“Savage Minds” take over the Parsons Paris Gallery with a collection of objects presented on three screens. From the shops and streets where they were sourced to the interfaces that present them to the viewer, these objects have undergone many transformations. They tell us something about social and design history, personal narratives or fictions of the future.
An homage to Claude Levi-Strauss The Savage Mind (1962), this exhibition presents the first works of Parsons Paris incoming class of graduate students from the Design + Technology MFA, Fashion Studies MA and History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA.
While exiled in New York at The New School for Social Research, Claude Levi-Strauss explored the language of many Northern American Indian tribes. This research would eventually serve as the introduction to his seminal inquiry into the idea of a universal and untamed human thought, the “savage mind”. Central to this text is the exploration into the relationships between magic, science and art as various methods of knowledge acquisition and classification. The key figure of his essay is the “bricoleur”, whose “game is always to make do with whatever is at hand”.
Coming from a broad range of academic backgrounds and geographic origins, graduate students became “bricoleurs” – either metaphorically, through context and display, or practically through various technological strategies. These savage minds in the worlds of design history and practice, have collected, researched and repurposed these artifacts, thus creating a curated interface between the material world and the mind of the viewer.
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Parsons Paris Gallery, 28 August – 31 August 2016, 45 Rue St. Roch, 75001, Paris
Curated by Graduate Students – Parsons The New School Paris 2016-2018
Graphic Design: Tala AlGhamdi
Image: Tala AlGhamdi
