Matali Crasset

Matali Crasset is an industrial designer. In the early 2000s, She created her own structure, Matali Crasset productions. It is in Belleville, in the heart of a popular Parisian neighbourhood, in a former printing works rehabilitated into housing and small gardens that she has installed her studio, adjacent to her house.
Matali Crasset sees design as a research. She works from an off-centre posture that allows her to both intervene in daily life and project scenarios for the future.
Her methodology is based on observations of ordinary practices and challenges to usual organizational principles. In the image of her emblematic object, the column of hospitality “Quand Jim monte à Paris”, it is from a fine observation of the customs that she invents new rituals. With an expert and always fresh look at the world, she questions the evidence of codes to free herself from them. Her work consists in searching for new typologies and formulating new logics of life. She defines this research as a gentle way to get to the contemporary. Her territories of intervention are multiple, always linked to interactions. She collaborates with various actors, both the craftsman who wishes to develop his practice and an individual seeking a new scenario of domestic life. both the manufacturer ready to experiment (Ikea) and the hotel-owner who wants to develop a new concept (Hi Hotel in Nice or Dar Hi in Nefta); as well as the small rural town (the Le Blé en Herbe School in Trébédan) which seeks to enhance its cultural and social dynamism and the museum which wants to transform itself (SM’s in s’ Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands).
She brings together universes that are usually quite distinct, ranging from handicrafts to contemporary art (the four forest houses for Vent des Forêts), from the textile industry to fair trade, carrying out projects in scenography, furniture, architecture and graphic design, as well as collaborations with artists (Peter Halley), young furniture publishing companies, municipalities (Library of Geneva, City of Istres…), communities…
This experience, acquired over the years, has now led it to engage in increasingly participatory projects at local and global levels, in both rural and urban areas.
Based on meetings, creative workshops, reflections and common desires, it works with different project leaders who are convinced that collective dynamics generate plausible scenarios of social bonding. Matali’s fiction, narratives and sense of work are finally organized around the question of living together.