BB Can you tell us a bit about the background of your opera? How did you come up with the idea? What brought you together?
DDG & N Design Displacement Group featuring Noviki: It is said that there was a time when it was easy to distinguish design from art. But something has been happening to design in recent years – something significant – similar to the moment we could observe in the field of art when people realized that they are no longer dealing with something they could name or define. In the art field this moment was recognized and commented by many theorists, one of them was Jerzy Ludwiński* who in his text ‘Art in the Post-artistic Age’ described (45 years ago) the blurring of the distinction between roles of an artist, curator and theorist as the indication of this shift. This shift is present in the design field today. Eight years ago, Nick Currie** described it as the ‘Duchamp Moment’ in honor of the presentation of a urinal to the New York Society of Independent Artists in 1917 by Marcel Duchamp. Despite the fact that it has been almost 100 years since this action we continue to wonder‚ what are the consequences of this change? Has this shift been properly recognized? How can we set the borderlines between responsibilities (of the artist or designer) if they have already dissolved? All of these questions remain open for us and our practice. We would like to present this opera to you as a testimony of our current reflection during our Design Displacement Group practice. Let’s explore the Duchamp moment one more time!

BB Can you briefly lead us into the discourse being born within your project?
DDG & N The Death of Graphic Design, an Opera is a result of rekindling that recurrently surfacing spirit – the sense of possibilities offered once tired design methodologies are done away with. We discover new (design) territories with the format of the opera by re-approriating its formats.

BB How does the project you have prepared for the Off Programme fit into the larger context of your practice? Are you working on something related?
DDG & N This project is delivered by ‘Design Displacement Group, featuring Noviki’. The group consists of sixteen members collaborating in shifting constellations across a range of projects that take form (in real time) through commissioned client projects, self-initiated works and open-form workshops. All individual designers have their own studio practice and choose to discover territories with these practices.

BB This edition of the Brno Biennial responds to the metamorphoses and the state of contemporary graphic design; its multitude, variety, vagueness and apparent superficiality. Can you identify some of the basic parameters, current themes or motivations of contemporary graphic design?
DDG & N DDG practices a working method that should be read as collective and post-signature; a mechanism to reflect, refract and speculate upon alternative frameworks for ‘productive’ engagement and exchange. We work in different collaborative frameworks in several combinations of authors, which delivers the kaleidoscopic post-signature that is so characteristic of our work.

* Jerzy Ludwiński was a Polish art theorist. His text ‘Art in the Post-Artistic Age’ proclaims that the art world might have missed the moment in which art became something that we could no longer name or define.
** A text by Nick Currie, Frieze blog, 2008, source link: blog.frieze.com/archive/author/nick-currie