LAUSANNE.- Following the vacancy at the helm of
mudac – museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts on 1 July 2023, Marco Costantini, then acting director of the institution, agreed to take over as interim director. He has now been appointed director with effect 1 January 2024.
Following the announcement of Chantal Prod’Hom’s retirement, a recruitment process was launched in the spring of 2022. Costantini was interviewed and his application met with a positive response from the recruitment committee. His creative and scientific profile, and the ideal balance between his roots and his interests in both the local and international scenes, made a strong impression.
At the end of October 2023, at the request of Patrick Gyger, Managing Director of Plateforme 10 and hiring authority for the museums in Lausanne’s arts district, the same committee met again in corpore and unanimously recommended the effective appointment of Costantini to the post of Director of mudac. This recommendation was followed by the Board of Trustees of Plateforme 10. The Managing Director therefore offered this position to Marco Costantini, who accepted it. This will enable mudac to continue its development in close collaboration with all teams at Plateforme 10.
Costantini first collaborated with mudac in 2010 as guest curator for the exhibition Covering the Wall. Contemporary Wallpapers. He was invited back in 2014 for Nirvana. Strange Forms of Pleasure before being hired as curator in 2015. He put together the exhibitions Mirror Mirror (2017), Sneaker x Collab (2019), Let’s Meet at the Station (2022), Beirut. Eras of Design (2022) and managed the revivals of Archaic Future (2015), The World of Hergé (2016), Out of Ordinary – Studio Wieki Somer (2017) and The Bauhaus #itsalldesign (2018). In 2020 Costantini was appointed deputy director.
Costantini has worked with the three museums that now make up Plateforme 10. Between 2009 and 2011, he was commissioned by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne to carry out various studies relating to the museum’s move to Plateforme 10 and co- organised the exhibition Incongruous. When Art Makes us Laugh (2011). He also worked at the Musée de l’Elysée from 1998 to 2002, as a collection assistant and with the cultural outreach team.
Costantini also has a number of independent exhibitions to his credit for contemporary art venues in Switzerland and abroad. He was director of Raddar magazine, an annual design review co-edited by mudac and the first Swiss scientific publication devoted to design research. He was a lecturer at the Valais School of Art (édhéa) from 2008 to 2020, where he taught the theory and aesthetics of contemporary art, after having been an assistant and then a lecturer in the art history department at the University of Lausanne (2002-2008), and at EPFL (2003 to 2007). He is the author of numerous articles published in exhibition catalogues, and scientific works on design, contemporary art, and photography.
Costantini holds an MA in Art History from the University of Lausanne and a CAS in Management of Public Institutions from IDHEAP.
“The strategic vision of mudac that I have in mind will be developed in several phases, each of which will attempt to demonstrate how design, in all its forms, should be seen as a force for commitment that can and should help to make our future desirable.”
Costantini’s vision is built on notions of territory, temporality, commitment and founding values: By territory, we mean working not only with the local community but also at a national and international level, in the peripheries as well as in the Global South. By temporality, we mean understanding the role of mudac as a sensitive agent focusing on the analysis of our present time, while remaining attentive and vigilant to the future. By commitment, we mean the collective dimension. The ambition is to develop mudac as an institution which, through its production of exhibitions, publications, events and research, sets out to seize the opportunities and collective intelligence of today and tomorrow in an exploration of a complex, expanding world, beset by crises which often seem insurmountable. It is the “together” dimension of design that ultimately defines its founding value.
