In 2024, Véronique Bacchetta, then director of the Centre d’Édition Contemporaine in Geneva, invited me to contribute to a series of small publications focusing on particular, perhaps divergent, curatorial practices. I no longer remember the exact term she used, but what interested her were exhibitions that did not present what might be considered ‘ordinary’ works of art.

We had already worked together in 2011, when she invited me to present (and publish a related book on) a collection of ceramics I had assembled under the title Sgrafo vs. Fat Lava. (1) At that time, the collection was not conceived as a project in itself, but rather as a tool or an exercise, a way of training myself in the construction of a collection before embarking on a more complex endeavour: building a contemporary art collection for the Syz banking family.

The choice of ceramics was almost incidental. I could have collected matchboxes, snow globes or stamps. What mattered was that the objects were accessible and inexpensive, allowing me to quickly assemble a coherent body. These vases, often grouped under the label Fat Lava, were produced in West Germany between the 1960s and 1980s and widely considered kitsch, even ugly, and largely dismissed. The challenge, then, was not simply to collect them, but to present them in a way that could restore a certain form of attention or legitimacy. The exhibition of these ceramics raised a number of questions: about taste, seriality, repetition, industrial production and the transformation of everyday objects into collectible forms.

What interested me was the possibility of constructing this collection in an almost neutral or systematic way, even if such an approach is always partial; inevitably, subjective decisions intervene, based on taste, cultural background or intuition.

The challenge was to produce coherence without falling into fragmentation. To do so, I relied on systems of classification, serial arrangements and repetition. I have always been drawn to such systems: the vitrines of natural history museums, collections of insects or even the display of screws in hardware stores. These arrangements produce meaning not only through singularity, but through accumulation and variation. I often thought that these displays were sometimes more stimulating than those in fine arts museums, and I have frequently drawn inspiration from them for my projects.

This approach owes much to Aby Warburg and his Mnemosyne Atlas, in which images from radically different contexts – artworks, maps, postcards, everyday objects – are brought together to form unexpected relationships. Meaning does not reside in individual images, but in the intervals between them; juxtapositions destabilise canonical classifications and open new interpretive possibilities. This method has profoundly influenced my work. Rather than establishing hierarchies, I am interested in creating constellations, systems in which objects, images and references coexist and interact.

Looking back, Sgrafo vs. Fat Lava marked a turning point for me. It initiated a curatorial approach that I have continued to develop, mixing contemporary art with objects, historical or recent, anonymous or attributed, and treating the exhibition as a constructed device. This exhibition drew on my early experiences at the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva, where objects were presented in immersive environments, often as part of staged narratives. These displays attempted to integrate what was perceived as ‘other’ into the museum context, making it legible and acceptable. The project later travelled to different venues, museums, galleries, apartments, vitrines, and each time the display was reconfigured. These variations reinforced an essential point: meaning does not reside only in the objects themselves, but in the conditions of their presentation.

The collection itself can be understood as a curatorial gesture. It mimicked – to some extent parodied – the logic of art collecting. It also revealed something fundamental: that choices are never entirely objective. Selecting an object often depends on contingent factors – availability, price, proximity – rather than purely aesthetic criteria. This does not invalidate the process; rather, it makes its mechanisms more visible. Curating becomes a form of experimentation. It allows for testing hypotheses, observing reactions and exploring the effects of different configurations. In this sense, exhibitions function less as definitive statements than as provisional arrangements.

Later, I became interested in the Mingei movement, meaning ‘folk crafts of the people’, that emerged in Japan in the late 1920s–30s as a response to industrialisation and the rapid modernisation of society. It was both an aesthetic philosophy and a social project, centred on the value of everyday objects made by anonymous craftspeople. In 2013, I produced an exhibition, Mingei: Are You Here?, at Pace Gallery, London. The idea was to question the return of craft practices in contemporary art. The exhibition took the form of a vitrine, and the effect was quite powerful. We also produced a small publication in the form of a leporello, concertina-like, and the show later travelled to New York.

What I found innovative, given the period in which the Mingei movement emerged, was its ability to seek the quality, the ‘beauty’ of objects where none had previously been recognised. The essays by Sōetsu Yanagi, the founder of Mingei, collected in The Beauty of Everyday Things, remain essential reading. (2) His proposal for a dynamic rereading of the relationship between high and low, long before it became a postmodern concern, is fundamental.

It is this democratic vision, which gives all objects a chance, that interested me. Mingei theorised what I wanted to do with the German vases: to make space for everything, to be inclusive, to offer alternative voices beyond the well-known ones, to be less elitist, more democratic.

That small French leaflet I mentioned at the beginning of this text, My Craft, had only a few black-and-white images, and after publishing it I felt that the conversation deserved to be better illustrated. (3) Readers were systematically searching for references online, so why not integrate them into a new colour publication? I had photographs taken of the books I consulted and assembled more than 800 images as a resource. In fact, I conceived the book Craft in the same way I approached my exhibitions. (4) The entire project is grounded in a broader reflection on cultural hierarchies. Historically, distinctions have been drawn between art and craft, fine art and design, intellectual and manual production. Here, they were erased.

Craft does not simply document exhibitions: it reconfigures them. It translates spatial arrangements into sequences of images. In this sense, the book becomes another exhibition space. It selects, orders and juxtaposes. The page functions as a display surface.

The Zurich-based designers Norm selected and organised the material into a horizontal format that allows for an almost vitrine-like arrangement. The process was interesting: I would naturally tend to include as many images as possible, so that the book would become a kind of archive. However, the designers, who lean towards minimalism, defined a strict grid for the layout, and I mostly let them choose the images.

In my book there is no table of contents; I don’t know why, I think we simply forgot. Instead, it is structured according to the twenty-four questions of the interview. For each question, the designers selected a few words extracted from my answers and used them as chapter titles. This was done somewhat randomly, but I liked it, and we kept them all: ‘Forever the Lookout’, ‘A Kind of Panorama’, ‘Difference in Similarity’. I have reused some of them in this text.

One of the key effects of the book is the flattening of scale. A small object and a large installation can be reproduced in the same size. This does not erase their differences but places them within a shared visual field. The book also enables repetition and circulation. Images reappear, shift position and establish new connections. It extends the logic of the exhibition while transforming it.

To my surprise, the book does not mark the conclusion of a series of exhibitions but extends it. Craft becomes another space of display, one that operates through images, sequences and juxtapositions rather than physical proximity. The objective is not simply to reverse hierarchies, but to complicate them, to add layers of information, expand the field, and introduce new relationships. In fact, through making this book, I learned much more about the themes of the exhibitions I had produced. The process forced me to formulate and justify choices that I had not previously articulated, as I had, in a way, been protected by the displays themselves. They functioned like stage sets, and perhaps occupied too much space in relation to the works.

One of the parameters of my exhibitions was that the perception of an object could be transformed simply by placing it within a white cube, even if it originated from a popular or vernacular culture. How, then, might an image of that object be perceived differently within a book? I did not ask myself this question while making the book, as I initially thought it would merely document exhibitions, but it has emerged since. In fact, I discovered that the book is an exhibition space, for the graphic designers as well.

What is certain, however, is that, as Richard Sennett argues in The Craftsman (2008), making and thinking are not separate activities. The artisan, the artist, the designer and even the programmer share a common structure: they engage in processes of construction that are both material and intellectual. This perspective allows for a reconsideration of practices, objects, artists and projects that have long been marginalised.

I would like to conclude by recalling a passage I included in the book. Patricia Falguières, who visited the Mingei Now exhibition I curated in Kyoto in 2018, has offered valuable insights into the relationship between display, art and commerce. According to her, the connections between different objects originate in the cabinets of curiosities, Wunderkammern (the title of one of her books), as well as in the major sixteenth-century projects of universal classification:

In the end, what these experiences have taught me is that there are no fixed rules. We are often told, for example, that paintings should be hung at a standard height, aligned to an ideal viewing line, but such prescriptions are ultimately arbitrary. Some of the most compelling displays emerge when these conventions are challenged. I am thinking, for instance, of exhibitions in which works were placed unusually low (like with Paul Thek), almost at ground level, allowing children to encounter them directly, transforming both perception and hierarchy. There are no immutable principles carved in stone. Each exhibition is a proposition, a negotiation with its context, its audience and its time.

I remember when I organised my first exhibition around Mingei we included Japanese boro textiles, indigo-dyed and patched cotton pieces that do not strictly belong to the canonical vocabulary of the movement. We expected criticism from purists for departing from established norms, yet the response was the opposite. These gestures were welcomed, perhaps because they reactivated a discourse that risked becoming closed, even exhausted. What this suggests is that traditions themselves can become dead ends if they are not continuously reinterpreted.

To curate, then, is not to apply rules, but to invent them, each time anew. The historical does not stand apart from the present; it nourishes it, just as the present reshapes our understanding of the past. This requires letting go of preconceptions. There can be no evolution without invention, and what was once the norm may no longer hold today. What matters is not fidelity to a fixed model, but the capacity to remain attentive, responsive and open to transformation.