Milan Bench

KASK – School of Arts Ghent is a prominent player in the field of higher education in the visual and audio-visual arts, music and drama. The KASK design department offers a diverse range of specialist design courses and strives to create a favourable climate for interdisciplinary projects and crossovers between art and design. Today, over 2000 students and researchers as well as 500 highly specialised teachers continually benefit from two hundred years of educational experience in the arts while working according to the highest standards of the contemporary artistic field. The Milan Bench aims to represent the numerous design programmes at KASK. As an intervention spread throughout the exhibition, the benches invite to reflect upon and challenge common notions of design. The concept’s origins lie in the guerrilla furniture series made by student Milan Verstraete This young interdisciplinary designer with a background in woodworking and furniture design uses design as a tool to investigate the complex relationship between humans and their environment. His designs bridge the gap between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary practices such as Street Art. The series he made for Ventura Lambrate Milan consists of simple, versatile structures that can easily be placed almost anywhere in the city. These inexpensive seating units appear throughout the urban landscape as a sort of tangible graffiti, spontaneously leading a life of their own. Tightly secured on one side but floating freely on the other, the seating structures are simple but intriguing objects that offer fatigued visitors a welcome place to sit and enjoy the vibrant scenery. We are proud to install 10 'Milan Benches' across and between 2 locations of Ventura Lambrate in Milan: at Via Privata Oslavia 8 and at the intersection of via dei Canzi and via Gaetano Crespi. From April 9-14.