Photo: Riccardo Raspa / for IG.

Where are you from?
I’m from Šurany, a small town below Nitra with good railway connections to the world and a rich sugar past. This is recalled in a forgotten but remarkable brownfield on the outskirts of the town.

Where did you study?
(In high school, I wanted to continue my family’s carpentry tradition, so I enrolled at the Volen Woodworks, majoring in Furniture and Interior Design. I expected it to be carpentry with a high school diploma, but there we were nicknamed designers. That was the first time I encountered that word.)
I did my bachelor’s degree at the AFAD Department of Design. In between I spent a few months at KONSTFACK, a few weeks at the Architectural Association and a few days at Central Saint Martins. I did my postgraduate studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven Social Design department. There last year I finished among the top ten graduates nominated for the MA founder Gijs Bakker award and with Cum Laude which is our red diploma.

Who was your best teacher?
My class teacher in primary school who proactively encouraged me in singing, music and stage presence. My art teacher at the elementary art school was also important. During high school in Zvolen, it was again my Slovak language teacher, who, besides music, strongly supported me in writing and speaking, and my art teacher, who gave me a great foundation in design work and art theory.

Who were/are your parents?
My father was an electrician, as were his parents, but shortly after he started a family and earned some capital, he changed his profession to carpentry, following his grandfather’s example. Mom was an excellent nurse in the neonatology ward at New Hampshire Hospital, but after I was born, she changed careers to HR and accounting, which she also does freelance for Dad’s company.

What don’t you enjoy in design?
If anyone in our field takes themselves too seriously and enjoys being in an Eastern European environment, the work of an artist, designer or architect is shrouded in a veil of mystery. It means that it is perceived as something different, elite. For me, the low awareness of the profession is a problem.

And on the contrary, what do you?
I like materialisation, workshops, thinking, prototyping, displaying and consuming works, in short everything that goes with making. If I had to pick one, it would be collaboration. (I’m delighted when a fellow designer, marketer, curator or artisan complements me. Even better if it’s someone from a completely different background, such as a farmer who is willing to challenge the status quo wants and is open to collaborating with a designer. I visited such a farm in Eindhoven. They had gotten hold of discarded experimental aquaponic technology from Philips and were doing great things with it.)

What do you listen to?
The playlist that suits me best on Spotify is Modern Psychadelia. Its content changes frequently, but it’s been a good fit for me for years.

Your favourite film, cartoon, series?
My favourite film is Kouř (1999), directed by Tomáš Vorel. (I like South Park and Rick and Morty a lot more than The Simpsons or Futurama. When watching feature series like Game of Thrones and the like, I have trouble even finishing the pilot. I prefer limited one-series shows.)

Who do you respect as an authority in and out of your field?
I haven’t met anyone who is fully my role model. If I had to name names I’ll take educators from the Netherlands for freshness of memory. I admired the amazing presentation and form that Simone and Andrea (Formafantasma) had. My supervisor Marina Otero, in turn, inspired me with the tremendous depth and originality of ideas that were present in her projects and practice.

What thing did you last buy?
In Paris I bought a purse from Maison Kitsuné, blue inside with a zipper, green outside with an indifferent resting fox.

Do you buy professional literature? What was the latest book?
Yes, often. The last professional book was The Black Technical Object by my Design Academy teacher Ramon Amaro. The book explores the history of statistical analysis and “scientific” racism in machine learning research.

Do you vote?
Yes, I also participated in the municipal elections in my part of Eindhoven, Emmasingel Quartier.

Who throws the best parties?
My classmates from the Design Academy, specifically from the info design department – it was a very strong class of good partymakers. (They were also great at organizing and mixing. They even started a school radio station, which had its own booth at the Salone Satellite in Milan this year. In addition, they used to play at RARARADIO, which was the city’s radio station for musicians, DJs, activists, writers and magicians.)

Your favourite dome?
The designed but unbuilt dome of the Neo-Romanesque addition to the Church in Šurany.

Party dress. Made by…?
Acne Studios. (Aside from the clothes, they have the best HQ of all the fashion houses. The former Czechoslovak embassy in Sweden. A lot of their stores were designed by one of my favourite studios, Halleroed. The first thing I bought when I was in Konstfack was at the Acne Archive Torsgatan store.)

Your hero from the past?
(I’ve had two big heroes since high school, one is foreign and from the past.) Italian master designer, theorist and critic Enzo Mari. I was at an exhibition of 60 years of his work at the Triennale in Milan. It was very important to me so I took my mom. Enzo Mari died at the time of the opening of the exhibition. (The other hero is more local but not at all from the past, Professor Pelcl. During high school I had a dream to study in his Prague studio just because of the social aspect of his work, and the influence he had from his teacher Ettore Sottsass from the Royal College of Arts in the eighties. Such influences and assignments were not readily available in Czech and Slovak design education, so I worked on myself and travelled to Prague a lot for that. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see him as head of the studio.)

Best/nicest house?
Right now, the most beautiful house for me is the one I’m moving my studio into. It’s a rented house built in the 1920s in Palisády in Bratislava. It has beautiful details and traces of history, such as bullet holes from World War II in the facade. I have also recently seen the original project. It’s not somehow a well-known piece of architecture, but through gradually getting to know it and working with it, I’m developing a personal relationship with it.

Do you have any stereotypes when you work? How do they show?
When I’m doing something where I’m not fully occupying my mind, like modelling or drawing technical documentation, I have Poirot on the second monitor, the one portrayed by David Suchet. It helps me occupy the part of my mind that would distract me by being bored. Poirot wouldn’t amuse me without that job.

What’s on your desktop?
A default background, which I occasionally replace with this weird kaleidoscopic emoji graphic of planes and clouds. I like to do portraits of my 9 year old brother captured doing mundane activities like mowing or chopping wood, so he has some artistic and humorous memories of his childhood. When a shot is aesthetic enough for the background, I have that too.

Best exhibition, work of art?
For a retrospective design exhibition, it’s the aforementioned Enzo Mari exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesca Giacomelli. For the contemporary Cambio by Formafantasma, which I saw at the Museo Pecci and was also curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. In free art, I thoroughly enjoyed the retrospective exhibition of Mária Bartuszová at Tate Modern and the current exhibition of Who The Bær, Simon Fujiwara at the Fondazione Prada.

What do you respect both from the local and foreign design scene? And why?
From the local scene, I find the most interesting the work of philosopher Lukáš Likavčan, who deals with ecology, technology and visual cultures. He wrote the book Úvod do komparatívnej planetológie [Introduction to Comparative Planetology] and his ideas are part of this discourse. He has given lectures at the Transmediale festival on digital culture and art in Berlin, for example. From the world scene, I like Cooking Sections, which is also dedicated to exploring global systems, but through food. They make bravura use of multimedia in their work, they work very locally and their work is somewhere between architecture, ecology and geopolitics. In 2020 they even won the most prestigious prize for research in architecture, the Wheelwright Prize awarded by the Harvard GSD. Last year it was won by Marina Otero, my supervisor in social design.

Ethics or money?
I wouldn’t mind at all if I could just create and money didn’t exist. But there is. At the same time, as a social designer, I want to understand society, and money is part of that. Whenever I have doubts about the morality of a project, I consider it carefully, do my research or go to the first meeting to see if the criticism is just slander, and make a decision. I’ve turned down a few odd projects. I remember the interior of a hotel that had strange names associated with it, and the interior of an office for a Social Democratic Party politician.

Extraordinary book?
To stay on topic, I’m going to choose the catalogue of the Enzo Mari exhibition, where, alongside the monographic study, there are a number of interviews and contributions from internationally renowned designers and artists who have been invited by the curator to pay tribute to the work and figure of Enzo Mari through their works.

Optimist, pessimist, nihilist?
Optimist.

Do you have any hobby?
I like to cook the most and create different pop-up events where I can cook for my friends. When I travel, I like to learn new recipes, traditions and ways of preparing food. My brother has this hobby even stronger until he decided to change his budding career from IT to gastronomy.

Solo or in a collective?
Collectively.

Slovakia as the Promised Land?
This has been my biggest dilemma of the last year. In the spring I decided to return to Slovakia. In September I am opening a studio in Bratislava Palisades, called Space Object. It will be dedicated to spatial and product design, but at the same time it is a space object for all the multidisciplinary work I do. We’ll have the best espresso and occasionally some pop-up brunch, dinner or super early coffee with a discussion on topics of interest to the design community. That’s exactly what my apartment in the Netherlands was like and it was great. In Bratislava I want the same thing, just open to the street.