Jon Ardern

What a joy to be featured on the cover of @el_pais Babelia The deep dive into studio practice and our 17 years of expertise explores the studio’s speculative practice, operating “strictly outside of contemporaneity.” It explains how we plant seeds of imagination that flourish in the hearts and minds of others despite the prevailing and exctractive worldview of a single, irrevocable future. The Spanish text reads: “There is life after the Anthropocene. Halfway between art and critical design, the duo at Superflux imagines, in Vienna, a future of ecological reconciliation and collective repair between people and species based on artisanal technology.” Thank you to Marta Peirano for spending time with us in both London and Vienna, and for such a generous and wide-ranging piece. THE CRAFTOCENE is on at @weltmuseumwien until 16 August 🖤 Photo Credit: @manuelvazquezfoto

The Harvest Seat is a thatched armchair, its frame filled with the annual harvest. We have deliberately misremembered the Le Corbusier LC2 design icon, in its place creating a cyclical ritual whose logic feels foreign yet uncomfortably familiar. The wheat grown, the seat fashioned, the body that surrenders to the vigil, with hands that flick through the prayer beads Crafting the piece meant cutting, cleaning, thatching and binding the straw so the sheaves would hold their form within the frame. The result is a relic, an imagined place where labour was offered up as seasonal, cyclical, necessary and holy. On display as part of THE CRAFTOCENE at @weltmuseumwien until 16th August Chief makers: Jaxon Stickler @jaxonstickler Can of Gas @canofgas Photo Credit: Matthew Edgson @matt_edgson

We are thrilled to be featured in the @financialtimes @ft_weekend Design Special last week! 🖤 Thank you @debikaray for including us in such a thoughtful article on making and materiality, and for bringing THE CRAFTOCENE into a wider story about design that feels more urgent than ever. As @anabjain says: “Left with the detritus of the Anthropocene, the process of making something with our hands, using materials we might otherwise discard, becomes a story about what we can imagine and what we choose to do with what we have.” It is inspiring to see our critical perspective on craft finding a place in design discourse alongside other makers, and to know that our show at the Weltmuseum in Vienna is influencing conversations at Salone del Mobile in Milan and beyond. THE CRAFTOCENE is on display at @weltmuseumwien until 16 August - let us know what you think when you visit!

The Aalto stool began as a utilitarian object but has long since taken on a mythic status in the design world, less about sitting and more about communicating a certain social standing, and a proximity to good taste. That tension between function and desire is exactly what we wanted to chip away with the Stack Totem. Ed spent a week axing away the outer bark of three pine trunks, rough-shaping each one down to the diameter of the stool before Inés took over for three weeks of carving, working through layer after layer of stacked legs to define the shape and sand it to completion. As Ines put it: “the project was treated with the care that a trunk deserves. Not expecting a high end finished product such as the stools, but rather accepting the nature of a tree when it fell.” The Stack Totem is part of our new installation Relics of Abundance, a testament to a past culture - ours - that measured virtue in accumulation and read stillness as failure. The wood will dry over time. It will crack. A monument to accumulation, slowly coming undone. On display as part of THE CRAFTOCENE at @weltmuseumwien until 16 August 🖤

The Stack Totem is a ceremonial object at the heart of Relics of Abundance. It is carved to resemble a column of Alvar Aalto stools. In @weltmuseumwien the Stack Totem is displayed alongside a fragment of scripture that our descendents have gathered, misremembered sayings of their ancestors (us). It reads: “Those who grind daily, denying the temptation of rest, shall stack their bread high so all may witness their righteousness, and the glory of the Market.” In their half-remembered states, the totem and poetic fragment pierce the logic of a culture that elevated labour into virtue, coded idleness as failure, and amassed chairs as a display of success. The stools were carved from the trunk of an invasive species of pine, retrieved from the south east of England in a collaborative act of ecological restoration. On display as part of THE CRAFTOCENE at @weltmuseumwien until 16 August Chief makers: Ed Lewis @_ed_lewis Inés Miño Izquierdo @iminoizq Photo Credit: Matthew Edgson @matt_edgson

Someone, somewhere, sold us a story. That wanting more was progress. That the latest gadget, the newest chair, the freshest sneaker was not just desirable but necessary, a marker of how far we had come and how much further we could go. A singular trajectory, dressed up as reason and called civilisation. Our new work Relics of Abundance described here by Superflux cofounder @anabjain asks what happens when you place that story under a different kind of light. A future civilisation looking back at the Mass-Consumption Era and finding a culture steeped in magical thinking. A volatile deity called the Market, appeased through repeated ritual and collective devotion. Objects imbued with spiritual properties, their true purpose long since forgotten by those who made them. The cause of our collapse, in this imagined future, is still debated. But the artefacts speak for themselves. And in their quiet, eerie familiarity, they make it easier to see what is already true about our present. Relics of Abundance is on display as part of THE CRAFTOCENE at @weltmuseumwien until 16 August 🖤 #klimabiennalewien #weltmuseumwien #superflux #thecraftocene

It is an honour to have our show included in @biennale.wien the 2026 Klima Biennale as a Partner In Climate with our colleagues and friends in Vienna.  The Biennale’s theme, Unspeakable Worlds, reflects something at the heart of our work: that the most urgent realities of our time resist the languages we have for them. In our three rooms at the Weltmuseum, we try to find other languages, through craft, through myth, through listening to what the river is already saying. The myths that hold us are coming undone, and in that dangerous, fertile space, we believe there is room to craft - together - other, more hopeful ones. Explore the festival programme on 9th and 10th April, and come visit THE CRAFTOCENE on display at @weltmuseumwien until 16 August 🖤 #weltmuseumwien #superflux #thecraftocene #klimabiennalewien

Views from THE CRAFTOCENE, our major solo show at @weltmuseumwien , Vienna. Walking through the show we first encounter Refuge for Resurgence, our multispecies banquet that celebrates ecological reciprocity through the oldest of human rituals, a communal meal. Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream attends to the intelligence of water, tide, and birdsong alongside technology. Relics of Abundance turns the lens on ourselves, staging the objects of modern consumer life as devotional artefacts of a civilisation that believed, above all else, in the Market. Stories about consumption and grief, reciprocity and hope, bound together with objects from the museum’s collection gathered across centuries and continents. THE CRAFTOCENE is our container for stories, myths, artefacts, and we invite you into this space of imagination. On display until 16 August at @weltmuseumwien 🖤

Relics of Abundance is our new work for @weltmuseumwien , now showing as part of The Craftocene. We like to believe we live in the age of reason. But look closer. Sneakers preserved in clingwrap like holy relics. Open-plan living rooms that look more like halls of worship than homes. Money itself a kind of collective hallucination. Tell an anthropologist you had discovered a civilisation that did this and they would not hesitate to call it magical thinking and ritual behaviour. Relics of Abundance imagines a future civilisation sifting through the remnants of our excess, trying to recreate a sacred object called ‘The Wassily Chair’ to summon the old gods of abundance. Their understanding of our time is profoundly incomplete. But their reverent misremembering makes visible something already true, and slightly absurd, about our present. The distance of a far future just makes it easier to see. Modern design icons, from the Wassily chair to the smartphone, the LC2 to the sneaker, misremembered and reconstructed as holy objects. Relics of the myth of progress. What kind of ancestors are we becoming? On display at @weltmuseumwien until 16 August. Photo Credit: @matt_edgson

Delighted to be invited to collaborate with @Superflux on #TheCraftocene 03/03/26 - 16/08/26

The holy sneaker! Our show The Craftocene was featured in the cultural supplement of Austrian daily Die Presse @diepresse.schaufenster “Future archaeologists, designers, and ethnographers have recreated formerly coveted design objects from fragments of knowledge and materials. Yet, these replicas...are completely robbed of practical utility. The television is made of concrete; Ardern cast the sneakers from lead - they are now ‘quite toxic’ and weigh 25 kilograms.” Thanks to @magdalena_.mayer @daniel_kalt for the very kind preview of the exhibition and the new works

Weaving myths of our more-than-human futures through The Craftocene: A beautiful and thoughtful review of our new exhibition 'The Craftocene' by @mrinmayeebhoot for @stir_world . Drawing the arc of the show through the key ideas, stories, objects, and some lovely glimpses of our making process. "By positioning their speculative designs as part of a fictional ethnographic history, one that in some way explains the project that is humanity, Superflux puts forth a provocation: that while the Anthropocene has so far defined our relationship to the world, perhaps in the future, the outcomes of our culture will be understood through the lens of reciprocity and resourcefulness. “Reciprocity, because every object in this exhibition points to a relationship. And resourcefulness, because the ability to pick something up, understand its properties and find a new purpose for it is not a quaint survival skill. It is the most relevant form of intelligence we have,” Jain & Ardern note." @weltmuseumwien @superfluxstudio @claudiabanz1 @jonardern Link in bio 💛