The potential to powerfully express a feeling or thought through design is core to Genos – a new collective launching its first objects next week in Milan.

For the group, individual reputations are less important than collective impact. As such, the members – or “monads”, as they say – are faceless. Instead, they create as one, resulting in objects that each reflect multiple meanings and inspirations. “Genos’ plurality of voices is reflected in the heterogeneity of its products, objects that inhabit spaces: every creation is different from the other, part of an ever-changing and dynamic identity,” they say.

To mark the group’s launch, it presents Edition One at an installation in Milan’s Spazio Fonte. The installation itself has been inspired by an underground parking lot, and each of the new pieces pose as parked cars.

“We are a group of creatives giving life to high-end objects that inhabit spaces”

Rather than specific, tangible points of inspiration – the pieces in Edition One reflect themes important to Genos – “they speak about all matters, but design,” they say. To them, the power of design is how a piece is interpreted.

This more conceptual approach is evident across the naming of the five objects, too.

A chair has been titled “How Dare You”, and is described as being “dedicated to those who are working a job or living a life that doesn’t belong to them, that they never chose and that they never desired”. Its form has been milled from a single block of aluminium, with a pillow crafted from leather that features screen-printed motifs across its back.

“Scattered Minds” coffee table features a magnetic top, and comes complete with steel letters that can be placed on its surface. “The item is thought for those who are distracted, and find in distraction an opportunity to create,” Genos say.
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A second coffee table comes in the form of “Post Humanity”, which is crafted from a cement designed to recall the asphalt of Milan’s streets, and from a conceptual standpoint, is a commentary on the heating of the planet. “2000 years from now archeologists will take asphalt as evidence of a past that didn’t want to change.”

The collection is completed by the “Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear”, which looks like a giant coin of sorts, and “Future Stool”, which marries motifs of the past with those of the future, and manifests in an internal wooden structure breaking through a stone exterior.

Edition One will be unveiled on September 12, and on view until September 14. In other design news, Formafantasma and Artek are pushing for a “new aesthetic of sustainability“.

Spazio Fonte
Via dei Fontanili 13
20142 Milan