Valerian blos shows speculative design in light of materials
There is a table in the center of Valerian Blos’ practice. It’s not real, although he has made a few, and this painting is featured in Substance of Power, a performance installation where visitors sit under red light, surrounded by neuron-Ceramic shaped plates and architectural miniatures slowly crumbling under piles of cracking sand and salt. Each night, guests are invited to taste something: an essence, an idea, a truth they would rather not face. The substances change every night. One night it was mercury, then, plastic. Another, the silent accumulation of technological consumption that enters the body with the food chain and air.
It’s not a comfort meal, and that’s the point. Valerian Blos uses the painting as a metaphor for “friction”, along with his frequent collaborator Gosia Lehmann, the designer and artist who also co-created the projects Material Kitchen, Living Objects and Grünes Labor Weimar. The Berlin-based designer, artist and educator’s practice moves between installation, speculative design, material research and teaching. He describes his position as being on the border between art, science and design, using the latter not to produce answers but friction. In each work, the same underlying structure emerges: take something that the world has normalized, make it strange enough to see clearly, and then release the gaze to the person standing in front of it. The normalized things the designer keeps coming back to are technology, destruction, and matter itself. They overlap, and the overlap is where the most awkward questions live.
Essence of Strength | all images courtesy of Valerian Blos
Porcelain objects from real disasters
What Could Go Wrong?, for example, takes historical disasters that started as safety drills and ended up as real disasters—like Chernobyl, nuclear test explosions, industrial accidents—and freezes the moment of the explosion in a 3D simulation, then casts it in porcelain and fires it in a kiln. The destruction here becomes an object that users can hold, and the process itself, which simulates the destruction and then makes it permanent through heat, is a kind of ritual to sit with the question of where human hubris ends and consequence begins. THE of the designer The project Catastrophes and Simulations takes the same area to the playground, observing that a swing, a climbing frame and a rope course are not structurally different from fire escape equipment and disaster training rigs.
Children practice survival before they know it, and Valerian Blos made new toys for upcoming disasters and called the result a research project. What connects these works is the honesty of a future worth living for, but requiring the recognition that the present is failing. The designer constructs this account using objects and experiences rather than arguments. As seen in Into the Second Dust Bowl, it places visitors in a Western theme park in the climate overshoot period, beyond 1.5°C of global warming, where sandstorms are everyday geoengineering and a feature of ordinary life. Visitors then make a two-minute commemorative video on their own smartphones and take it home, bringing the future from the installation to the same device they use to scroll past news of the present.
in Substance of Power, the designer creates architectural miniatures that crumble under piles of sand and cracking salt
Creating bioplastics and conductive play for the public
The material dimension of Valerian Blos’s work is where utopian thinking becomes most natural. The Aura Harvester, for example, began by collecting dust from artworks at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the fine particles on painting surfaces that must be removed to prevent damage, but which carry within them fragments of the original surface of the painting. The designer picked up what is usually discarded and asked what it contains. I can’t touch this, a student project by Jannick Dietz, which the designer supervised during the lockdown at the Berlin University of the Arts, asked students to experiment with materials that cannot be contained: breath, soap film, light, temperature.
Then there’s the Material Kitchen, which taught kids to make bioplastics and conductive clay from kitchen ingredients, turning the domestic space into a laboratory where new materialities begin. Grünes Labor Weimar collected the hidden, unseen and unnoticed from a UNESCO heritage park and created an immersive exhibition of these findings, explorable with all the senses. Taken together, these works describe a person who believes that the path to a better future lies in a more honest relationship with matter, with what things are made of, what they contain, what they leave behind and what happens when they are no longer wanted.
Each night, guests are invited to taste something: an essence, an idea, a truth they’d rather not face
In Living Objects, workshops in Tokyo and Berlin used synthetic organisms as a starting point to discuss the boundaries between living and manufactured. In Substance of Power, the substance that enters the body is the subject: mercury, plastic, the nameless compounds that accumulate in tissue over a lifetime of consumption. The body is always in the picture, and it is the place where the abstract becomes concrete, where power becomes chemistry, where a bad decision made in a boardroom or a workshop finally arrives as something to be devoured.
Valerian Blos teaches these questions along with asking them. He develops new methods of practice-based interdisciplinary research with students, asking what happens when material disappears, becomes imaginary, or ceases to be tangible altogether. The classroom and the installation share the same method: they make the invisible visible, they make the normalized strange, they give people a way to feel what they might otherwise read, and they trust that emotion will work where an event cannot. This trust is itself a utopian position, for it means believing that people, given the right conditions, will see the difficulties clearly, and that looking is where an alternative future begins.
Living Objects explores the means of living and dead in a material and technological context
Catastrophes and Simulations explores modern fears and how they can be overcome through playful forms
the designer created new types of rituals and games for the coming doom
