Galerie Philia is delighted to announce the launch of Design Brut | Philia & Kids, the first edition of a non-profit initiative conceived to inspire, connect and engage children worldwide with design, from reflection and conception to creation.

In Paris, the inaugural exhibition of Design Brut | Philia & Kids will unveil new furniture designs imagined by children from Breil-sur-Roya primary school in France and brought to life by Antoine Behaghel and Alexis Foinyfrom Studio Behaghel Foiny, the designers selected for this first edition.

The project Design Brut is inspired by French artist Jean Dubuffet’s notion of ‘Art Brut’, commonly translated as ‘raw art’, i.e. art created outside the academic tradition of fine art by children and marginal communities including prisoners and patients in psychiatric hospitals.

According to Dubuffet, these groups produced more direct, emotional, truthful and untrammelled by cultural conventions and norms, compared to those of trained artists, influenced and moulded by technical and academic knowledge.

The philosophy behind ‘Art Brut’ inspired Galerie Philia’s founder Ygaël Attali to find ways to stimulate connections, reflections, and discourses on design beyond academic conventions through collective workshops and collaborations that would be sustainable.

The answer was Design Brut | Philia & Kids, an inaugural workshop introducing 6-7 years old children to the practice of sculptural design that took place earlier this summer in Breil-Sur Roya, a French village nestled in the Roya valley in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.

Under the supervision of their teacher Virgile Ganne and the artistic direction of contemporary designers Antoine Behaghel and Alexis Foiny from Studio Behaghel Foiny, the children were invited to draw shapes and ideas on paper to form their own interpretations of sculptural design.

The children’s drawings were then realised as physical designs, sculpted in local olive wood by a cabinetmaker from the region, followed by a small display in the chapel Notre-Dame-des-Monts in the presence of the children and local community.

“It was a joyful adventure to watch them having fun while drawing or thinking about design,” he says. “I hope most of all to inspire them. If even just one of them keeps these memories alive in the future and imagines himself as a creator—whatever the creation would look like—for us, it would be a victory.”

Gallerist Ygaël Attali

The project was documented in a film directed by Benjamin Juhel which will be unveiled at the exhibition in Paris.

Images courtesy of Galerie Philia and Maison Mouton Noir