ARCHAEOLOGY OF TILES
PROJECT ROOM #13
2024

Project Room #13 features India Mahdavi’s latest collaboration : a collection of tiles with Japanese company Alternative Artefacts Danto. Recently unveiled in Milan for this year’s Salone del Mobile, the tiles have made their way to Paris and will be displayed from May 21st till June 14th 2024 at the Project Room.

Invited by Teruhiro Yanagihara, artistic director of A.a. Danto, India Mahdavi used the company’s traditional know-hows as a starting point to conceive this collection, entirely manufactured in Danto’s original factory on Awajishima, an island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. With its experimental vision, technological skills and mass production expertise, Danto aims to shift ideas behind the meaning of tiles and imagine a new interior paradigm, opening up in its wake, many possibilities.

One possibility is the ability to apply up to three layers of glazing on one single surface, which allows for various effects — some mimicking the transient and imperfect biological patterns of nature — thus acting as a ladder between the industrial and the traditional wabi-sabi aesthetic.
From this experiment, spawned the Mycelium, Freckles and Cracks patterns — each resembling the biological form they are named after using different reactions produced by the firing process.
The Criss Cross pattern reconnects with Danto’s tradition of producing ornamental tiles and lead India Mahdavi to explore relief with moulded clay — a gesture materialized as monochromatic grids, on a multitude of scales.