Ilenia

Imagine a game with no rules. With no purpose and no goal. With actions, scores, and turns that follow no pattern. A game with no winner, no loser, and no objectives. If it is the rules that make the game, what is the game without the rules? If the rules were to remain, but each player arrived to the tournament with differing understandings of what those rules restrict and allow, how can a winner be distinguished and how can the game be followed?

A game with no rules is play in its purest, most honest form. Leisure with no restrictions is the only true form of leisure. A walk with a destination in mind cannot really be a diversion. How do you lose yourself if you know where you are going? In this small exercise we have a lesson for life; an argument for the unexpected twists that make existence a delight rather than a chore.

A new body of work by Concorde, the Milan-based design duo whose styles and objectives shift with each season, explores the forms that support modern gaming. Deregulated and distinct, a series of tables follow no pattern and eschew expected dimensions. Aside from the most basic formal requirements – they stand upright with legs that support a single surface – these tables follow no previously set rules for what form gaming tables traditionally follow. They are assembled from the legs of other tables, chairs, and mirrors. Former pepper mills, staircase railings, and paper towel holders provide support. Baseball bats, once active bodily extensions, become static. Salad bowls are upturned, their bottoms becoming bases. In Concorde’s definition of a table there is room for coat hangers, vases, door stoppers, and curtain rings. Candle stands, a traditional component of 18th century game tables, even reappear, albeit in unfamiliar forms.

These tables are in essence collages. What makes them game-specific are the found parts from which they are assembled, vaguely suggesting in color and shape the environments in which games are traditionally played – domestic settings from the stodgy to the destitute, the private club of the English gentleman or the concrete corner under a streetlight. Concorde’s practice itself is without rules, the offspring of two minds without formal training, so it follows that they would rather forfeit than ever play the game as it’s expected to be played.

-Camille Okhio

Concorde is a Milan-based duo founded by Carlo Prada and Nelly Hoffman. Launched in 2020, the project was born from a shared desire to reinterpret bourgeois aesthetics with a cultured yet punk approach. Concorde reimagines traditional design codes through playful experimentation and overlapping of historical references. Recent exhibitions include: Emanuela Campoli, Paris (2024); Uppercut, Brussels (2024); Conceptual Fine Arts, Milan (2023); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2023).