Commissioner – David Usborne
Organization – MUDE, Design and Fashion Museum
The David Usborne collection, a collection created at the flea market and other street markets, testifies to the ancestral taste for collecting. Bringing together artifacts as diverse as tweezers and clamps, rotary machines, knives, agricultural instruments or surgical utensils, Usborne appears attentive and sensitive to the way in which Man has always been in search of unity between beauty and functionality.
The exhibition presents around 250 artefacts in 9 major categories, which correspond to the main actions and needs of Man, such as hitting, grabbing, cutting, shaping, spreading, protecting. Side by side, there are artisanal tools and industrially manufactured utensils, completely different in their technical formulation, but very similar in terms of their use and shape. Nothing is extra or superfluous.