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How to Write Design – Talk with Emanuele Quinz Published on: 27 October 2025 :,

27

10

27.10.2025
11:00 am

ABADIR DELIDA Library
124 Via Vittorio Emanuele II
95131 Catania (Italy)

27

10

How to Write Design – Talk with Emanuele Quinz Published on: 27 October 2025 :,

27.10.2025
11:00 am

ABADIR DELIDA Library
124 Via Vittorio Emanuele II
95131 Catania (Italy)

«It is impossible to define design».

This statement, which is increasingly frequent among historians and theorists, is not just a gesture of caution, but the symptom of a deeper transformation. Today, design is an expanded field, a set of techniques, concepts and forms of thought that cross different cultural horizons and make it impossible to circumscribe it within stable disciplinary boundaries.

And so: how to talk about design without reducing it to the object or the functional intention?

 

Monday 27 October 2025 at 11:00 at Abadir DELIDA (map) Emanuele Quinz, art and design historian and independent curator, is in conversation with Paolo Casicci, journalist, Vincenzo Castellana, architect and director of the Master's degree in Strategic Design and Creative Direction – From Ford to face powder, and Lucia Giuliano, director of Abadir, exploring the ways in which the project becomes theory and theory in turn becomes project, starting from the essay Against the Object: Conversations on Design, published by Quodlibet in 2020 and winner of the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award in 2022.

 

From this perspective, design is no longer a domain to be defined, but a critical site in constant motion, a language for thinking and for acting in the world.

EMANUELE QUINZ

Emanuele Quinz (Bolzano, 1973) is an art and design historian, lecturer and independent curator. He is a Full Professor at History and Theory of Contemporary Art at Université Paris 8, Associate Researcher at EnsadLab – École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and at the Cluster Matter of Activity at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

She has curated various international exhibitions between Italy and Europe. With Samuel Bianchini, she devised the experimental performative roundtable project Dissect, presented at the Centre Pompidou, the Grand Palais and the Humboldt-Universität, in collaboration with architects and artists such as ecoLogicStudio, Marco Donnarumma and Tomás Saraceno.