Once again, and following the programmatic line dealing with relations between art and design -that started in 2003 with exhibition "The Undisciplined. Art's Position on the Borders of Design" and resulting in "Creating the Necessary" in 2004- MARCO, Vigo's Museum of Contemporary Art, offers a reflection on one of the subjects most present in contemporaneous creation; the relations between design and everyday life, through an international exhibition. On this occasion, the exhibition -being MARCO the only place where it can be seen in Spain- is curated by the director of the Design Department of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, an institution that MARCO already collaborated with last year in the exhibition "The Last Picture Show".

This exhibition is aimed to enlighten the design in our lives, by gathering some unusual works, including architectural pieces and products, furniture, fashion and graphic design. Objects and projects that explore the role of the user in their creation and function, and that sometimes require the active participation of the user in the realization of the final product. Original purposes through which this authors report the reinvention of the commonplace.

A light that responds to silence, a table that knows where it is, a pig farm the size of a skyscraper, a house that fits in your pocket... Strangely Familiar brings together more than forty innovative projects drawn internationally from the fields of architecture and product, furniture, fashion, and graphic design. These projects question the habitual, transform the commonplace, alter our expectations of dwelling, and blur the boundaries of form and function.

The exhibition is gathered into four main ideas to question the conventional premises related to the design of objects and spaces:

1. polemical objects that force us to reconsider our relationship to products and dictate new rituals of use and expectations of performance

2. portable structures that respond to nomadic conditions of lightness and ephemerality, thereby undermining long-held architectural principles of site-specificity and permanence

3. multifunctional objects that change both shape and use, thereby blurring the traditionally fixed relationship between so-called "form and function"

4. extraordinary designs that reference and transform otherwise ordinary objects and spaces, drawing our attention to everyday conditions.

1. Polemical objetcs: rituals of use

Many projects featured in Strangely Familiar attept to implicate the user as a central figure or participant in a design's realization, exploring the users' behaviour in relation to the designed object. This takes many forms, ranging from greater physical interaction to the reconsideration of common routines and rituals. The point is to include user participation, personalization, customization, and even rejection as a vital element in the work. Allan Wexler's Gardening Sukkah is an outdoor structure that contains all the necessary implements to plant, harvest, and preparea meal to celebrate the Jewish Sukkoth festival. Product designer Michael Anatassiades develops objects that highlight human interaction and product responsiveness. For example, his Anti-Social Light only perform its function in the presence or absence of sound. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are particularly interested in how people interact and adapt to electronic products. In Dunne and Raby's Placebo Project users are given the opportunity of living with a newly created object, such as a table embedded with global positioning satellite (GPS) technology to track its own whereabouts. Other projects explore the role of a participatory or "do it yourself" design. A series of products by Do Create requires the physical interaction of the user for their ultimate realization, such as Do Hit, a cube of metal and comes with its own sludge hammer to transform it into a chair, or Do Break, a ceramic vase with a special coating that allows the user to smash it without destroying the piece.

2. Portable structures: mobility

Along with the city, the home is an important site in which to understand the workings of everyday life. The nomadic possibilities of contemporary life are explored in this exhibition through several projects that propose portable dwellings. Not only do such structures acknowledge the desire for mobility and freedom, but they also confront our need for connection and community. The portable house also challenges long-held architectural assumptions of permanence and stability.

The houses and structures featured in this exhibition represent a range of transience and permanence in dwelling. For example, R & Sie...'s Habitat Furtif, a living unit for one person that travels urban streets in search of safe harbour for its inhabitant. While Markku Hedman's Kesä-Kontti is designed for quick escapes to the woods, a kind of mobile week-end cabin, LOT-EK's Mobile Dwelling Unit is envisioned as a permanent dwelling. Jennifer Siegal has developed several projects that utilize portable structures, such as Portable House, conceived of as a more flexible and ecologically friendly version of the conventional prefabricated home. Other examples in this section are Markku Hedman's portable dwelling, Etana; the Prefabricated Wooden House by Alejandro Stöberl; Shigeru Uchida's designs for a trio of teahouses, or architect Shigeru Ban's Paper Loghouse.

3. Multifunctional objects: form and function

The desire for portability corresponds to an interest in products with multiple functions, things that create efficiencies in space or weight, important considerations for mobility. Not surprinsingly, garments and furniture are one locus of activity and exploration. For example, Martín Ruíz de Azúa's Basic House, or Moreno Ferrari's Tent, which can be formed from a translucent raincoat.

Regarding furniture, Julian Lion Boxenbaum's Rugelah Chair captures in one piece a multitude of possibilities for sitting, lounging, and sleeping. Similarly, Paolo Ulian's Cabriolet/Occasional Table is a sofa, storage unit, and coffee table in one. At an architectural scale, Tumble House is a six-sided structure designed by Koers, Zeinstra y Van Gelderen of the Netherlands that allows people to rotate the building into six different positions, and each one changes the functionality of interior elements. For example, a door becomes a window or skylight.

These explorations of multifunctionality express a desire to provide multiple choices for users, allowing functions to be situationally contingent. The multifunctional object displays hybrid formal qualities at odds with the conventional design philosophy of "form follows function."

4. Extraordinary designs: transforming the everyday

A major theme of the exhibition is the re-presentation of the everyday with extraordinary projects that foreground what is commonplace. For example, MVRDV's design of the Netherlands pavillion at Hannover 2000 transforms the typical elements of the Dutch landscape. A typical Swill farming village becomes the site of profound transformation in Roche & Sie's proposal Scrambled Flat. The everyday world of objects is the subject of Tokyo-based Elephant Design, which reworks the typical phone, fax machine, or vacuum through its Insipid Collection, by stripping the objects of the superfluous, leaving a minimal, gosthly white shell to express its functionality. Many projects embody the everyday only to transform it, as Jurgen Bey's Kokon Chair, with its protective polyester-resin coating covering the ghostly presence of the ordinary chair that lies beneath, with a tactic of surprising displacement , making the familiar strange. The transposition of scale, making the small large and the large small, is an important device in altering our perceptions of the everyday, as in Marcel Wanders' Airborne Snotty Vases, or the Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym's series of miniatures, Buildings of Disaster.