Here are some words about “Ressources”, the main theme of this year Biennal’s  :

“Resources”, the theme of Est Ensemble’s next Emergences Biennial, calls upon designers, craftsmen and material artists to give dimension to the mutations currently going on in the way we use resources. Because whether they are material, technical or intellectual, these resources give a uniqueness to creative gestures and the products that result from them.

Raw and natural materials, modest or rare materials, bio-sourced materials, innovative, recycled materials … Beginning with specifications influenced by new restrictions and aspirations, many designers already integrate these new approaches for using their intelligence and rationalizing their means as their ongoing work premises.

These approaches, which are formulated either consciously or unconsciously, also focus on finding new properties in materials or diverting them from their initial use. Designers develop new ways to optimize techniques, find new machining qualities or new approaches to utilize their skills. They also embark on collaborative partnerships in a short circuit to get results that will serve a more virtuous economic model.

Our resources and production capacities are limited. We are now all concerned by environmental questions in our tiniest gestures or our most insignificant choices. This generally agreed-upon truth has an unprecedented impact as we are confronted by the serious ecological catastrophes we are currently experiencing.

What materials will we work with, how will we do it and to what ends? The designers, producers and manufacturers who bring to life design and the artistic crafts ask themselves these same questions. What markers will bear witness to new creative and productive directions in a sector that is usually connected at the same time to memory, the modern world and future experiments?

At the same time artistic craftsmen, who take longer to produce sustainable objects with a high added value, also question the availability of the often rare, precious and sometimes polluting resources they use as well as the future of their know-how. To the challenge of resources becoming rarer (wood, metals, textiles, stone, marble, …) is added that of preserving and renewing techniques to imagine excellent objects with more well-thought-out characteristics that will better meet today’s expectations.