The Shape of Use: What If the Shelf Turned, What If the Cutlery Were Giant

What if the shelf moved? What if the cutlery were giant? What if the blind, instead of blocking the light, offered to play with it? The Shape of Use puts three childlike questions to grown-up objects, and hands the answer to seven artists and designers — plus a class from Port-au-Prince. Boulevard Beaumarchais, 11–24 September.

The exhibition's wager

The exhibition takes the objects we think we know — furniture, plates, screens, books — and asks what happens when we give them their strangeness back. The premise is simple, the execution less so: each piece must remain an object of use while refusing the obviousness of that use. A purely absurd object teaches nothing; a purely functional object surprises no one.

The device that holds the whole together is the most unexpected: the work of the seven is set in direct conversation with drawings by pupils of the New Vision Art School. The reasoning is explicit, and it is sound — children already have this instinct, they have never stopped asking why things are the way they are. To place these drawings not at the margins but in the dialogue is to say that the question the exhibition poses is not a curator's find: it is the default question, the one we unlearn.

The seven pieces

Marte Mei van Haaster presents plates shaped like a puzzle, which invite you to touch, to rearrange, to complete. Trained at the Rietveld and then the Design Academy Eindhoven, she developed there a method she calls Land-Allyship, which casts the human as a collaborator with ecological systems rather than an extractor of resources: designing with the natural world, not out of it.

Serban Ionescu shows a letter-chair, literally a chair that seats language: depending on the angle from which you view it, it does not say the same thing. Born in 1984 in Romania, an architect by training, he divides his life between Brooklyn and Paris and works with equal ease in monumental steel sculpture and colourful furniture.

Alix Lacloche offers oversized cutlery, and asks a cook's question rather than a designer's: what would a mouthful taste of if the tool carrying it refused to be normal? A cook and culinary set designer trained under Alain Passard, Pierre Hermé and at the Plaza Athénée, she treats the table and its objects as a field of social enquiry.

Orfeo Tagiuri presents a blind that, rather than shutting out the outside world, strikes up a conversation with it. His practice moves from painting to performance, from film to woodcarving; he has made videos for James Blake and Brian Eno.

Kiri-Una Brito Meumann exhibits sculptural drawings, and asks why a drawing should stay flat. Born in Australia, of Brazilian descent, based in Milan, she approaches sculpture as a condition rather than an object: the forms arise from the behaviour proper to the materials.

Ilies Issiakhem shows screen prints that carry the hand and the machine within the same image. Born in Oran in 1984, trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he works on the relationship between body, image and technology, borrowing from the aesthetics of the glitch. His work is held in the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques.

And at the centre, Julien De Smedt installs his bookmills, rotating book-mills that refuse the tyranny of the fixed shelf and let books find their readers rather than the other way round. An architect and founder of JDS Architects, he is also a co-founder of the venue.

To this is added a reading list compiled by Lou Stoppard, writer and curator, tracing the ideas beneath the works — a bibliography on display, which is in itself a way of treating the book as an object of use.

What the New Vision Art School does

Founded in 2016 by the Haitian artist and teacher Lesly Pierre Paul, based in Port-au-Prince, the school provides art education and free materials to children living in a conflict zone, making creative practice an instrument of personal formation and resilience. For The Shape of Use, its pupils bring drawings that enter into direct dialogue with the works. This is the first exhibition born of the partnership.

A word on the way this collaboration is presented, because it escapes the usual format: the pupils' drawings are not shown in a side room with an explanatory panel, they are placed in direct dialogue with the works. The difference is not one of staging, it is one of status — in one case you illustrate a good cause, in the other you argue that these drawings have something to say about the objects on show. The exhibition wagers on the second reading, and that is what makes it worth seeing rather than merely endorsing.

Where we are

Vie Projects is an exhibition and project space in the Marais, founded by the architect Julien De Smedt and Michelle Lu, of Semaine. It stands exactly where art and design cross editorial culture, and brings together artists, designers, architects and authors in a programme of exhibitions and collaborations. Previous ones have hosted Sky High Farm, James Massiah, Bobby Dowler, Sophy Rickett, a set of modern Japanese prints, Shaun McDowell, India Leire and Inès Mélia. The exhibition is supported by Semaine.

Why this address

Because it is one of the rare shows of the week where, standing before a piece, you will not be able to say whether it is an artwork or a piece of furniture — and that is the very subject of the exhibition. Our tool can track down a chair produced in three hundred copies; it can say nothing of a letter-chair that exists once. That is a limit, and it is also the reason we go to see these addresses: what is identifiable by no one today is sometimes in the catalogue two years later.

Going

Vie Projects — The Shape of Use, 55 boulevard Beaumarchais, 75003 Paris. 11 to 24 September 2026. Opening on Friday 11 September, 6 to 9 pm. The exhibition stays open five days after the close of Paris Design Week: it is one of the few you can catch once the crush has passed.

The Beyit gesture: photograph a piece, scan it — and if it is not yet in our database, tell us: that is how it gets in.