«For us becoming designers was a way to build a workshop, an atelier, at the size of the world. A kind of workshop that would produce utopias, fantasies or dreams.»
Founded in 1992 by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, M/M (Paris) definitely is one of the most interesting team in contemporary graphic design.
After meeting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and after some personal experiences – Augustyniak studying at the Royal College of Art in London and Amzalag working as art director of “Les Inrockuptibles” – the two French designers have started to work together, motivated by the willingness to be part of the world, to produce signs for the world, by experimenting the different media made available by technological, social, cultural change.
Driven by a quasi-ethnographic attitude towards the multifarious dimensions of contemporary culture, from pop music to fashion and art, M/M has used its “office” in Paris – as they call it – as a base from which to explore an increasingly larger territory, and from which to work at different scales and through different disciplines, building a series of significant international collaborations – such as with Björk, Yohji Yamamoto, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, just to name a few.
The result is a varied but consistent catalog of signs, which are distributed in their different works – posters, publications, album covers, advertising etc. – and for which the world itself is a form of archive in real scale.
Watch the answer to the first question of the interview with Augustyniak, that we have made in Paris, in the office of M/M. The full interview will be featured on show.
Other interviews may be read on M/M’s website.