Jerszy Seymour

But Jerszy Seymour’s temperament enables him to see further than our imagination is accustomed to going. He is an anticipator, that is to say that he gets his art to go beyond itself, to constantly stretch past the limits of its reason for being. Over the years, he has managed to redefine his design practice through a broadened relationship with the world and with things. His research has led him to divert industrial codes that he fed on in a world without boundaries or authorities, where forms could be generated by advantageously zany services and situations. And what was the solution advocated by Seymour? New Dirty Enterprises, “a freely reproducible franchise system that spreads by imitation, a non-gesamt-gesamtkunstwerk, a non-total, total work of art”. When it was first presented at ABC Berlin in 2013, New Dirty Enterprises offered its shares to the public and launched a pizza delivery franchise. “After a year of active development and research for the sake of a re-evolution of the human condition and a new subjective manifestation of social reality”, Jerszy Seymour occupied Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette's temporary space in order to write The First Annual Report - Dialogue Is Not Possible, presented in the form of a non-opera opera at Garage MU in Paris. No one could have called this strangeness “design”, and yet that is exactly what it came from. This same incongruity was the basis of the Extra National Assembly that Lafayette Anticipations helped build on a Swiss mountainside. This structure, intended for the gathering of an assembly unfettered by questions of identity, norms or belonging, explores the very principle of what Seymour again calls a non-total, total work. This one-of-a-kind object, combining architecture, design, art and philosophy, backs up the singular thought of all of its creators in their ability not only to take part in societal change, but also to anticipate it. Since it transcribes universal values to a local scale, since it celebrates dialogue between independent citizens and their territory or history, since it is a vehicle for humanism and criticism, the Extra National Assembly sketches the outline of a new artistic, philosophical and participatory map.