Design CommissionsDesign Commissions

Cookies’ designers Alice Grégoire, Federico Martelli, Clément Périssé and Antonio Barone, who collaborated with Colin Keays and Edward Zammit, have tailored their choice and use of materials to the subjects of the exhibition. For the spatial design language and typography, the designers have been inspired in various ways by different art and design movements with a clear connection to the theme. The exhibition design is based on workwear’s function as a protective barrier between people and the outside world, between body and architecture. Heavy physical labour and protective clothing are at their most visible, perhaps, on building sites. Cookies translates the wood, plaster, concrete and metal we know from these environments into the setting of a museum gallery. This choice for ready-made materials in their raw state also determined the colour palette of the graphic design: the mint green of plasterboard and the natural shades of raw plywood, set off by the silver-coloured details of the metal text boards.

Nieuwe Instituut and curator Eldina Begic did not want Workwear to be the usual kind of fashion exhibition, with displays that could have come from the windows of a luxury department store. In Workwear, therefore, garments are displayed on custom mannequins. These wooden figures consist of modular elements that can be combined in various ways to make specific garments stand out. The wood is used as efficiently as possible. You can see the making process throughout the entire set-up. The multiplex boards from which the separate arms, legs, torsos and heads have been cut are reused elsewhere as a background for plasterboard information panels and as dividing walls between the various exhibition sections.

The design of the mannequins is reminiscent of the work of Russian Constructivist artists who, in the early 20th century, used geometric forms in their attempts to depict a better, modern world. The rows of workers displaying their work clothes also recall German-Dutch graphic artist Gerd Arntz, whose 1930s pictograms made social, historical and technological relationships clearly visible to ‘ordinary people’.

Alice Grégoire, Federico Martelli, Clément Périssé and Antonio Barone started their design and architecture agency Cookies in 2016. They see their practice, in their own words, as “a catalyst for art and architecture; a polyphonic dialogue between research and production… Cookies dismembers and re-articulates the relation between art, display, curation and space, diving into projects that require a critical approach and multidisciplinary collaboration.” Cookies has collaborated with designers, art institutions and media around the world. Read more on the studio’s own website.