For more than twenty years, the French design studio smarin has been exploring how objects shape not only our spaces, but also our ways of living and thinking. From cushions that turn into landscapes to tools that reframe how we breathe, their practice has always blurred the line between the aesthetic and the political — proposing gestures, materials, and rituals that can open up new imaginaries.
Last July, smarin was in residence at BASE to begin the first chapter of a collaboration that will continue in 2026 with an ambitious new project. We interviewed Stéphanie Marin about comfort, slowness and manual gestures as radical tools in an age of ecological and cultural crisis.
B: smarin has existed for more than 20 years. What has remained unchanged in your approach, and what, on the contrary, has radically evolved over time?
s: Since its creation, smarin has been built around a simple conviction: objects make the world. Each object, each act of design contributes not only to shaping our spaces, but also to shaping how we live and think. This fundamental question has never changed: it remains the foundation of our work. What has evolved profoundly, however, is the resonance of these questions with our time. For many years, we explored them almost in resistance, against the current. Today, they are recognised as essential: how we produce, the materials we mobilise, the way we inhabit the world. The complexity of these issues has greatly expanded, and with it the possibility of developing multiple, transdisciplinary responses. This makes our work more demanding, but also more stimulating, because it now meets with a much broader echo.
B: Your projects seem to arise from questions rather than forms. What are the questions guiding your work today?
s: We observe that the major issues of our present : the climate emergency, socio-cultural polarisation, urban crises ; all share a common substrate, tensions that emerge around questions of speed and rhythm. From this starting point, we have turned to fields such as chronobiology, microsociology, industrial ecology, and metabolic urbanism. All reveal how our conditions of life depend on the articulation of multiple temporalities: biological cycles, social rhythms, urban flows, technological velocities.
Within this trajectory, we are preparing to initiate a cycle of research we call Rhythmic Studies, or the study of inter-rhythmic questions. The aim is to explore what occurs when these different speeds meet: tensions, frictions, but also potentials, partial synchronisations, collective inventions, and the emergence of new imaginaries.
As a team, we also conceive of our shared work as a form in itself: the invention of a system based on multiple parameters. The balance of a studio involves a series of economic and pragmatic questions, complex ones, that we do not wish to set aside in favour of purely artistic ambition. We see design precisely as a concrete ground on which to experiment with questions of production scale, to develop intuitions, and to propose hypotheses for new research frameworks.
B: In an increasingly digital world, you choose natural materials, slow gestures, manual practice. Is this an aesthetic choice, a political one — or both? How does this relate to our time, marked by ecological crisis, cultural polarisation, and the urgency of new imaginaries?
s: Aesthetics and politics are distinct spheres in theory, but in reality they belong to a single continuum. Our approach is empirical, rooted in the simplicity of gesture and inquiry: it consists in proposing concrete situations that allow us to experiment with other habits, other gestures,
other temporalities.
By working with natural materials, simple forms, and practical protocols, we seek to trigger small transformations in everyday life. These modest shifts can lead to deeper mutations, capable of nourishing new collective imaginaries and opening the way to more desirable situations. In this sense, each project is both an aesthetic exploration and a political proposition, inseparably linked to our present time.
B: BASE is a place of relation between the public, culture, and artistic production. What attracts you to the idea of activating a project here? How do you imagine it might dialogue with your work? Can you give us a hint of what will happen in 2026?
s: BASE is an open, fertile context where culture is experienced as a collective process. It is both stimulating and demanding, because the public and partners here are truly engaged in shaping a common transformation within Milan, a city that occupies a distinctive place in the circulation of cultures across Europe. We have begun to explore the local context, engaging in dialogue with institutions, researchers, and students. We imagine proposing simple protocols and collective experiments that will allow us to test, in real time, new forms of relation to the world.
In 2026, we will present an exhibition in partnership with the Institut français, the Politecnico di Milano, BASE, and the Triennale. It will take the form of a laboratory dedicated to the analysis of inter-rhythmic questions, a research we consider particularly fertile in the field of design. It will be an invitation to practice, to experiment, and to share around this theme.