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Mudam invites designer Thomas Pausz (*1978) for a series of open air activities throughout the summer. Pausz treats his design practice like a garden from which participants are invited to collect what has been sown during shared experiences. Pausz acts softly, his means are economic an ecological. A slow pace and a sense of community are at the center of his activity program spread across several intra and extra-muros sites.
Hortus Praxis seeks to attract visitors and contributors of all kinds: gardeners, dreamers, families, craftsmen, bees, birds, joggers, poets, tourists, lovers, bankers, cyclists...
For Thomas Pausz, design is not limited to the formal conception of functional objects: design is a journey towards a product, an open process to which everybody can contribute. Pausz’ design practice does not aim for results that are sleek and consumable, it is orientated towards experience, communication and interaction, that grows from and between the participants. His design work follows the principles of Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione (translated as self-design): a free catalogue with detailed instructions for making easy-to-assemble furniture pieces. Pausz’ Open Designinterrupts the industrial chain of production, which purposefully leads from conception to manufacture and on to marketing, and introduces moments of evaluation of the different steps. Reformulating the various steps encourages a questioning on ecology, deceleration and collective making.
Nature’s garden is not only explored as a metaphor, as Pausz literally picks from nature: he selects plants and herbs after seeking local knowledge on their properties and found some use for them in his projects. Wether making soap with herbal essences or making ink with natural colorants, the projects here developed by Thomas Pausz for Mudam and introduced under the name Hortus Praxis, allow each participant to experience and to contribute to the production process of everyday objects.