Région Sud Design Prize Showroom 2025
Following in the footsteps of the Prix Région Sud Art, the Prix Région Sud Design was created in 2022 to highlight young designers from the region and contribute to their professionalization. The designers selected by a curator will present their work in a dedicated space during Art-o-rama.
The winner selected by the Design section exhibitors during Art-o-rama will receive a 2,000 € production grant and a dedicated exhibition space during the next edition of the show.
In 2024, Zoé Saugrais was the winner of the Région Sud Design Prize, therefore she will be taking part in this year’s exhibition.
Camille Lamy – 2025 curator
Camille Lamy is a designer, curator, teacher at EESAB Brest and researcher with the Désorceler la finance wilderness laboratory. She works on the agentivity of design, and more specifically on objects of wrestling.
Selected designers & studios for Art-o-rama’s 2025 Showroom
* Texts by Camille Lamy
Chloé Berthon — RAEIRO, chromatic traverse
Cloé Berthon’s work navigates between light, color, and language. With RAEIRO, a graphic design project that takes the form of an installation deployed in space, she creates a delicate work where color becomes memory, typography becomes a filter, and the installation becomes a sensitive threshold between two geographies: Paris and Marseille.
Starting from a sense of loss—that of the south, of the warm light that envelops the stones and passes through the eyelids—RAEIRO attempts to bring the poles closer together. Cloé Berthon captures light not as a physical phenomenon, but as an emotional one: what light provokes, what it reveals about us, what it retains in its color. The process begins with the chromatic capture of the luminosity of the two places, every day at noon, the blue, cold, and harsh light of Paris, and the orange, warm, and overwhelming light of Marseille. From this capture emerges the language, the translation, the color chart that describes what the eye observes in one place and then in the other. This color chart will be the chromatic reference for Cloé Berthon’s research.
A volume of monotypes reveals a journey: that of a train crossing between Paris and Marseille, as seen from the window. The landscape becomes a gentle abstraction distorted by speed, a digital glitch, a focusing error. The colors of the north and the colors of the south slide and intersect across the pages, as one slides from one station to another. What we see is no longer reality, but its retinal persistence, its inner imprint.
Words, meanwhile, are printed on a page, read in suspension, infusing the air with an almost immaterial white pigment. Typography acts as a veil, light is filtered, and the shadow of words tells a story. Printed in silkscreen on tracing paper, these typographic grays become areas of narrative transparency where the text can be read and traversed. It is also through white that Cloé Berthon suggests her past presence in these places, through the evanescent traces of an absent body left here under the blazing sun.
The ink itself is a memory of the territory. In her holistic approach, Cloé Berthon seeks out the pigmentary origins of the landscape. She produces screen printing ink from Vitrolles stone, pink marble, crushed and ground into pigment, evoking both the dust of Mediterranean trails and the low light of late afternoons. Paradoxically, it is in Parisian sandstone that ceramics extend the chromatic materiality of the landscape.
The entire installation evokes Provençal landscapes, rolling hills, and laundry hanging to dry in windows, while also recreating a printing or bookbinding workshop where each page of the book being produced hangs waiting to be assembled into a volume. Everything is connected: narrative, typography, color, material, light.
RAEIRO is a work of the in-between: between cities, between nuances, between languages. Cloé Berthon articulates a concept of graphic design that, beyond organizing signs and their interpretation, explores their ability to embody a sensitive memory and compose an atmosphere. It is a design that touches on the perceptive and the poetic.
Fabrice Peyrolles
With a background in engineering, Fabrice Peyrolles explored the world of Ebénisterie at the Ecole Boulle in Paris, before earning a Master’s degree in Creation and Contemporary Technology at the ENSCI. Now based in Marseille, he is a designer-researcher, weaving a dialogue between design, life and traditional knowledge. This research is materialized by the realization and documentation of projects whose accumulation outlines the contours of an ethical way of Producing, in harmony with the natural world.
At the intersection of object design, craftsmanship, and critical ecology, Fabrice Peyrolles’ work questions our relationship with materials and the life forms that produce them. Through a serie of objects made entirely from Agave americana, a robust plant with sculptural features, harvested from the rugged Mediterranean coastline, he engages in a subtle dialogue between the designer’s gesture and the contradictory dynamics of living things.
Agave americana, introduced to southern France in the 14th century, has taken root vigorously in the cracks of limestone, even colonizing certain parts of the Calanques National Park. Manual removal campaigns are regularly carried out to restore natural environments. Some see it as nothing more than ecological disorder, but Fabrice Peyrolles perceives it as material to be revealed, a plant memory to be listened to, and a care for living things that inspires him.
By collecting these fragments of landscapes in tension and transforming them using demanding artisanal techniques, he does more than simply recycle: he reconstructs a narrative. His objects, which follow the standards of object design—armchairs, lamps—are fragments of a fractured world. They bear the traces of uprooting, proliferation, and the slow transformation of the ecosystem. Their manufacture is designed to minimize environmental impact, imagining production methods that do not harm living organisms, but rather support the preservation of the Calanques Regional Park.
He studies ancient techniques, tracing them back to their origins in the plant—not to reproduce them identically, but to understand their material logic, their biorhythms, and their ways of being in the world through action. From fiber extraction to wood processing, he engages in a design practice where the hand does not dominate the material, but works with it. This localized intelligence unfolds in an economy of means, where each element responds to the whole, and where form arises from a process of material and formal understanding. The Maguey armchair encapsulates this approach.
This poetic rehabilitation work itself needs to be re-evaluated. Recently, a discreet insect—the black agave weevil—has been causing the decline of these plant populations. Introduced in turn, it silently eats away at the plant from the inside, accelerating its disappearance. What was once considered invasive has suddenly become ephemeral. The raw material for the project is becoming scarce, and with it, the very possibility of the gesture.
Fabrice Peyrolles’ work is therefore set in a suspended moment in time, that of impending disappearance. By transforming a contested resource into an artifact, he reveals the unstable condition of all matter in a finite world. His pieces carry the memory of a plant that is both hated and on borrowed time, and reflect the ethics of a design that is attentive to damaged ecosystems.
Contrary to productivist logic, Fabrice Peyrolles crafts designs from little, from almost nothing. Here, the object becomes an active vestige, an imprint of a territory where the tensions of our time are replayed: between nature and culture, craftsmanship and biopolitics, survival and erasure.
Edda Rabold
The work of designer Edda Rabold draws its essence from the exploration of materials, their contradictions, and their potential deformations. Her blown glass project, created using the traditional technique of modeling glass tubes with a torch, perfectly illustrates her approach, where craftsmanship and digital technology intertwine to create objects that are both organic and imbued with traces of the process.
Blown glass, although crafted by hand, allows for fluid and distorted shapes inspired by digital processes. This torch-modeling technique makes it possible to play with stretching and twisting, evoking the digital distortions obtained through parametric modeling. In this project, the glass undergoes physical constraints similar to those of digital tools: it is inflated, curved, assembled, interrupted. The result is a series of pieces where process and form are inseparable, each object bearing the traces of its manufacturing process. The object starts from the standardized shape of the tube, just as one might start from a shape in 3D modeling: sphere, cylinder, cube.
The deformations that arise from blown glass, far from being accidents, are instead signs that invite us to reflect on materiality and the importance of imperfection in contemporary creation, imperfections that industry and parametric tools have attempted to erase. Here, glass becomes metamorphic, capable of reproducing the viscosity and fluidity of digital modeling. Each stretch, each twist of the glass tube becomes an analogy for the digital process, where forms are evolving and where the material itself seems to be subject to the laws of the virtual.
Alongside these glass prototypes, Edda Rabold presents short videos demonstrating the parametric techniques of 3D modeling. These videos offer a glimpse into her studio, where she works with her hands. Here, her manual dexterity is applied to mastering digital tools and skills, as well as traditional craftsmanship.
This tension between craftsmanship and digital technology is not merely technical. It raises profound questions about the evolution of creative practices. In a world where digital tools are ubiquitous, Edda Rabold offers a reflection on the object as a metaphor for our era, where analog and digital coexist in a complementary manner. Blown glass becomes the meeting place between these two worlds, a place where manual gestures and digital creation come together, and where the material becomes the vehicle for this dialogue.
Zerma
At Atelier Zerma, design does not impose itself, it infiltrates. It slips into the gaps, divets existing devices, adopts vernacular forms to better reveal untold stories and parallel economies. By setting up shops in unexpected places – in the closet of a school, a fish market, a santon nativity scene, a marble sculptor’s workshop, a scooter delivery drivers bag or a museum’s maintenance room — Atelier Zerma’s work adopts a critical, skillfully dissident stance. This is what the work zerma tells us, from the Maghrebi Arabic “Zarma, za’ma,” a slang interjection meaning “so-called,” “sort of,” expressing irony, cynicism, doubt, or misappropriation. Atelier Zerma produces design without our knowledge, in the womb of a capitalist society where class and labor violence are not always openly acknowledged.
This approach to design is neither solutionist nor universalist, nor does it seek to embrace the ambition of innovation or fulfill the social role and utility attributed to it by society. The infiltrated designer decentralizes the role of the author by becoming a researcher, an agent complicit in collective storytelling, directly engaged with the economic, social, and material issues of their time.
This stance was born out of necessity. Out of the impossibility of separating design research from economic survival. Each project presented here is also a response to the precarious status of artists, authors, and designers: earning a degree while creating a clandestine micro-enterprise to finance it; transforming an unpaid exhibition into a paid performance; producing narrative objects sold in the form of figurines to disseminate one’s work at a lower cost, subcontracting one’s work under someone else’s name, illegally camouflaging an urban beehive to develop a nomadic business, opening up discussion between museographers/exhibition curators and maintenance workers within a museum with a view to preserving bodies and spaces.
So many strategies to devise, so many workers to embody, so many professions to infiltrate; ultimately, the Zerma workshop practices and champions the concept of “deformation design,” or a design that one decides to abandon in favor of another profession, only to find it resurfacing almost in spite of oneself. Each production, each profession infiltrated, each stance adopted is meticulously documented in a publication that provides us with the keys to understanding this clandestine practice.
Faced with demands for free services, visibility as currency, precarious contracts, or no contracts at all, Atelier Zerma is inventing other models: DIY, hybrid, pirate. The designer becomes a distiller, a fishmonger, a smuggler, a laborer, a beekeeper, or a shepherd of dust sheep, depending on the circumstances. Through this poetic and political infiltration, the practice of design asserts itself as a form of resistance, a research in action, rooted in reality and focused on those who live it.
It is an impulse that comes from within, a subaltern revolution.
