Do you have any thoughts as to why Memphis might be enjoying a revived interest? Could it have to do with a new generation that’s exploring internet aesthetics and finding shared sensibilities with Memphis’s ideas?



Memphis was finished 30 years ago, and then for 25 years nobody talked about it. All of a sudden there is this kind of revival. I don’t know where it comes from. I think that things regularly come back, it’s not because internet aesthetics have anything to do with Memphis—I think they’re quite different. When I was young there was a revival of the thirties … Things tend to just return sometimes.





Don’t you think that the eclecticism of Memphis could be striking a chord in an age where everything is accessible, again, via the internet?



Memphis existed before the internet, and all the ingredients of Memphis were things that were coming from a lot of different horizons. First of all, from the radical movements in Italy of the 1970s, but it also took things from all over the world, from the iconography of different countries, and of poor places as well, as Memphis sought to break hierarchies: between materials, yes, but also between influences. It was really breaking the rules of Modernism in that sense. Once the rules were broken, they have never been put back together, so what happened 35 years ago is still going on now—that’s why it’s not really revolutionary, this return of Memphis.

Click to expand...