In the early 1970s, the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass found himself diametrically opposed to the “rationalist culture” of industrial design, as crystallised in his collaborations with Olivetti and Poltronova. In this period, he journeyed into remote landscapes across Spain, Italy, Greece, Israel, Egypt, and the American Southwest with Catalan artist Eulalia Grau to explore a new approach to design. A precursor to Memphis, his sketches, writings, and fragile constructions made of stones and sticks questioned the role of the designer in a time of energy crises, war, and political instability: “It seemed to me that if anything was to be regained we would have to begin by regaining microscopic gestures and elementary actions, the sense of one’s own position.”
Sottsass’s context could be a mirror for the present day, in which the logic by which the world operates seems ever more opaque and design is both implicated and marginalised in a consumerist system that operates at a speed beyond human comprehension.