Lunch Talk: Garden Futures
Location: Library
Friday 10.11.2023 at 12 p.m.–1 p.m.
In the Design Museum auditorium
Free entry, pre registration
The opening day’s Lunch Talk introduces the Garden Futures: Designing with Nature exhibition. The exhibition’s curator Viviane Stappmanns from the Vitra Design Museum, Nieuwe Instituuts head of programme Flora van Gaalen, and the Design Museum’s exhibition curator Ksenia Kaverina will talk about the exhibition’s themes. The discussion will be hosted by Suvi Saloniemi, the chief curator of the Design Museum Helsinki. The event is in English. Register for the Lunch Talk here.
Garden Futures: Designing with Nature is the first collaborative exhibition between the Museum of Finnish Architecture and Design Museum on their journey towards a new architecture and design museum. It will sprawl across both museums, taking over the exhibition spaces on Kasarmikatu and Korkeavuorenkatu from November 10, 2023. Approaching gardens through architecture, design, and art, Garden Futures: Designing with Nature is a touring exhibition by Vitra Design Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation, and the Nieuwe Instituut, with Helsinki being its first stop.
The Garden Futures exhibition demonstrates that even private gardens are interconnected with society in various ways. The ongoing transformation invites us to view gardens from a different perspective: rather than as romantic escapes, they are now examined through activism, social justice, and biodiversity. The exhibition highlights, for example, how many of the familiar plants in Western gardens have deep roots in colonialism.
Speakers
Viviane Stappmanns is a curator with the Vitra Design Museum. Among the exhibitions she curated and co-curated are the touring exhibition »Garden Futures: Designing with Nature«, »Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today« (2021), as well as the solo exhibitions »Christien Meindertsma: Beyond the Surface« (2018) and »Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Better Nature« (2019). Viviane joined the Vitra Design Museum in 2013 after over a decade of studying and working within architecture and design. After completing degrees in both Interior Design and Journalism, she worked as editor of Inside Australian Design Review, as well as completing numerous publication and curatorial projects. Since 2002, she has maintained an active teaching practice, her most recent assignment was a guest professorship at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany (2020-2022).
Flora van Gaalen works as Head of Programme at Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture. Pushing the institutes agenda to work on more socially and ecologically just futures, she focuses on bringing different voices and disciplines together and, by doing so, explores what it means to be a cultural testing ground.
Ksenia Kaverina is a Curator of Exhibitions at Design Museum Helsinki. After graduating from Master’s in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at Aalto University (Finland), she has been working as a curator and project manager within expanded fields of contemporary art, design and culture in Finland, and also has a substantial previous work experience as translator and creative writer. During the time free from museum work, she is writing a doctoral dissertation centered on the topics of ‘global exhibition’ and translation, and maintains a community garden plot with her neighbors in Kontula, Helsinki.
Suvi Saloniemi is a curator active in the fields of design and contemporary art. She has been exhibitions curator at design museum since the spring of 2012, being responsible for the museum’s exhibitions programme and the curating and production of exhibitions. Suvi has a background in studies in art history and curating. She has worked for many of Helsinki’s largest cultural institutions and at the same time in micro-projects, as a DJ, radio journalist, and the creative director of the Töölö Fashion Institute, an imaginary fashion school based on workshop interventions. Suvi is particularly interested in graphic design, fashion, critical design and the encounters that take place between design and other arts.
Accessibility
The event is free of charge, and it has pre registartion. The Design Museum building is accessible. You can find more information about the accessibility of the Design Museum here.
Photo: © Vitra Design Museum, Illustration: Lorenz Klingebiel and Dominik Krauss. Illustration based on photo: Les Jardins de Marqueyssac, Dordogne, France ©Laugery