Studio tutor: Youri Kravtchenko, assistant: Manon Portera

Curators: India Mahdavi and Javier Fernandez Contreras.

Few formats define more accurately the relationship between presence and obliteration than the Herbarium. Deprived of life, the Herbarium presents specimens that acquire a new condition in their timelessness. These are species that simultaneously exist in the realm of representation, content and the result of depiction. Objects that become their own image.

Are contemporary interiors like herbariums, spaces whose image oscillates between content and representation?

When India Mahdavi designed the temporary restaurant “The Gallery at Sketch” in London in 2014, she created one of the most disseminated spaces in the history of pictures. In a unique collaboration, HEAD – Genève revisits with her a collection of timeless interior spaces that marked their time but have mainly remained through representation, as images. These are places like Verner Panton’s Varna Restaurant in Aarhus, Philippe Starck’s Café Costes in Paris, or Stanley Kubrick’s Korova Milk Bar in fictional London.

Reloaded as a magnificent Herbarium of Interiors, these spaces no longer replicate their original images but their mythologies, experiences and associated cultures. The hypothesis that defines us today is to rewrite the history of interior architecture through interior architecture. To understand that certain mythical scenes have not only been witnesses of an era but have also become harbingers of future times, allegorical places of cultural production and social imagery, capable of drawing and redrawing the frame of time.