“Every Straight Line Bends by its own Weight” is a research-exhibition-forum project that aims to document, display, and debate the emergence and development of the Finnish design mythology. The project extends its critical focus on the heritage of the mythology such as in the context of current roles of institutions, designers, and consumers. These questions, for example, the borders and roles of national definitions of design and cultural practices that have been counterpoise to the legacy of advances in the internationalisation of knowledge and expertise. Therefore, the Milan Design Triennials became the starting point for this research; as the referential meeting point of design in the international arena.
From the February to the May of 2017, the research outcome was displayed in the continuously developing project in Helsinki’s Design Museum. The conceptual framework of the project involved blurring the borders between exhibition, archival display, and action research. In this vein, the project aimed to serve as contact zone and meeting moment for critical encounters. As a temporary artistic intervention within the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition engaged photographic and documentary archival material in a changing setting. This setting was operationalised as a research process on display and developed in a dialogue with the interviews, presentations, and encounters that organically grew alongside the exhibition. The forum concept, in addition, provided further extension with valuable contributions from various academics, researchers, design practitioners, artists, students, and general audience in the form of public lectures and roundtable discussions.
The entire project – with the above display and debate features – was specifically aimed to re-read and re-archive the histories
to intersect and expand layers of content across some elements in the permanent collection of the museum. In this context,
the project specially emphasised on what escapes the archive: the subjectivity of testimonies and anecdotes in the midst
of struggles for power; as well the fragility of the means with which power conceals itself.
The exhibition has so far received domestic and international attention. In May, for example, it was promoted in the German FORM Magazine’s monthly agenda.
Background of the Project
The research process of the exhibition had been launched in late 2016 and involved a set of interviews and an extensive documentation of the archival material primarily from the Suomen Taideteollisuusyhdistys Arkisto, Design Forum, YLE, and Domus Archives. Initiated with an aim to bridge moments for critical reflections of the blind spots in contemporary design ethos, the research revolved around the professional and media construction of the national design mythology in Finland. The documentation originated from the cultivation of the mythical designer roles in the 1950s and 1960s emergent consumer society and extended towards these roles’ wider impact on the contemporary design and consumption scenes in Finland. The presented material, for example, included a selection of the inner professional correspondence between the era’s organisers, promoters, and designers. This framework was substantially enriched with the archive capital of the Finnish media such as the era’s art, design, and lifestyle magazines as well as daily newspapers that vividly illustrate the media building of the rhetoric of national design mythology and the design heroism in the consumer imaginary.
In synchrony with the archival scanning, with the intention to put a critical light on the very emergence of sectoral hierarchies and industrial monopolies, interviews were held with people who took active role in debating of the “golden era” of Finnish design such as Yrjö and Kristiina Wiherheimo. As this aimed to qualitatively reflect the legacy of Finnish modern design in contemporary design issues, the first roundtable discussion was carried out addressing design’s museumification in Finland. Design historian Prof. Pekka Korvenmaa from the Aalto University, museum curators Leena Svinhufvud and Katarina Silvatuori participated the discussion. The discussion stretched across the drivers, mechanisms, and stakeholders behind the Finnish design’s international achievements in the mid-century and developed a critical stance on the present design issues such as the museum’s current role in the promotion of design and its cultural policies.
Picnic on a Raanu was the second event where public was invited to attend a picnic with their Raanu pieces inside the premises of the Helsinki Design Museum. The picnic event was designed to shift the focus of the research and exhibition from the heritage of modern design to what has been rendered as the Finnish folkloric culture. Engaging a feminist perspective, Prof. Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen from the University of Turku and artist Elina Juopperi discussed the role of knowledge-heritage transferred across generations of craft and household workers. Elina presented her own Raanu collection project. They reflected on the importance of Sami knowledge-heritage transfer and its neglected recognition of a design status. The conversation concluded by signalling some contributions of early feminist networks to the construction of the welfare state. Using kaipio arkku as a metaphor, the conversation also opened questions about other pieces of knowledge that are needed to be transferred and preservedin contemporary times.
For the third public event, our project hosted Prof. Harri Kalha whose incorporation of the poststructuralist mythology understanding in Finnish design history writing has greatly inspired and shaped the research and exhibition project. In his lecture, Prof. Kalha focused on the construction of the national design mythology in Finland with a critical eye on the contemporary reproduction of the mythology in the design scene. The lecture was built upon the Barthesian notion of myth, and reflected on the shift from “reception aesthetics” to “discourse analysis” in design rhetoric. These opened the debate to inquire into the possibilities to re-politicise mythologies.
In the final public event, the project invited a design historian, Prof. Tevfik Balcıoğlu, this time from Turkey whose historical, social, and cultural structure is distinct from that of Finland. The aim of this choice has been directing the shift of the research focus to a different design heritage context. Turkey is considered as a representative case of some very large, emerging economy segments. With its distinctive “radical modernism” history and current politically-motivated Islamist employment of arts and craft heritage, Turkey provides an interesting case to explore the untapped layers of design mythology and heritage. Prof. Balcıoğlu, in his lecture, entitled In pursuit of a lost identity in Turkish design. Heritage: used & abused, focused on how Turkey’s historical capital is deployed and mythologised by the populist political discourse and ideological frameworks such as neo-Ottomanism. Balcıoğlu provided a pluralist reading of the rich fabric of diverse and dilemmatic interrelationships woven in the rapidly changing conjuncture of tensions, compromises or fusions faced by designers in Turkey.
" Telegram from Gio Ponti to Gummerus, 29.12.1950. Courtesy of Suomen Taideteollisuusyhdistys Arkisto. "
Exhibition and research team:
David Muoz (NAES), Elina Juopperi, Fahrettin Ersin Alaca and Giovanna Esposito Yussif
Advisors:
Katarina Siltavuori, Auli Suortti-Vuorio and Leena Svinhufvud
Acknowledgments:
Aalto University, Design Forum
This project has received funding from the Kone Foundation.
NÆS – Nomad Agency/Archive of Emergent Studies is a collective-connective research agency and a cultural production studio focusing on emergent and resilient dynamics of social organisation. It functions as a platform for activating alternative forms
of knowledge production and critical thinking.