Vera Sacchetti: I studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where I got my MFA in Design Criticism in 2011, and that was when I first considered curating. Before my graduate studies, I worked as a graphic designer in a studio in Portugal that did mostly cultural commissions. I designed exhibitions, which gave a feeling for space. It is crucial that you have a spatial understanding of what can work, what a path is in a space, how people navigate, and the light.

Later, I worked for Domus Magazine under editor-in-chief Joseph Grima, who was curating the inaugural edition of the Istanbul Design Biennale in 2012. It was the first time that I was exposed to a high-level international event. Grima co-curated [with Ethel Baraona Pohl, Elian Stefa and Pelin Tan] Adhocracy, an exhibition which highlighted the major trends in design at the time, including open source, 3D printing, and decentralised production, building on the radical ideas of the 1970s in design. I co-edited the catalogue with Tamar Shafrir and Avinash Rajagopal and conducted research. I saw the exhibition shape up, but I wasn’t actively involved in it.

Editorial thinking and curatorial thinking are not very different from one another. You are still trying to tell a story. Watching Grima and the curatorial team transform an old school building into an exhibition was eye-opening. It showed how non-traditional infrastructure can be used for a design exhibition.  

In 2014, I worked with Jan Boelen on BIO 50, the Biennial of Design in Ljubljana. Again, I was co-editing the catalogue and researching, but I wasn’t really organising things in space. Then I worked with Boelen in the 2018 Istanbul Design Biennial, A School of Schools, where I curated the public programme. I ended up focusing on formats that are more experimental and time-based. The biennial’s public programme ran for 60 days across six locations simultaneously, featuring various formats. It was challenging, but also very invigorating, as it made me believe that an exhibition is not something that can be relegated to objects. Much to the sadness of some of my [curator] colleagues, I tend to say that I have a problem with objects.

I would rather see media, tours, and interpretation that help us access the stories behind the objects. But I do understand that exhibitions are needed. In Istanbul, we stated that we wanted to create an expanded biennial, breaking the traditional idea of what a biennial is. This expanded format meant that the exhibition is the backbone of the event, but what really makes it come alive are all the additional things. We worked with the spaces of existing cultural institutions within a 3 km radius, so visitors could stumble upon events rather than entering a single museum.

These were the ideas that we rehearsed, and I continue to build on them – most recently in the international exhibition for the 2025 Covilhã Design Triennial, which I curated with Frederico Duarte. There we spread the exhibition in seven different locations, such as libraries and universities, all free and open to the public.

VS: I’ve always been working with contemporary design. I’m interested in how the field is currently changing. I believe this began when I was at Domus, and it was sparked by Joseph Grima, who was interested in capturing the present moment of design – a snapshot of what’s happening. It was about understanding that design is entangled and cannot exist in a vacuum outside of a context. 

It can be as simple as making a spoon; however, it could also be about developing surveillance technology to listen to phone conversations. All of those things are designed. When I worked with Jan Boelen on BIO50, we examined the post-industrial shift. We live in this post-industrial moment where it’s impossible to continue growing unbridled; we need to think about resources, production, and necessity itself. 

Today, I’m convinced that design is a form of mediation and translation. Design is a way to put things together, a means of communication between disciplines, but also a way to shape systems, tensions, and attitudes. For example, design has helped shape our democracy in Western Europe, specifically based on the ideals of the French and American Revolutions. We have shaped constitutions, parliaments, spaces, voting systems, ballots, and the act of voting, among other things. All these things are designed. 

It is not that designing a spoon is less valid than designing a democratic system. However, it’s essential that we recognise the reality that design is active at both those levels. We should not be afraid to interact with that complexity. Part of the role of the curator is to make this complexity visible, understandable, and help translate and mediate it for a wider public.

VS: I’ve consistently worked as an independent curator. I collaborate with large institutions, but always from the outside, which allows me to ask difficult questions: What is this? Could we do it differently? 

At the same time, I’ve worked on the side on several small experimental formats. TEOK Basel was one of them. It emerged in 2014 from an obsession with the contemporary, as I sought to understand how we can capture a snapshot of who we are, where we are, and what the creative community is. This was a collaboration with Juan Palencia de Sarrià and Marta Colón de Carvajal (who today have formed isla architects).

TEOK is an acronym that stands for The Edge of Knowledge. It essentially postulates that everyone is at the edge of the knowledge of something – and the world would be a better place if we shared it. It was a lecture series in people’s living rooms. Speakers were invited to discuss something they loved and knew a great deal about but it was not their job. The idea was twofold: to see how individuals define themselves beyond their jobs, and to test the belief that anyone can give a good lecture. When you’re 25–40, you define yourself by your job and what you produce. But what else are you about? And what else interests you? We had presentations about black holes and the big bang, the most interesting swimming pools in Europe, why it is that a McDonald’s burger tastes better as a whole than its separate parts. The talks were free and not recorded. From 2014 to 2019, we did 44 of those. 

The curatorial initiative Foreign Legion was also born out of frustration. As women and foreigners in Basel, Matylda Kryzkowski and I were frustrated by the realisation that in order to get anything done, we had to run twice as hard to get half as far. We had many dinners and angry conversations, and then Matylda was interviewed for Icon Magazine, in which she said she had just started a feminist collective called Foreign Legion. Soon after, Tulga Beyerle, then the director of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Dresden, asked if we would like to organise a conference in Dresden based on the invisibility of female designers. That sparked a whole lot of work. First, a conference (A Woman’s Work); then, two exhibitions. Since then, we have worked on a variety of lectures and workshops, always focusing on opening up the spectrum of who gets to participate and be visible in design. The project began in 2019 and continues through the work that Matylda and I do, including teaching, curating, and serving on juries, among other activities.

This project changed how we work. We made new rules for ourselves, for example, the 50% rule. In any project we do, half the collaborators can be people we already know, but the other half must be new. It is a way to widen the network, widen the bubble, and avoid protectionism in the projects you’re creating.

VS: Grima and Boelen were crucial because they unlocked things for me. From 2013 to 2018, I worked with Jan Boelen, who is an important mentor and friend. After this period, I started working much more independently and defining what I want to do. There, I had partners in thinking and in working: Matylda Kryzkowski on gender politics in design; Amelie Klein on democracy and design; and Frederico Duarte on contemporary design discourse and how to mediate it. 

I’ve had heroes, and every time I’ve had a hero, I reached out to them because I wanted to work with them. Grima and Boelen were heroes, then they were mentors. Today, I’m not searching for mentors; instead, I value good conversation partners who expand my thinking. When you find yourself, you just start making your own road. 

Since 2019, I’ve been teaching. I have ended up mentoring others, and who knows what effect I have on them, but hopefully it is a good one.

VS: Fazer is a design institution initiated in 2023 by Frederico Duarte and me in Portugal. One of the ways in which it materialises is a magazine on contemporary design, consciously published in Portuguese only. Frederico and I are both from Lisbon, and ever since we studied together in New York, we have wanted to do this magazine. It only took us 13 years to do it. Fazer means “to make” or “to do”, and shows our attitude towards design. We are interested in discussing the process, rather than the objects themselves. 

We also wanted to stimulate critical discourse on design in Portuguese, which is currently lacking. We understand that it is no longer possible to produce a magazine solely as a print object. We wanted to create something that can exist in multiple formats. It is true that the first two issues have had an exhibition as a companion. In the future, the possibilities are endless: a podcast, a flyer, or an event. We are keeping it open.

The first two exhibitions existed because we received an invitation from a museum to explore contemporary design in Portugal. The shows included public programmes, which resulted in conversations being turned into articles for the magazine. When the exhibitions closed, we launched the printed issues, in which half of the material had been commissioned and written before the exhibition opened, and the other half emerged from the exhibitions.

We are now working on the third issue, which will be published after the summer of 2025. It’s about the design of Empire and the strategies of resistance to the project of Empire. We are discussing colonial, postcolonial and decolonial approaches in design in Portugal and elsewhere. 

Making a magazine is a lot of work, but we are in it for the long run. Our goal is to rethink what a design magazine should be in the 21st century. 

Another experimental format happened as I was working on the democracy theme with Amelie Klein. With the democracy exhibition, we’ve been exploring democratic innovation and how it occurs. In Germany and Belgium, we ran citizens’ assemblies in the museums where we worked, in 2023 and 2025. We invited randomly selected groups of people – diverse in age, gender, background, nationality, and education – to deliberate on how the museum could become more open and democratic. In Belgium, the question was also how it can be a place of belonging. The results were eye-opening and deeply transformative, for me immensely so. The institutions that ran the assemblies were confronted with the many ways in which they are not inclusive. It made me understand that what I’m really interested in is, in fact, institutional transformation. 

The experience of the assemblies impacted me so much that I have even written that we should “burn the objects” in design museums and put all the finances towards mediation: stop making exhibitions, and focus on workshops and talking to people.