Surrounded by a constant stream of products, images and innovations competing for attention, we rarely stop to consider the lives of the objects that already inhabit our world. Design is one of the fields that, although subjected to the same fast Fordist model of production, still preserves the unavoidable care and deliberate pace of something consciously conceived by humans. Hella Jongerius is a designer who has focused not on quickly creating novelties, but on looking more closely and valuing what is already here. Open at the Vitra Design Museum until September 6, Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things traces the full scope of Jongerius' interdisciplinary career through more than 400 pieces across three decades.
The retrospective takes its name from the idea that objects possess voices of their own, a way of thinking that becomes very clear when seeing Jongerius's work up close. Exhibited inside the neat and instantly recognisable building created by Frank Gehry that is home to the Vitra Design Museum inside the massive Vitra Campus, where structures made by names like Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando and Herzog & de Meuron happily coexist, the universe of the industrial designer is enhanced by its surroundings. Here, every single building and every single object inside each building tells a story: a story of its time, of its context, of who made it or of how it was made, and Hella Jongerius is, aside from a successful industrial designer, a gifted storyteller.
Throughout her career, Jongerius has resisted the pursuit of uniformity that often defines contemporary design, choosing instead to embrace irregularity and the expressive qualities that emerge when materials are allowed to retain their individuality, a key factor and necessary freedom that distinguishes her spontaneous designs from the rest. The freedom given to her creations comes from her very own free mindset, where restriction has not been a part of her vocabulary, allowing her to explore her vision across all sorts of mediums, from painting, sculpture and installation to textiles, interiors and furniture. The museum exhibits pieces from all typologies, providing a holistic understanding of her overall approach to creation.
The exhibition is divided into four chapters, each of which helps us understand a different layer of her practice and her mind. The first, Dirty Hands, returns to the early years of Jongerius’s practice and her projects around the time of her studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven and examines the experimental approach she developed during her time with the design studio Droog in the 1990s. We could see a video projection of her working and explaining her process above many pieces, especially ceramics, textiles and furniture; all of them were full of colour, and all of them reflected her curiosity towards materials and ways of defying their properties.
Questions of production and collaboration take centre stage in the second part, Business Class, where projects developed with international companies and how they came to be are exhibited. Many are considerable in scale, from the 2005 IKEA PS Jonsberg collection of ceramic vases, which features techniques and prints recognisable from earlier works, to her collaboration with Dutch airline KLM, for which she worked on everything from uniforms to aircraft interiors.
Another key project is the one with the Spanish footwear icon Camper, a company with a deep-rooted history of design and innovation that is always looking to expand its universe with fellow artists and creators. The collaboration with Jongerius achieved a cohesive universe, manifested in redesigns of some of Camper’s most recognisable silhouettes, including Pelotas, Peu, Imar and Brothers, that harmonise both brands’ aesthetics and styles. This was not by chance, but the result of a deep research process that included the development of a specific colour system that has also served other collections.
The synergy born in this joint project is part of the Camper Together initiative, which, since 2006, has invited designers to experiment and create together. It's such a special venture that it has its own installation at the Vitra Design Museum, where we can see a curated selection of some of the results of its work with other influential names in design, including Martí Guixé, Jaime Hayón, Maria Blaisse, Bernhard Willhelm, Jasper Morrison or ISSEY MIYAKE.
From the most public side of design to the personal realm of searching for and finding our own voice, Feeling Eye, the third part of the exhibition, explores colour through Jongerius’s eyes. An impressive ceramic installation stands at its centre, surrounded by textile and graphic interpretations and different versions of her 'colour catchers' which helped her investigate how colour behaves under different conditions and across materials. Lastly, Cosmic Mind closes the exhibition with her most surreal, philosophical and raw side. Here, Jongerius focuses on animals and what they may feel in our time, asking what it would look like if they could express themselves and how angry they might be at us for what we have done to them and their world.
With an approach that feels more spiritual than practical, this final room is significant not only as the exhibition’s conclusion but also as the close of a three-decade-long phase of Jongerius’s career as an industrial designer. As she has announced, Jongerius will move away from production to focus purely on research, one of her greatest passions. It is a natural path for someone who has explored almost everything a designer can do yet still has unanswered questions and ideas to develop from new angles, all with the same freedom.
