PINPIN NATIONAL DESIGN INSTITUTE

David Legrand and Philippe Zunino, 2023

Between deliberately botched archives, absurd prototypes, and disorienting pedagogies, this low-tech fanzine hijacks the codes of industrial design, art education, and modernist avant-gardes. Here we encounter the Pinpins artists — sensorily impaired figures — practicing a post–Art Brut, feral and mutantic. Their degenerate, cobbled-together creations rise up against all aesthetic or functional norms. Techno-sensitive limp forms, digitally-assisted maladapted objects, oozing artefacts, and parasensory structures unfold amid trans-historical imagery and fictional schools (Pinpin’s Art Hight School), post-Bauhaus manifestos, and anthropoid puppets. This parallel, limping, and critical museum displays the residues of a fictional design in which matter itself appears to be the victim of prolonged assistance. The whole takes the form of a cabinet of unstable experiments, where the act of “designing” happens in the margins — between cruel irony and wrecked lucidity — within a post-optimistic world.