Emanuele Quinz

EMANUELE QUINZ: Asking this question is absolutely central: placing art in a social context is a necessity and an urgency in a world in crisis such as ours. But this does not necessarily mean filling it with seemingly socially engaged content, nurturing a literal, simplistic view of engagement - at the risk of permanently diverting the judgement of its impact from aesthetic to moral. Art has a fundamental role, as a space for experimentation of the social, in which to experience the transformations taking place and in preparation. It is not a question of action and therefore of leadership, which the artist should assume, as the historical avant-gardes or the movements of the 1960s advocated, but on the contrary of consciousness. Artists should be the first not to express certainties but to push us to dwell in doubt, to make us aware that not knowing is more interesting than knowing.

EQ: Hope is a fundamental component of art, and especially of design. If art can afford to stop at doubt and criticism, design always wants to result in a proposal. Based on the thinking of Tomas Maldonado - who published a book called La Speranza progettuale in 1971 - I define design as a “technology of hope”. Not only is there design because there is hope, but there is hope because there is design (i.e. the possibility of changing something). And, to develop, to spread, to contaminate, hope certainly needs narratives, which are not only reassuring, but also cautionary. 

Therefore, I am interested in alternative design currents - such as critical or speculative design, which work on fiction, sketching scenarios of the future. In the book Strange Design (edited with Jehanne Dautrey, it éditions, 2016), I tried to reconstruct the genealogy of these trends, starting with the Italian radicals of the 1960s. In all these practices, design, instead of producing objects, composes narratives in which strange objects induce strange behaviour and thus help us, through the deviation of strangeness, to understand the impact of objects on our daily lives, how they condition our relationships with others, how they shape the horizon of society. From this point of view, these narratives oppose the official design narratives, which Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, critical design theorists, have called “affirmative” - reinforcing the status quo. With the power of imagination, irony and surprise, these design narratives warn us against design, against a certain design - and help us better understand how to prepare our future more equitably.

EQ: For several years now, I have been examining the inter- or trans-disciplinary, notably in a master's seminar at the Université Paris 8, entitled Enjeux de l'interdisciplinaire.

Traditionally, a discipline is defined as a domain structured by codes and norms. It is identified by the boundaries that delimit it, as much by what it includes as by what it excludes. Consequently, the notion of interdisciplinary indicates a confrontation and possibly a connection between constituted disciplines, between methodologies and theories coming from different epistemological horizons, and in the case of art, from codified genres, established by a tradition and institutionalized by a milieu. In a nuance not always easy to point out, the transdisciplinary suggests a more fluid relationship, of exchange, of transfer. For his part, the Canadian artist François-Joseph Lapointe proposes the notion of paradisciplinary, which describes a strategy of contamination. But what interests me is what I call counter-disciplinary,

​Firstly, I define it as a tension - which is both dialogical and polemical, positional and oppositional. A tension is related to a force rather than a form, to a dynamic - which both pushes towards something, and pushes away from something.

​It is this tension that I try to implement in the research projects I explore - notably with the Reflective Interaction team at Ensadlab (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris) and with my accomplice, the artist and researcher Samuel Bianchini. In these projects, the convocation of skills and knowledge, but also of heterogeneous perspectives, the confrontation between art, design, hard sciences, social sciences or engineering sciences constitute both a means and an objective. The project becomes the place, the theatre of a counter-disciplinary exchange, which does not aim at confrontation but at cooperation - and which directly involves the public. The prefix “counter” must not lead to a contraction where each discipline closes in behind its trenches, but on the contrary to a contract, not to a negation, but to a negotiation. The counter-disciplinary tension expresses this imperative of emancipation - and redesigns the art system as a theatre of boundaries, which need to be constantly crossed, moved. This tension seems to me to be the condition for a transformation, both of art and of the social horizon.

EQ: The 'better world' issue disturbs me. The word “better” seems innocent, indicating an improvement in material living conditions, but, in reality, it always conceals a moralistic undertone. Who determines what is good, and what is better? With what legitimacy?
Of course, this does not deny the crisis, political, social and above all ecological, in which we find ourselves, but there is no single solution. There are perspectives, dynamics, positions, which must be thought of pluralistically, which must be negotiated.

One of the focal points that awaits us, and which interests me most, is the redefinition of social space - which can no longer be limited to human beings. While we need to remove all forms of social injustice and marginalization from the human horizon, we also need to question the anthropocentric approach to society by including other forms of subjectivity, such as other living beings and why not, even artefacts. This complexity of the social seems to me one of the challenges of the present and one of the most beautiful prospects for the future.

JS: Even though I work on the present and the future, my training as a historian always leads me to look backwards in order to see forward. History is fundamental - and today we are witnessing a fundamental process of rewriting, which replaces the universalist and self-definingly objective discourse of the modern tradition with plural, more situated, decentralised narratives. It is a crucial, exciting moment.

I have no specific rituals, because projects for me always arise from dialogue with others, artists, designers. So, I can perhaps say that the first point is dialogue, sitting down and discussing.