’s Fire Station on the Vitra Campus, as well as unveil three new limited edition products he has been developing together with Vitra.
It is an understandable pairing: the creative world’s favourite new multidisciplinary, genre-bending deconstructor and reconstructor of narratives who says ‘modernity is something I believe in’; meets a manufacturer with a strong modernist heritage that has a talent for identifying and embracing the avant-garde. What is interesting is that the resulting collaboration is not targeted towards the majority of revellers on the Vitra Campus but towards ‘the emerging generation’.
The exhibition is clearly autobiographical in nature. This borrowing and remixing that Abloh does right across his immense creative output reflects the highly eclectic nature of contemporary cultural context. Thanks to the heterogeneous worlds opened up by smart phoneand ubiquity it becomes increasingly difficult to work out where we come from and who we are.
For now though, the editions comprise two remixes and a new piece: Jean Prouvé’s Petite Potence lamp gets a contemporary utilitarian coat of bright orange lacquer and an LED lamp in a cage. Prouvé’s Antony chair also gets an orange lacquer update and a transparent plexiglass shell-seat to draw all focus to the structure. In the installation, there is a wall of 999 hollow, glazed ceramic blocks – each one individually numbered.
Perhaps the most important result of this collaboration between the polymath from Chicago with Ghanaian heritage and this prestigious furniture manufacturer will be, as Abloh comments, that his working with Vitra ‘is going to open the door to a number of my contemporaries who don’t think that door is even open.’ §Ceramic blocks by Virgil Abloh for Vitra.Installation view of ‘TWENTYTHIRTYFIVE.