Tools For After

Exhibition at Sursock Palace

AI3 . March 2024

Tools For After explores how design can respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene and imagine possible futures beyond the climate crisis.

Dates: 14 March – 7 April 2024
Level: AI3
Discipline: Exhibition design & scenography
Venue: Sursock Palace, Beirut
With: ALBA × Italian Cultural Institute

Bringing together more than 50 contemporary Italian design projects, the exhibition investigates alternative materials, ancestral knowledge, living systems and innovative strategies for a more sustainable world.

Structured around four themes — LYFE, PALEO, TOOLS and MAPS — it moves from the organic and prehistoric to invention and future possibilities, questioning what we can create, rethink and carry forward into “what comes after”.

Exhibited at Sursock Palace, Beirut, as part of the ALBA students’ exhibition project.

Photograph of a Sursock Palace gallery with stacked display frames sketched over it in pale yellow

Photograph of a palace doorway with display frames sketched over it in pink

Photograph of the arcaded palace hall with a run of display stands sketched over it in blue

First ideas, drawn over photographs of the palace

Concept

The exhibition stands were designed to highlight the objects while allowing Sursock Palace to remain part of the visual experience. A combination of open metal frames, mesh and opaque surfaces creates different levels of transparency and visual contrast, adapting the background to each exhibited piece.

The lightweight metal structure also integrates the electrical wiring and directional spotlights, allowing each object to be individually illuminated without visually competing with the architecture.

A flexible display system where material, transparency and light work together to give each object its place.

Exhibited objects: a coat and hat hung on branch-like stands

Exhibited objects: a ceramic vessel and lemon, a bust wearing a 3D-printed porous headpiece, and hands holding a hexagonal tile

The triple-arched hall of Sursock Palace with its marble statue and sheer curtains, cut out against the page — Sursock Palace, Beirut

Exhibition plan of the palace ground floor locating the LYFE, PALEO, TOOLS and MAPS stands — Plan

Axonometric drawings of the five PALEO stands: thin steel frames with mesh panels, each object marked in red and keyed to its photograph — Paleo 01 – 05

Render of the black steel stands arranged between the columns of the palace stair hall, a visitor beside the fountain

Render of two stands beneath the palace staircase, red blocks marking the exhibited objects

Drawing of one stand with an integrated spotlight on its mesh panel lighting three objects — Integrated lighting

The built stand in the palace: rusted steel frame and mesh with small spotlights lighting three sculptural objects and their labels — As built

Dimensioned axonometric sketches of the three TOOLS stands, annotated by hand in red — Tools 01 – 03

The TOOLS stands in the palace hall, lit objects glowing inside mesh frames on the marble floor

A wider view of the stands before a carved stone rosette wall in Sursock Palace

Panorama of the exhibition in the main hall of Sursock Palace: slender steel stands beneath three pointed arches, warm light on carved stone walls — The main hall during the exhibition

Opening night: visitors among the stands in an arcaded gallery washed in red light

A stand displaying lit 3D-printed heads before a marble statue and draped window

Dimensioned elevations, plan and axonometric of the longest stand, 6.95 metres, with exhibited objects marked in red — Elevations, plan and axonometric

Detail of a stand holding a glowing green cylinder and bamboo objects

Detail of a rusted mesh stand with a small glass vessel lit from above

Two visitors lean over a woven textile piece displayed on a mesh table during the opening

The Tools For After poster for Italian Design Day 2024, a violin displayed on a stand, and the ALBA team on the balcony of Sursock Palace — Italian Design Day 2024 · the team at Sursock Palace