Designer Lilly Friedeberg stands in front of a monochrome sky-blue wall.

Dezain Crush – three questions for Lilly Friedeberg

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“That’s the liberating thing about Japanese design, although it’s quite highbrow it can still be cute.”

Dezain Crush was launched on 2 June 2024. The pop-up exhibition at the Toykio on Immermannstrasse took place right after Düsseldorf’s annual Japan Day. The team behind the event were three Düsseldorf designers, Lilly Friedeberg of Studio B.O.B., Alexandros Michalakopoulos from the Morphoria design agency and Kiyo Matsumoto of the Letterpress 77 printshop. The exhibition explored German-Japanese friendship, different design perspectives and enhanced visibility for the creative industries. We talked to Lilly Friedeberg about Japanese cuteness, German seriousness and her dreams for the future of the event.

Lilly, you and your husband Alexandros Michalakopoulos are fans of Japanese culture. Together with Kiyo Matsumoto, you decided to set up Dezain Crush. How did you come up with the idea?
A number of factors coincided. Alexandros and I had often toyed with the idea of a design festival, because we feel that compared to the art scene, for example, the design scene isn’t really visible enough. We’ve always been passionate about Japanese culture anyway, and Kiyo was keen to exhibit a designer friend from Japan. All three of us like Düsseldorf, and the fact that there is a growing focus on Japan and Little Tokyo here. We were partly inspired by the ‘Us by Night’ event in Antwerp, a design festival that really put Antwerp on the map in design circles and turned it into quite a destination. It would be great if Dezain Crush could eventually have a similar effect on Düsseldorf. The city has a lot of local creative industries, but they don’t have enough presence yet. In our opinion, there needs to be a greater awareness of design as an interface between art and commercially applied creativity. That developed into the idea of combining the themes of Japan and design.

The Dezain Crush pop-up exhibition shows mainly graphic and illustrated works. What is the difference in the approach of Japanese and German designers?
Yes, we are starting with graphic design and graphic illustrations. We’re keeping an open mind as to whether we’ll add other disciplines in future. But first we need to establish a direction. Since our backgrounds are in graphic design and we are very well connected within that discipline, that is where our current focus lies. We are keeping an open mind, of course. For example, the Japanese designer Yu Miyama is going to exhibit a knotted carpet. There will also be woodcuts. Yu Miyama is quite a good example of why we need a format such as Dezain Crush. I’ve been following her on Instagram for ages and really wanted to invite her. But that was only possible because we had no language barriers, thanks to Kiyo. Japanese design is super important for current trends. In Japan there is great admiration for Bauhaus, for minimalism and clarity. But they manage to subvert this perfectionism by adding loud and colourful elements. I find that exciting. In Germany you almost feel embarrassed as a designer if you’re doing something loud, colourful or kitsch. That’s the liberating thing about Japanese design, although it’s quite highbrow it can still be cute. You even get that cuteness in the public realm. Whereas in Germany, especially in the public realm, things tend to be more serious.

The pop-up exhibition is essentially a sort of prologue to the Dezain Crush Festival that is planned for 2025. What can we look forward to?
It is our great dream, our vision. The festival will definitely be bigger than the pop-up event. We’ll obviously see how that one works in order to figure out where we go from here. But the plan is to exhibit with more designers. We want to invite speakers to give talks, we’d like to promote dialogue and possibly even set up a design market. We want to facilitate an exchange that is impeded by the language barrier. Dezain Crush allows us to be intermediaries. We would like to understand each other, present fantastic designs and ensure greater visibility.

dezain-crush.com

Artwork for the Dezain Crush exhibition


Interview: Cynthia Blasberg
Photos: Press photos from the Dezain Crush event

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