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COLLECTIBLE: Could you briefly introduce your practice as a duo and independent and tell us about your past projects?

Heim+Viladrich: Johan Viladrich is a designer running a practice focussed on the design of furniture and spatial structures since 2017. Lauriane Heim is a designer and an independent instructor in creative skills. Together we founded Heim+Viladrich in 2021 with the desire to develop a collaborative practice merging Johan's knowledge of material and production techniques and Lauriane’s focus on conceptual research within a more institutional context. The studio works within the fields of scenography, installation, object and interior design.

We created our first piece together during Johan’s solo show at Atelier Jespers in 2021. In 2022, during COLLECTIBLE we presented Aire A75 - an installation inspired by the highway stops in the south of France. We are currently working on several projects including the interior design of a fashion store in the centre of Montpellier (FR) and the development of a magazine named Trabalh highlighting industrial techniques and know-how of the Occitanie region in the South of France. 

Next to the scenography of the Curated Section, we are also exhibiting again at COLLECTIBLE in collaboration with Laurids Gallée.

C: How does Leo Orta’s sustainability focus echo with your practice and with the scenography for Collectible curated section?

H+V: In all honesty, it is almost contradictory to design a sustainable installation for a week-long design fair. The concern was not so much on what material to use but rather on what to do with it once the show will be over. We could use the most sustainable resources but having to discard them after a week-long show would be nonsensical. 

Two things were very important to us, the first is that we needed to choose a material that we will be able to use within our own work. The second is that we must leave it as untouched as possible. We decided to use raw aluminium sheets as we are certain of reusing them in later projects. To keep the sheets intact we have found very simple and efficient ways to temporarily assemble and create volumes with leftovers from past productions.

We wanted to show to the audience that sustainability doesn’t exclusively lie in the use of bio-sourced or recycled materials but could also start within the already produced pieces from the industry. Our approach to sustainability is through the rationalisation of construction and the optimising of labour: as it is, the scenography is a fully reusable, easy to assemble, modular and a mono-material installation.

C: How do you approach scenography as a designer? How is this different?

H+V: The exciting but challenging part of scenography lies in the fact that it should serve the exhibited pieces and the audience, the scenography itself should be quiet. Designing a unique piece or designing its support, the methodology is quite different, therefore when it concerns the latter we are forcing ourselves to rethink all our intuitive choices regarding materials, finishes and assembly systems in order to serve the exhibited objects.

To us, conceiving a scenography is to find a compromise between proposing a clear, bold, but almost invisible vision.

About Heim+Viladrich