Toxico Cultura

Image by Santiago da Silva: Day one in Berlin.

We are incredibly excited to inaugurate a new project of Tóxico that will help talented young Mexican artists, designers, filmmakers et al have the opportunity of doing international internships and residencies abroad, during critical moments in their career, helping them take their work to the next level and permitting them to explore and deepen their knowledge and passions, pushing them to take new risks, experiment beyond the borders of their respective disciplines. These young artists will be hand-picked by Tóxico from a pool of people we have worked with before, or have taken Tóxico workshops; once selected they become part of the Tóxico Mentorship system and we will try to support them in various and personalized ways.

And so Santiago–an amazing young Mexican designer, musician and visual artist who has collaborated closely with Tóxico on several occasions–will be interning during 4 months with Manuel Raeder.

Manuel studied at the London College of Printing and has completed a post-graduate at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht. His main focus lies in close collaborations with artists, designers, curators, theorists and musicians. His work has a wide range of formats from exhibitions, publications, type design to furniture design. Manuel has held workshops at the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Paris and the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg.

Says Santiago:

“My main interest as a designer is in how design can integrate different discourses and messages through the production of everyday objects and how these objects affect people. I believe this focus lays in the intersection between design and art, since the first is dedicated to the construction of realities and the second questions it constantly. Manuel Raeder’s work is continuously shifting between art and design, exploring ways of how one can complement the meaning of the other. He works closely with artists and galleries, but processes related directly with art constantly affect his own work. This results in a direct questioning of design itself and also generates a search for developing systems through which different relations can be established with everyday objects. This also results in a questioning of art and it’s function today.”

Keep posted on the Toxi-blog for updates and multidisciplinary musings by Santiago, direct from Berlin.

(A big thank you to The Lift for supporting this new Tóxico initiative)

(Y mucha suerte señor da Silva)