Shahar Livne

In 2018, she was a finalist for the Beazley Design of the Year Award, with her work exhibited at London’s Design Museum, and in 2020 she was named Dezeen’s Emerging Designer of the Year. Litty Salas, a graduate of DAE’s Critical Inquiry Lab, spoke to Livne about her research, her ‘meta’ view of materials and how her experience at DAE has shaped her practice.

→Litty Salas: Can you tell me a bit about your journey through DAE? What fascinated and inspired you to become a designer?
Shahar Livne: There was a time when I was back in Israel when I read a lot about designers that really excited and inspired me. Surprisingly most of the designers I read about were from DAE, and that got me really interested in pursuing design from the Academy. Unlike other design schools at the time, DAE did not focus on industrial or product design but a more rounded and research-based design field that I was passionate about. While at the Academy, my perspective about design completely changed. This prompted me to find my passion within the field, where most of my projects started from the material. Not the physicality of the material, rather the underlying story that’s narrated through the material. It’s from here that the layout of my practice started.

→LS: What prompted you to work with obscure materials? How did you relate to these materials in order to start working with them?
SL: Working with obscure materials has become my practice, and it was shaped during my thesis semester at the Academy. My graduation project was about plastics – the cultural, critical, philosophical and speculative angles of plastic. It was not about recycling plastic or sustainability but was really questioning and criticising the material in terms of grading and looking at how nature and ecology played a part in it. My work was not about concluding if plastic was good or bad – rather, it was to take a step back, look at it from a neutral perspective and really understand the processes behind it – the geological and transformational processes and what it actually means. This was sort of the turning point that garnered attention to my work, and ever since then, I have pushed ecological and speculative design within the design of materials. My aim was not to provoke or scare people, but it did have that effect because they started to realise that the everyday notion of plastic starts to fall apart. And this research led me to understand that materials have a more meta meaning to them than their materiality.

→LS: What meta meaning do you associate with plastic?
SL: Well, plastic is a very important material. If we are talking about it in a more philosophical way, it is the material of ultimate transformation. What is interesting is that plastic is perceived as a very artificial material, but if you go back in time, it’s very natural. It comes from fossil fuels, and these fuels come from fossils or dead animals, making it a very beautiful transformative material. And plastic is the marker of our time within the geological record of the earth, making it a very important material.

→LS: Could you tell us a bit more about your practice after DAE? What are some of the other projects you have done, and which ones do you resonate with the most?
SL: Graduating from DAE and presenting at Dutch Design Week, my Metamorphism project (the graduation project on plastics) became very popular, and that sort of gave me a natural flow into my practice. I got a lot of media coverage for it. I was also nominated for the Beazley Design of the Year award, among others and was asked to exhibit at the Design Museum in London, which was such a huge honour. And then, I was approached by Balenciaga, which is a very unique brand in the world of fashion. I designed a series of jewellery consisting of earrings, rings, bracelets, made of plastic and sediments, which was my own creation. The whole range was shown in the catwalk for the Fall, Winter 2021 and was worn by Kim Kardashian. A video game called ‘Afterworld’ stemmed from this collection as well. Another work of mine that is quite famous is the ‘Blood Sneakers’. It started out as an assignment while I was in DAE, and the theme of the assignment was controversy in the food industry. I did my research on blood as a colourant. After graduation, somehow it came up again when I presented it in an exhibition, and someone saw it on Instagram and picked it up, and now I have been working with it for almost three years.

LS: You have become known for projects that make very bold statements. What lies ahead for you in the future? What are some of the things you wish to achieve with your work?
SL: I received a grant from Stimulerings Fonds (Dutch Creative Industries Fund) last year, and I wanted to do a project that started similar to the Meat Factory project [a project exploring how to use entire animals, which includes the bio-leather made from blood used in the Blood Sneakers] but in a different direction. So I am working with milk fibres in collaboration with the Textile Museum in Tilburg which should come out in the next two months and will be shown in the exhibition ‘To Dye For’. And I have two other materials I am working on, which I cannot say much about as it is still the beginning of the research. I have also been obsessed with bees, so I would like to work on something related to that, like beeswax or honey, which is still in the drawer, and I hope to bring it out someday.