ABOUT

We are two freelance designers, Romain Coppin and Alexis Bondoux, who regularly work together under the name of Messgewand. Which is like a collaborative practice based between Lyon (FR) and Amsterdam (NL). After seven years of education in product/object design, we now use this discipline as a medium to question its aesthetic conventions and define our own plastic language. We explore the concept of mental furniture, midway between functional sculpture and nonfunctional design. This position especially make us answering to professional assignment as much as self-initiated projects with a critical approach toward modes of production and representation.

Our experimentations are visualised using object, furniture, sculpture, image and drawing. By doing so, we try to challenge the contemporary visual codes and rules of the object design field. Each project is an opportunity to experiment and precise our personal design langage. All of them put together are determining a large research area positioned in a narrow gap between art and design.
We see ourselves as designers/researchers that have a fascination for aesthetic ambiguity, which is something that we use as a tool to create aesthetic contrasts within our objects, and try to keep our work constantly in between. Always oscillating between sacred and cheap for instance, which is helping us to mix mass culture and avant-garde. Being ambiguous it’s also the way we choose to approach as closely as possible a new discipline related to object/furniture, and to the crossroads of many others.

We use our design background to hack the usual product design process of creating and making such as thinking - sketching - drawing - modeling - making. We see each step of it as a potential final proposal instead of having them linked in a global and closed production loop. For us, it is really more fulfilling to experiment all these mediums independently from each other by keeping them in an open relation, where they all have the same hierarchy regarding the notion of finality. One of our challenge is to display the results of our experimentations in some stages which are not the usual ones. Challenging the conventional process enables us to give abstract and maximal answers to the design practice that we question.

The intuitive and raw collage is the main part of our practice, our favourite and most powerful tool to produce our pieces so far. It appears also really convenient to express our desires of maximalism. It allows us to mix mediums, popular aesthetics and domestic codes. Our work is actually a collage of effects (texture, colors, decoration, accessories) combined with poor material, semi-object and leftovers that we enhance by layering, covering, composition and ornementation. Thanks to that process, we are able to create busy objects made of contrasts and ambiguity between trash aesthetics and plastic radicality.

Novembre * Issue 15 *
Fall/Winter 2019

Gray * Issue 48 *
October/November 2019

Glamcult
Re-manipulate to Re-engage
May 2018

Novembre * Issue 12 *
Fall/Winter 2017

ALFA residency * Zaventem Ateliers * Bruxelles [BE]

Furniture design for Mamali Shafahi * Prince.sse.s Des Villes * Palais de Tokyo * Paris [FR]

Art installation for * Lente Kabinet Festival *
Amsterdam [NL]

Set design exhibition Viral Bodies for NXS World * De School * Amsterdam [NL]

Group show Punx Not Dead * New York Design Week * Jonald Dudd * New York [US]

Illustrations * Novembre Magazine n°12 *
Paris [FR]

Group show ISOLA3000 * Amsterdam Art Weekend * ISOamsterdam * Amsterdam [NL]

Party curation Ultratatane 4 * OT301 *
Amsterdam [NL]