The Pursuit of Optimal Relevance With Berlin Creative Studio sub

sub's Pursuit of Optimal Relevance

What does it mean to be relevant? Relevance is “the right thing appearing at the right time.” It concerns what feels needed (useful) and what feels desired (appropriate). These qualities are not subjective; they are the outcomes of complex processes in which every human on earth plays a part. Relevance can be researched. Relevance can be pursued. It can even be measured.

The purpose of all cultural production is the achievement of relevance. This truth connects every type of artistic expression: from old masters to upstart kids, from masterpieces to micro-trends, from vernacular clichés to the most sacred and ancient traditions.

Relevance concerns how people feel about the world and what they think about existence. In this sense, relevance is a mashup of the material and social worlds. Achieving material relevance involves understanding how resource extraction, production and consumption, labor relations, economic exchange, geopolitics, technology and industry all interrelate as complex systems. Achieving social relevance requires interpreting how human emotions, attitudes, beliefs and norms lead to the construction of identities and worldviews. These two spheres each contain many different types of information and models of communication. At every moment, they are all intermeshed: interacting in a dynamic feedback loop, trying to achieve equilibrium but never stabilizing.

If you could somehow visualize this immense confluence of data and sentiment and objects and people, and map it over time, it might appear like a focused beam of light. This is our contemporary condition; what could be called the line of “optimal relevance.” It determines what is culturally significant at any given time. The relevance of a cultural expression is measured by its illumination. Some people intuitively grasp this reality. Others must come to reveal its secrets through investigation. What makes Berlin studio sub so unique is their consistent ability to understand and achieve relevance, and their relentless pursuit of meaning and resonance.

In many ways, sub is entirely alone: They have no obvious peers; there are no comparable companies or practices. However, in other ways, their existence and body of work speak to a common problem for many of us implicated in the creative sector. Over the last decade, it has become clear that historical definitions of design no longer feel very relevant. 

A new type of design is emerging, and we either lack the correct terminology to describe it or the consensus about what existing terms mean. The failure of language to keep up with the evolution of design is evident all around us. The overuse of “interdisciplinary” is an irritating case in point. What does “creative direction” even mean? It feels vague and expansive; increasingly like a catchall or Trojan horse, so that this new mode of design can flourish outside of too much scrutiny and thus capitalism’s extreme desire to commodify all unorthodox ways of being.

The founders of sub, Niklas Bildstein Zaar and Andrea Faraguna, communicate in their only common language, which is English. Most native English speakers are monolingual. This leads to a distorted perspective amongst the Anglo world: that all foreign languages are exactly the same as English, but with different words. For Anglos, translation is misunderstood as a kind of code-breaking, in which one sign is simply swapped for another. In actuality, every language generates its own distinct universes: It has singular and restrictive rules about what is plausible and what is thinkable; it has strong ideas about the structure of space and time, our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, as well as those of others and the natural world. To learn another language is to warp yourself into another dimension with a parallel reality.

What you feel in sub is a linguistic condition that holds back. Their work trades in all the signs and symbols you might expect, but their combination is always strangely familiar and uncanny. The material and social references embedded in sub’s work are not inside jokes; they don’t exclude their audiences. Instead, they possess a kind of allusion that leaves open interpretation in the viewer. Even though their work is always the outcome of immense intellectual energy, every project lands with a lightness and playfulness that is inviting and inclusive.

If we combine the three ideas above—the line of optimal relevance, the emergence of a new type of design and the role of linguistic ambiguity—it becomes evident that the true project of sub is the articulation of a contemporary that cannot easily be seen directly. Every attempt to capture what it means to live today results in an instance, an experiment, a fragment.

The most fitting metaphor for sub’s practice might be some sort of mythological creature; a hybrid being, assembled from a slew of other awesome and terrifying beasts. However, such beings are not abominations: They are not clumsy or awkward, they are powerful and deft. They seamlessly combine the best properties of many animals. The work of sub should not be thought of as additive or cumulative (it is not architecture plus art direction plus x plus y, etc.). Rather, their practice is hybridized; they graft whole discourses and disciplines into a unified whole that functions as a gestalt. This also points towards the new model of design, for which we do not yet have a name.

You can’t have mythological creatures without myths. In other words, for such a fantastical hybrid practice like sub to exist, it must also design its own world, and then populate that world with stories about its adventures. Mythologies are folk stories: narratives held in common by a cultural group, used as a pseudo-religious basis for collective morality, normality and ideas about the structure of reality. The beast describes what sub is; the framework of the myth explains what sub means.

Within the myth, every monster has a purpose. Indeed, every part of every monster serves some function. This explains why sub work in the way that they do: In order to pursue relevance, every project demands a specific community of intellectual, creative and material disciplines. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about myths is that they are never one-dimensional. Within each story there are always a multitude of perspectives and lessons. Each myth remains a perpetual investigation into human nature. 

Anne Imhof - "Youth"
SUB-ISA
2022

Anne Imhof’s exhibition “Youth” occupied the largest space in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, formerly dedicated to showcasing the institution’s permanent collection. The exhibition design comprised an archival display of the scenographic elements previously produced for Imhof, as part of the ongoing, years-long collaboration between sub and the artist. Various readymades, such as industrial water vats and school lockers, were arranged alongside architectonic structures including glazed partitions in order to produce a labyrinthine environment of narrow passages and enclosed rooms. 

The design instantiated a choreographed sequence of spaces for visitors to pass through, echoing the exhibition’s conceptualization of contemporary rituals. “The power of ‘Youth’ is also in how it remains a vessel empty enough that one can fill it in with one’s own projections,” writes critic Kate Brown. “The missing bodies, the occasional barrage of sound, the sense of lost time, the search for an exit—all of that echoes with the calamitous feeling of war drumming away in the background.”


Balenciaga - Tokyo Store
SUB-BAT
2022

The Balenciaga three-story flagship store occupies a building in the Aoyama district of Tokyo, adjacent to the Aoyama-dori and Omotesando intersection. The design is a distillation of the metropolitan perspective, characterized by fragmentation and framed views. In the store, this visual logic is translated into an urban design vocabulary and reproduced as a formal system of standardized façade mock-ups. 

The facades function as both optical devices—reflecting internal movement and doubling the space—and as a display system, featuring bespoke extruded aluminum shelves. Full-length mirrors installed on sidewalls accentuate the dizzying replication of views and produce an effect of spatial extension, as if the corridors formed by the facades system were internal passageways or streets. These linear spaces are further delineated with a variety of flooring, including interlocking concrete pavers, rubber chipping and shaved carpet, combining material signifiers of both domestic and public space within a single retail environment.

Anne Imhof - "Natures Mortes"
SUB-IPP
2022

Anne Imhof’s exhibition “Natures Mortes,” the fifth iteration of the Carte Blanche series at the Palais de Tokyo, occupied the majority of the 20,000-square-meter museum surface, which was originally constructed for the 1937 Exposition Internationale. The show comprised the artist’s own works alongside a selection of works from more than 30 other artists, such as Eugène Delacroix, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Cady Noland. Together, the works represented a diversity of media, from painting to performance and sound pieces. 

The exhibition design began with the removal of all non-permanent partitions, reverting the interior to its stripped-down state immediately after the 2001 renovation by Lacaton & Vassal. 250 insulated glass units (IGUs), many covered in graffiti, were extracted from the façade of a bank in Turin, Italy, prior to its demolishment, and shipped to Paris. Mounted on steel and concrete plinths, the glass walls served as scenographic infrastructure, delineating pathways for visitors. 

Additional elements, either taken from or inspired by civic infrastructure, were also introduced to further define the scenography. The movement of visitors followed a trajectory from the bright ground floor space into a cavernous basement, with the exhibition design serving to structure a sequence that recalled a ritualistic descent underground.

Balenciaga - Winter 2022 Runway Show
SUB-BW22
2022

The Balenciaga Winter 2022 show featured models walking amidst a simulated blizzard that grew in intensity as the show progressed. Situated in Hall 4 and 5 at Le Bourget Paris, the scenography comprised a brightly illuminated circular field covered with artificial snow. A curved glass wall separated the audience, seated in two rows in a darkened corridor, from the environmental simulation, which included atmospheric effects, such as wind and fog, as well as a lighting design that accentuated the show’s dramatic arc.

Balenciaga - Paris Couture Store
SUB-BGV
2022

The Balenciaga Couture Headquarters is located at 10-12 Avenue George V, at the same address where Cristóbal Balenciaga operated between 1937 and 1968. In the decades after it closed, the building underwent extensive modernization. The design strategy was driven by an attempt to restore the original character of the building, a conceit that required rethinking the meaning of originality to produce a deceptive replica of the former space using archival materials as a reference. The ground floor houses the Couture Store in two smoked-glass volumes that were inserted into the reconstructed Haussmannian façade, establishing a stark contrast between the historic architecture and the interior. 

Inside, vitrines fitted with pneumatic hardware doors and light-filtering technical glass house the garments and frame the naked walls of the original building, at once exposing and protecting the original wall surfaces. A small elevator upholstered in Moroccan red leather connects the ground level to the first floor, which houses the Couture Salon. The upper space features sculptural gypsum arabesques framing doorways and mirrors, treated with a flat and dusty white finish and accentuated with duchess curtains. The space, structured in an enfilade of rooms, is decorated with urn lamps and neoclassical sofas, alongside gold-painted chairs to emulate historical photographs. All surfaces feature various aging treatments, as if the space were left untouched since 1968.

Balenciaga - New Bond Street Store
SUB-BNB
2022

The Balenciaga New Bond Street flagship store occupies a building at the intersection of New Bond Street and Conduit Street. The retail space is separated from the street by a glazed facade, exposing the raw concrete interior to passersby, as if the interior was an abandoned relic amidst the luxury shops of New Bond Street. Initially designed as an opaque, high-security stainless steel door, the entrance cuts diagonally across the facade’s rounded corner, replicating the original 1939 design. 

Each of the three levels of the store is distinguished by unique surface treatments meant to simulate the effects of aging, which progressively increase from floor to floor. Chipped concrete shelves and oxidized steel construction elements are mounted on cracked concrete slabs and serve as shelving. Stabilized dirt and mud-like encrustations contrast with extruded aluminum fixtures. On all three floors, the building’s core is visible through glass panes, exposing the raw construction of the elevator shaft and industrial staircase, and serving as a unifying visual device. Illuminated display vitrines and LED screens are embedded behind the glazing, collapsing infrastructure with retail display.

Balenciaga - Winter 2024 Runway Show
SUB-BWP

It is undeniable that the concept of “augmented reality” has been present since the inception of visual art, as evidenced by the earliest known cave paintings. However, with the current online population exceeding 5.5 billion individuals, the boundaries between collective illusion and reality have become increasingly blurred. The Balenciaga Winter 2024 show explored this phenomenon by utilizing immersive architectural elements, such as high-resolution 4K screens, to envelop the space and provide a behind-the-scenes perspective of the digital realm that has become increasingly prevalent in our lives.

In this technologically advanced era, individuals assume the roles of both creators and consumers, perpetually generating and engaging with an endless stream of digital content. Anchoring the stream are stars, algorithmic beacons with enough attentional gravity to shape large online networks. As many attending were likely familiar with these dynamics, the show’s design played with a scenario where guests found themselves trapped in literal screenspace, reversing the roles in a medium where they are normally in control.

If one were to capture a single day in the life of the entire global population through screen recording, the resulting footage would resemble a feverish dream, characterized by a constant flux of images that form and dissolve, reflecting the deep-rooted human desire to escape reality by immersing oneself in the lives of others. Utilizing generative AI models trained on the collective data of our ideas, fears and desires, this show served as a gateway to our shared subconscious. However, as the complexity and volume of the on-screen content intensified, the content lost its coherence, ultimately emphasizing the contrast between the physical bodies and garments against a two-dimensional backdrop of pure visual noise. 

Shop GREATEST 09 here and discover the issue's other cover stories, including Yoon Ahn, Peso Pluma and Tyshawn Jones.