In the former Hotel Eden, an event focused on collectible design that focuses on curatorial selection and location to create an intimate experience between visitors and exhibitors

With a splendid view of the lake and the historic center, in a delabré building due to the construction site being restored soon, Nomad St. Moritz 2024 aims to be a destination for collectible design galleries, creating a dialogue between art, design and architecture, between content and container. “Holding a human scale,” adds Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, curator and founder of the event with Giorgio Pace.

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“We want to create a surprise effect. There arereturning galleries, but we ask them to bring something unexpected. At the same time we maintain around 40% new exhibitors to offer a sense of discovery to visitors. It's a curatorial event, we choose more based on the program and the applications than on the names of famous galleries."

On display this year 25 international galleries and 9 special projects which presented from rare historical objects to unprecedented contemporary creations that take us back to the material and precious expressiveness of the applied arts.

The narrative qualities of ceramics

Same material, three different visions. The three artists selected by the Antonella Villanova Gallery in Florence take us into as many plastic-visual worlds that are expressed through the irresistible sensoriality of ceramics.

The Neapolitan Diego Cibello interprets the tradition of Capodimonte, with the refined wealth of botanical details, in sculptural ensembles that are at times disturbing in which elements of human figures can be seen.

Pol Polloniato reinvents the white ceramic of Nove (Treviso) with a new technique through which he fragments and reassembles ceramic flakes with motifs typical of local factories in classically shaped molds.

Finally, the German Keiyona Stumpf expresses the relationship between man and nature in a sort of living sculptures/organisms in which fragments of the human body can be seen.

Accents of Africa at Nomad St. Moritz 2024

The renewed interest in the African diaspora that pervaded, to name one event, the XVII International Architecture Biennale of Venice, also finds space in the world of collectible design.

The Lausanne gallery Foreign Agent specializes inartists of African origin bringing us into contact with unpublished materials from the "north of the world" and local techniques from low tech.

Examples include the finely lacquered coconut wood container by Jean-Servais Somian, the furniture in recycled tin from oil barrels by Hamed Ouattara > and the textile works of the Congolese-born artist Maliza Kiasuwa who, in biomorphic forms, examines transformative and regenerative processes in an attempt to understand the mystery of life.

There was no shortage of more established African artists such as the Senegalese Seyni Awa Camara, also exhibited at the Center Pompidou, who creates clay sculptures in her courtyard, then fired in an open hearth oven.

Switzerland from an unusual perspective

If the spectacular views of the Maloia Pass and the Sasso San Gottardo in Ticino by the Belgian photographer Godelieve Vandamme (Shåk Gallery) are a more awaited prospect of Switzerland, Angelo De Luca's interpretation of the local landscape is less expected.

The jewelry designer creates a ring in which the position and color of each stone represents from the summit of Piz Julier to the autumn leaves of the Swiss stone pine, to the summer lakes of the Upper Engadine.

The Second Nature gallery in Zurich instead surprises with its scouting of young talents with a personal vision of applied arts and upcycled materials. Thus, Elisa Lacoste creates biomorphic objects from synthetic materials and recycled aluminium; Valerio Glisenti creates furniture by hand in mountain wood and animal skins that he hunts himself; Office for Ordinary Objects architects invent tables and benches by assembling industrial prefabs; the textile designer Stéphanie Baechler embroiders fragile organic traces on irregular cast aluminum frames.

Cover photo: De Pasquale+Maffini