TOUT EST CHAOS
As part of Paris Design Week 2026, Pli Office presents TOUT EST CHAOS. 75 designers, architects, and artists were invited and selected by curator Christopher Dessus to exhibit one or more objects that, in one way or another, resonate with the exhibition's title.
Modernism and industrialization carried a promise: that of an accessible, functional, democratic world, freed from material constraints through mass production. The Bauhaus, Scandinavian design, and the Ulm School believed in this and, in part, kept their word — they envisioned a daily life shaped by reflective design, pared-down forms, and mastered materials.
But today a threshold has been crossed, and we are literally saturated with objects. Warehouses, shops, and interiors overflow with things we once believed we needed and now discard or neglect without a second glance. What was meant to liberate us now burdens us; what was meant to simplify our lives now paralyzes us through excess choice. The paradigm of optimization has reached its limit. It is from this observation, and this impasse, that the exhibition TOUT EST CHAOS was born.
In ancient cosmogonies, chaos is not synonymous with disorder; for Hesiod, it is the original void from which all creation is born. In this exhibition, design and architecture become acts of resistance — ways of asserting, questioning, and moving beyond the purely aesthetic. The objects on display do not seek to resolve. They promise neither total efficiency nor absolute transparency. Instead, they offer something else: open uses, incomplete forms, reversible functions, narratives.
TOUT EST CHAOS celebrates design not as just another exhibition, but as a space of tension, of embraced saturation, and of rediscovered creative freedom — a manifesto in favor of young creation, at a time when our production systems are running out of breath.