Our homes are where the messiness of our everyday lives is perhaps most apparent. Flour on the kitchen tops, wet sponges in the bathroom, old tickets, notes and bills in almost every drawer consorting with inkless pens and pennies, and dust in random corners. Amid the clutter, perhaps one acquires a few curated artefacts—a ceramic cup from Italy with a chipped lip, a knock-off Kartell lamp, and a table spread whose bright colour is fading—objects of design that make our lives beautiful, but are not, after all, pieces of art that we don’t interact with. For French designer Inga Sempé, this vitality of messiness was crucial in the conception of her solo exhibition at the Triennale Milano, titled Inga Sempé. La casa imperfetta (The Imperfect Home), on view from April 15 - September 15, 2024. The showcase is curated by Marco Sammicheli, director of the Museo del Design di Triennale Milano, as one of the projects staged at Design Platform, the exhibition space linked to the Museo del Design which explores contemporary design.

Sempé tells STIR about the thought behind the show’s concept: “I find the design exhibitions that display furniture and objects which are still in shops, presented on a pedestal in a museum as boring and even a little untrue.  As if the fact that they are in a museum turns them into masterpieces and thus there is a need to set a distance between the visitors and the items… What is called ‘design’ are just objects that one can use and have. I design for daily life, and daily life is full of other things that we live with.” Based on this notion that designed objects are actors in the lives we live, the exhibition design by Studio A/C, a Milan-based practice, resembles someone’s home, adding an interactive element to the display. When visitors walk in, a brochure informs them that the house’s resident has just left, and they must now piece this person’s life together through the things in the house. It is, after all, the objects we own that tell our stories.

In one corner, one might see Sempé’s design for Ariake, the Cabine with a Paris Marathon Medal designed by her dangling off it. In the same area, they might also encounter a wall of sketches and mini-models of her work. In the corner, they can sit on Ruché, a sofa designed by her in 2010, and switch on PO/202, a lamp designed for Cappellini to read a book. It is an exhibition fit for a designer who eschews the idea of target markets, marketing and product lines. Apart from Sempé’s work, some products by Italian designers Vico Magistretti and Massimo Morozzi are on display, as well as artworks, completing the illusion of a contemporary French apartment.

At Inga Sempé. The Imperfect Home, visitors are encouraged to treat the space as a home, subverting a traditional exhibition format. The very contradiction between the privateness of a home and the publicness of a museum is played up with tangible as well as intangible touches, like a soundscape playing in the background or the exclusion of labels for the displayed objects. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition where the visitor must suspend disbelief and relish in the stories the objects tell, and a level of interaction that borders on transgressive.

STIR spoke to Sammicheli about this idea of interactivity in Inga Sempé. The Imperfect Home, where he elaborates on the choice to showcase an exhibition on Sempé’s work, and how it fits the unique rhizomatic network of Italian design. Below is an excerpt of the conversation.

Mrinmayee Bhoot: Could you tell us how the collaboration with Inga Sempé came about, and the process of working with her?

Marco Sammicheli: It was important to us to challenge the idea of how we exhibit and display contemporary design in museums and institutions. This is a programme that I started before Inga’s showcase when I invited Alberto Meda and Riccardo Blumer to stage and design Alberto Meda. Tension and Lightness, a solo exhibition on Meda’s work that previously occupied the space of the museum we dedicate to contemporary design.

We believe including contemporary design at the Triennale is a way to legitimate a story that belongs to a tradition: the tradition of the maestri, of the great masters of Italian design. In Alberto’s case, the works were already part of the Museo del Design Italiano’s permanent collection, and he took part in many international exhibitions. It was a progressive step to have a retrospective on him.

Inga, I thought, was part of another important tradition which is why I invited her. Post World War II, Italy and Milan in particular were very open, in the sense that it was hospitable for the designers who wanted to study and learn how to be part of the business by becoming practitioners and trainees in Milanese design studios. So for decades, young designers were coming to Italy from all over the world.

It was important to have a figure like Inga who has been moving between Paris, Rome and Milan to tell part of the story. To me, she represents a group of designers who moved to Milan and found the right conditions to blossom here. She's a good example of a class of creatives who live abroad but [whose] career could not exist without the possibility and the opportunities of the city, of Salone.del Mobile and the manufacturers based in northern Italy.

We might think of French design, for example—while Inga says it does not exist, we might say what exists are French designers working for European manufacturers. It’s almost impossible to think of Philippe Starck without Kartell or the Bouroullec brothers without Flos, and the same is true of Inga. Inga has collaborated with Alessi, Magis, D&D, Luceblanc and Mutina. So I picked her among many others because she's a good representative of contemporary design from a younger generation. It shows how this story is still relevant for debate today.

Mrinmayee: So it's almost a symbiotic relationship between the designer and the Italian craftspeople/ manufacturers that you are trying to highlight through the exhibition.

Marco: It is indeed a story of European design but something that portrays contemporary industrial design for the everyday. The way we conceived the exhibition facilitates this since it is an apartment where you can touch and feel all the different facets of the designs on display.

This concept came about through a conversation with Inga. She doesn't like the fact that most of the objects you see in a design museum are there only to be viewed when you can buy them in showrooms, stores or online. So why would you go to a museum where they are on a plinth?

So, when you arrive in the exhibition space, there are no captions. Instead, you find an apartment where you can lie down on the bed, stretch yourself on the sofa or eat your lunch in the kitchen. You are lured into the space where we also have displayed objects, works of art and furniture designs and you can see physical traces of a presence. You can see an orange peel on the side table next to the bed or you can hear voices of a presence evoked by a soundscape. This was the specific curatorial statement that we shared with Inga and Studio A/C.

Mrinmayee: That's beautiful. To go over the spatial design in a little more detail, when you call it the Imperfect Home, there is this notion of messiness that we don’t associate with a design exhibition. As you described, one would think the objects get put out of place when people use them. I was wondering how you maintain this idea of ‘imperfectness.’

Marco: The imperfection is very much intentional. It is the opposite of those houses you find in fancy magazines where the residential interiors are shiny and perfect. In normal homes, there are things we like or inherited. Sometimes we buy a product because we couldn't afford something more expensive, or some artefacts mean a lot to us. To me, imperfection is a layering of all these feelings and it is also the dust, the air, the hair in the bathroom.

All these elements have played a specific role in making this idea tangible. To us, the space can look like a cinematographic scenography. That’s also the reason there are no captions, and when you buy the ticket to the show, you receive a brochure. This brochure tells you that the inhabitants of this house just left.

Mrinmayee: That’s fascinating. Could you tell us more about this storytelling aspect?

Marco: You receive the brochure, and then in the space, there is a soundscape where you can hear an alarm clock ringing in the morning, you hear someone singing while having a shower, you see cutlery scattered in a drawer. You see a presence. This presence is never really there because the human presence is you—the visitors and users who explore the exhibition. Some of the visitors are very shy, some don't understand, but a lot of them do interact with the objects. This is also a great challenge because the interaction can span from curiosity to vandalism, from trials to provocation.

Since the show’s opening, we have had many kinds of interactions in the space. People falling asleep on a sofa, leaving their footprints in the bathroom, confusedly questioning the guards, but also people who came again and again because they felt it was a human space.

Mrinmayee: How do you see exhibitions like this, where as you mentioned, there's a human touch to it and are interactive, subverting the traditional notion of displaying design?

Marco: Nowadays, interactivity in design exhibitions is always driven through technology—QR codes and augmented reality—essentially content you experience via screens.

On the other hand, we wanted to go back to the roots of interactivity, so that while you physically visit, you can mechanically understand how the product designs work. With Alberto Meda and Riccardo Blumer, we designed a gym where you could use an office chair, not to exercise but to mimic the motions of exercising, so you could see how it functioned. In the Imperfect Home, the question was about thinking of ways to experience the comfort of a sofa, of sitting on [it], apart from reading a long caption or a link which shows how you can customise this object.

I think this idea of tangible interaction is not a trend for us, it is a practice. We started it back when we acquired the Sottsass’ Casa Luna and put its interiors on display. Even though you're not allowed to touch anything, you can just walk around the space, and understand textures, interactions between objects and an idea of total living. We often refer to design as a discipline that can feel very removed from our everyday lives, so why not experience this in the museum instead?

‘Inga Sempé. La casa imperfetta (The Imperfect Home)’ is on view from April 15 - September 15, 2024, at the Triennale Milano.