FR
Le Musée de la Mine - © Sonia Barcet
IN Exhibition

The miraculous cradle of the hunter-gatherers

We do not know where design was born, but it probably wasn't in Saint-Étienne. Or Paris. Any more than it was in London, Tokyo or New York. I don't know where, but I do know when. It happened at the beginning of the Neolithic period when a group of men and women started to organise collective living. In those far-off days, when the question of making technical choices for the community arose, the (attentive) observation of practices, the (debated) proposals for solutions and the giving to them of (reversible) forms took place by a process that we would later come to call design.

I don't what will become of design. What I do know is that later objects will remain that were "perfect for their time" but which have become wrecks, anthropological enigmas, probably happy memories of a red estate car taking a family for a picnic.

The Berceau miraculeux des chasseurs-cueilleurs (the miraculous cradle of the hunter-gatherers) is a tribal chant to be deciphered more than a vehicle, a nuptial chamber for procreating a group of wild children, a cobbled-together solution from the Neolithic Age to constitute a desirable mini-group that is today embroiled in chaos.

Curator : Puits Couriot / Parc – Musée de la Mine (anonymous 2017)
Site : Puits Couriot / Parc – Musée de la Mine
3 Rue du Maréchal Franchet d’Esperey 42100 Saint-Étienne