For several decades now, Franco Clivio, a creator and lecturer, notably at the Zurich Schule für Gestaltung (School of Design) has, with a passion and a rare perspicacity, gone about collecting everyday objects usually considered commonplace and hardly spectacular. These he classes by functions, or into system typologies, materials or formal families; his collection is featured in a publication (Hidden Forms, Franco Clivio, Hans Hansen, Pierre Mendell, 2009). This exhibition, which he himself will be devising, features a significant selection of his discoveries.
These objects, often anonymously designed, pay homage to the ingenuity of craftsmen and engineers who provided solutions to a variety of problems. The show addresses issues linked to, for instance, an original and copies of it, to the model that enables a whole range of products to be developed, or else to the old but still current issue of the choice of materials-natural or artificial-and the techniques these bring into play. A generous presentation is foreseen in a playful, pedagogical and at times poetic vein.
