"I've always thought that design begins, where rational processes end and magic begins."

The exhibition begins with Ettore Sottsass's early creative years, nourished by artistic and architectural avant-garde, as well as by literature and folk art. In the 1960s, Sottsass made a significant production of ceramics that explore a dimension that is both ritual and sensory. The 1960s and 1970s were also the years of radical experiments, between design and architecture, from the Superbox (1966) to the nomadic architecture of the Furniture containers, carried out in 1972 for MoMA in New York. In the 1980s, Sottsass founded Memphis. Through its liberating approach to design, Memphis advocates a different approach to design in favor of an emotional and sensory dimension of objects. All his life, Sottsass never stopped taking pictures. This exhibition places photography at the very heart of Sottsass's conceptual research through several hundred photographs, exhibited for the first time, from the collections of the Center Pompidou.

The exhibition brings together a unique set of major historical pieces, and creates a dialogue between design objects and Sottsass's graphic research: drawings, installations, photographs, films are thus brought together from the collections of the Center Pompidou and thanks to loans from public collections. and private. The catalog is as fascinating as the work it presents.