Staging Modernity

Presented in the context of Cassina’s 60th anniversary of industrially producing the iconic furniture pieces of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret - first shown at the 1929 Salon d’Automne in Paris - this project aims to challenge the conventional narratives around modernity, domesticity, and design while examining the deep cultural implications of these ideas today.

The original Salon d'Automne presentation was a milestone in the history of modernist architecture and design. Le Corbusier’s vision of the machine à habiter (machine for living) sought to redefine the domestic environment as an industrial, functional, and hygienic space, liberated from the burdens of tradition. By introducing bent tubular metal furniture, Perriand, Corbusier, and Jeanneret distanced the new modern aesthetic from the tradition of wood cabinetmaking. This radical break was intended not only as a design shift but as a symbol of modernity itself: a forward-thinking, industrial, and rational world untethered from the past.

Formafantasma’s Staging Modernity at the Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber takes as its starting point the floor plan of the original Salon d’Automne installation. However, rather than simply revisiting or commemorating this historical moment, the installation fragments it, scattering the elements across the space as if they were sketches or drafts. These fragments, like disjointed pieces of a puzzle, evoke the idea of a vision once whole but now fractured, offering a lens through which to reconsider the idealized conception of modernity.

Le Corbusier’s, Perriand’s, and Jeanneret’s work, deeply embedded in the philosophy of rationality and progress, is re-imagined in Formafantasma’s intervention not as a pristine vision of industrial perfection, but as something more open and porous. The spaces are populated by animals’ reproductions to break down the divide between what is considered "human" and "non-human," or between the modern and the savage.

At its core, Staging Modernity critiques the binary oppositions that have historically structured modernist discourse: the mechanized, the rational, and the civilized on one side; and the natural, the organic, and the wild on the other. The installation asks, what happens when we no longer adhere to these distinctions? What happens when modernity is confronted with a broader ecology - one that includes non-human actors, animals, and ecosystems, as well as the forces of culture, industry, and technology?

The fragmented presentation of Le Corbusier, Perriand, and Jeanneret's work in Staging Modernity is not an abstraction but a reflection of the dissonance between modernist ideals and the contemporary world. While the mid-20th century celebrated a clean break from tradition, today we find ourselves grappling with the unintended consequences of that break and where the lines between the human-made and the natural are increasingly difficult to navigate. Through this intervention, Formafantasma proposes a new lens through which to see modernism - not as a fixed, static ideology but as a continually evolving conversation with the present.

The installation will be activated over the course of a week through a series of performances developed with the theatre director Fabio Cherstich. These performances, based on three commissioned texts by by philosopher Emanuele Coccia, architect, writer and curator Andrés Jaque, architect and Feifei Zhou (terriStories) will deepen the reflection on the ideological and material implications of modernity, moving beyond the static and the visual to include the performative, the auditory, and the embodied. In essence, Staging Modernity is a critical tribute. It honors the groundbreaking vision of Corbusier, Perriand, and Jeanneret, while also offering space for new reflections and interpretations.