that criminology claims to be a model and metaphor for the art visitor in search of clues that will enable them to interpret works of art that appear silent or mysterious, or for the exhibition curator who uses the narrative motors of fright, suspense, and revelation to construct the itinerary of an exhibition.
According to Walter Benjamin, a line runs between “private persons and […] bourgeois,” who scatter clues within interiors. The space linked to the crime connects two distinct places: on one side, the large-scale dwelling of H. H. Holmes, considered the first serial killer in the United States; and on the other, the miniature crime scenes reproduced in Victorian doll’s houses by Frances Glessner Lee, the inventor of modern forensic science. Comparing these two case studies invites us to re-examine the expography by encouraging visitors to decipher traces and clues. These questions have inspired the upcoming BIO28 Biennial, titled Double Agent, which invites visitors to become detectives and attempt to decipher the intermedial political feminist tradition of encrypted messages hidden within flowers, or floriography.
Alexandra Midal
