The Double Agent’s production platform ensures that BIO is a living design organism responding to the needs of society and the design field. This year, we will develop projects aimed at intertwining diverse media and disciplines such as design, craft, applied arts, and films into processes and results that contribute to the theme and deliver a renewed perspective on design. 

Selected participants will address the topics of materiality, language, design as a public tool, marginalised communities and film, together with eight esteemed designers who will lead the groups as mentors until the exhibition presentation. 

BIO28 Double Agent mentors are matali crasset, dach&zephir, El Último Grito, Polonca Lovšin and Studio Yukiko in collaboration with Grashina Gabelmann.

The Beeswax Studio and Grotto is a platform led by matali crasset. matali crasset has championed design at the crossroads of artistic, anthropological and social practice. She is working towards creative, living and everyday design and asking herself how can design contribute to living together and support us in the contemporary world?

After creating one of the most successful spatial installations Common stove for 25th edition of the biennial Faraway So Close, the participation of the local community echoes into this production platform.

This production platform revisits an ancestral practice in a different way, so as to reinvest our sensibility and allow us to reconfigure ourselves. Beekeeping, which is a Slovenian way of life and a major activity in the country, can help to establish a process that is more respectful and less destructive to our ecosystem. Building on this foundation, and using honey-producing flowers as a starting point, Beeswax Studio and Grotto proposes to focus not on honey, but on beeswax. This natural substance says a lot about our contemporary world: it has to stand up to stiff competition from industrial waxes made from soya (the bean), palm oil and paraffin (via petroleum). Beeswax is obviously the most natural, and it transcends the dividing lines between the plant and animal worlds, raising questions about our own place within the living world. So what remains to be explored is the place, if any, that human beings might occupy within it.

The Beeswax Studio and Grotto platform will consist of a wax workshop that will host research focused on beeswax, exploring natural dyeing using local plants and minerals, the creation of low-cost molds, and the manufacturing of modeling wax, as well as waterproofing textiles and wood. During the upcoming BIO28, a series of public workshops will take place where participants will engage in collaborative experimentation with wax.

The Not Erased project will be led by mentors dach&zephir. Graduates of the National School of Decorative Arts of Paris, Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach founded their creative studio dach&zephir in 2016. Mixing fervor and poetry, their projects echo the thinking of Martinican poet Édouard Glissant and celebrate the urgent and necessary diversity of the world. For the duo, stories and history are starting points in design, acknowledging that objects are mediums for our minds. They believe in the statement that we can’t move forward without acknowledging the past and history.

The production platform Not Erased is a continuation of the studio's reflections on marginalised, minorityized, or erased histories in national narratives and the ways in which they can be reactivated in a contemporary creative dynamic. Conceived as a research and creation unit on the subject of Slovenia's erased people - a group of communities from the former Yugoslavia residing in the country without citizenship rights because they have been erased from Slovene administrative files - the participants will be invited to reflect on the potential manifestations, reactivations, and/or reinscriptions of these individuals and their histories in a national narrative. The aim of the platform will be to form different narratives or backdrops for the creation of one or more works in lace. 

How do you tell the story of a lifetime of fractures and struggles in the creation of a motif? How do you represent the loss and erasure of a nationality? What can these other identities – in terms of their cultures and imaginations – bring to the creation of a motif? In other words, what are the modalities of lacemaking and its motif? Bobbin lacemaking – an ancestral skill in Slovenia and a Unesco intangible cultural heritage site – becomes the setting for these fragile stories and identities. Using this know-how, which is rooted in the country's culture and imagination, the aim is to reflect on how the stories of the erased are inscribed in the collective imagination, and possibly on new ways of creating motifs. The various trades will form multi-disciplinary work teams coordinated by a lace-maker.

We invite a collective who will develop a project under the mentorship of Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado from the collective El Último Grito. Roberto Feo is Professor of Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London, while Rosario Hurtado co-directs the MA Space and Communication at HEAD – Genève. Their practice responds to an ongoing investigation into the nature and representation of systems. 

The aim of this production platform is to create a short film about floriography and the themes of the Double Agent biennial that will simultaneously replace the exhibition catalogue. The film will act as a remnant of the event, a collection of intertwined actions, moments, sights, triggers, and keepsakes inspired by elements from the curatorial texts as well as selected works and the biennial site itself. The film will premiere in Ljubljana, London, Geneva, and Paris. Eventually, the film will be streamed online.

Stories do not have a beginning or an end… not really… they seem to start somewhere and end somewhere else… but not really…. Stories have a protagonist… but not really… stories are just mere adulterated perspectives, a result of “mythification”, an essential simplification required to comprehend reality.

Alpha 60 explains, in its guttural computerised voice, that “reality is far too complex for oral transmission”, so we must create myths/stories that simplify its content for us to understand. The Goddard mastermind imparting some ‘Borgesian’ wisdom.

This story is no different. It does not really start here and will, actually, never end… it’s just a moment in time narrated from a singular perspective… which will eventually stop being interesting or relevant for a narrator to tell or an audience to listen to.

- El Último Grito, 2024

Production platfoem Movement for Public Speech* is mentored by Polonca Lovšin. Polonca Lovšin is an architect and artist based in Ljubljana. In her work, she focuses on self-organized initiatives and alternative ways of living and working related to architecture, urban planning, and environmental issues. She is exhibiting her work internationally in solo and group exhibitions and has been awarded numerous grants, awards and residencies.

Movement for Public Speech is a sculpture in public space, a monument to public speaking and participation. By definition, public speaking is the discussion of people in a public space about important issues in society. This project challenges the relationship between the audience and the speaker and portrays this relationship as interdependent. The speaker's speech can only be heard over the sound system if he is supported by the audience, who synchronously press, pull, or step on the manufactured devices. The foundation of this project is the collaboration of two different roles – those who move to support the speaker and the speakers themselves. The common goal of the "movement" is to visualize the interdependence of all involved, who support each other and build alliances – a community. 

Today, in times of crises (economic, political, social, and environmental), it is essential to speak in public about the issues of human society, which are often overlooked, forgotten, or insufficiently present in public discourse. It is equally important that we listen to them and hear them. The project, which is playful and serious at the same time, demonstrates the importance of cooperation and interdependence to achieve a common goal and thereby create a vision of a different society.

The Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant that sets a trap to surprise and eat the fly, serves as the intellectual and design framework for the BIO28 edition of Movement for Public Speech. Are we humans caught in a trap of our own making? Maybe we can resolve the trap by supporting and listening to each other, creating friendships, building communities, and creating a vision of an entangled future.

*The Movement for Public Speech is an ongoing project by architect and artist Polonca Lovšin, which was first installed in 2015 on Liberty Square in Maribor as part of the Maribor Art Gallery’s art in public space program. Since then, it has been performed six times in different cities (Maribor, Kočevje, Ljubljana, Feldbach (Austria), Strasbourg (France)), activating different audiences through collective action and building new communities.

Cattleya is a production platform co-mentored by Michelle Phillips (Studio Yukiko) and Grashina Gabelmann (Flaneur Magazine). Studio Yukiko is a Berlin-based creative agency specializing in creative direction, art direction, brand strategy, concept generation and graphic design for commercial and cultural clients alike. The studio is producing award-winning work, unearthing narratives, telling stories of local communities worldwide, and immersing themselves in the trends of internet and youth culture. Grashina Gabelmann is a founding member and editor-in-chief of the site specific, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary project called Flaneur Magazine. She works as a writer and translator. Her creative practices also involve listening as an act of care, giving political/creative workshops to kids, teenagers, and the elderly, and collecting stories in different communities.

The production platform Cattleya invites you to deconstruct the androcentric correlation of the female-as-flower. The name of this project is a glimpse into Marcel Proust's famous concept of cattleya (referring both to “making love” as well as the Cattleya orchid flower) from his opera In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The participants will reinterpret the mundane patriarchal idioms associating women to flowers by examining the rich connections between language and image that are pervasive in Slovene poetry, literature, the arts, advertising, and elsewhere as well. Therefore, it will question, criticize, and reformulate these relationships into a series of provocative and bold visual productions. Through zines, posters, and other manifestations of graphic design, the participants will focus on idiomatic expressions related to the comparison between women and flowers, thus visually exploring the cultural significance of these expressions.