PARALLEL ROUTE 01

This new project approaches design as a parallel route to artistic practice: a path that intersects with art, shares languages, yet pursues other ends, functional, social, material, technological, and historical. PARALLEL ROUTE 01 proposes a space where design and art do not compete, but rather contaminate, question, and enrich one another.

For this first edition, we posed a dual challenge: designers confronting the limits of dysfunction, and artists exploring the beauty of functionality by creating a piece to sit on. The brief was deliberately open, yet precise enough to generate a shared field of inquiry. The result is not a collection of chairs, but a constellation of responses in which the act of sitting becomes both pretext and territory, a common ground where gesture, structure, materiality, and concept converge.

At the core of the exhibition lies a question: what happens when design abandons pure function, and art embraces utility? The works gathered here inhabit that friction.

Artists: Antoni Arola, Max Enrich, Klas Ernflo, Marc Morro, Júlia Esqué, Bruno Ollé, Luna Paiva, Jaume Ramírez, Júlia Rossinyol, Octavi Serra, Inés Sistiaga, Turbina