PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES

The exhibition Public and Private Spheres – Design Mediates Our Interests explores how individuals and
societies define, negotiate, and shift the boundaries between the private and the public.
Through the lens of design, the exhibition reveals how objects, spaces, and systems
mediate our relationships, protect our intimacy, and shape our collective experience.

The exhibition Public and Private Spheres – design mediates our interests tells the story of how people organise their relationships to private and public spheres. The topic ranges from the personal and at the same time exposed expression of human faces all the way to the infrastructure of commonly used areas. Accordingly, the exhibition describes an enormous range of everyday and extraordinary phenomena and does so across cultures and eras.

Public and Private Spheres features thematic installations with designs of prominent creatives such as Shigeru Ban, Charles and Ray Eames, Anna Heringer, Ingo Maurer, Joe Colombo, or Jean Prouvé as well as those of unknown designers and makers. However, the real narrative in this exhibition is provided by a series of photos, which contextualise today’s globalised reality and question our usual attitudes towards private and public spheres.

Our reality of digital data, instantly published and shared on global networks, challenges the boundaries between public and private spheres. Our interpersonal relationships, the rhythm of daily life and the places to which we belong have always had to be renegotiated. With the digital revolution, however, this process has taken on a whole new dimension. What once belonged to silence or secrecy now flows through algorithmic channels, and the public sphere, once defined by encounter and debate, disintegrates into systems of control with conditional visibility or access.

The home has always provided a revealing example of the intersections between individual and collective needs—from single-family homes in the countryside to urban social housing, and from collective living and working on the traditional farm to today’s home office. Designed in accordance with all kinds of official requirements, it is connected to public roads and to electricity, water and communication networks. It is a more or less self-made microcosm whose boundaries we try to control as best we can.

By focussing on the functional shaping of our environment through design, this exhibition highlights traditions and innovations within the current dynamics of our society. In it, design unfolds as a critical language, a grammar of the sensual beyond any form, emphasizing the shifting contours of the political and the intimate. Ultimately, our freedom lies in interpreting the world in our own ways and in constantly reshaping reality with a view to a better future.

The exhibition is organised like a private tour of a house – from the outside, through the entrance, the living room and the study, to the encounters with the fictitious residents, their social milieu and the nature that awaits us at the exit. Along the way, it tells its own story throuhg introductory texts for each room and a continuous numbering of images and objects. In what follows, object labels are printed in bold type.
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An exhibition of Domaine de Boisbuchet – CIRECA, 2025

Coordination: Franca Spielmann

Concept, research and texts : Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, Hugo Brethenoux von Vietinghoff, Franca Spielmann

Mounting : Dean Toepfer, Felix Panis-Jones, Carlos Guisasola Suarez, Daniel Hernandéz

Handling of objects: Serge Mauduit, Hugo von Vietinghoff, Paul Eaton, Dean Toepfer, Felix Panis-Jones, Eric Orvain

Graphic design : Lu Grompone (installation), Manon Arrougé (flyer)

Communication: Pablo Sevilla Alonso, Manon Arrougé

Public and Private Spheres – design mediates our interests

Domaine de Boisbuchet
21 juin – 21 septembre 2025