Muller van Severen

A Lot of Work is a new monograph dedicated to the work of the restlessly inventive Belgian design studio Muller Van Severen. Shaped by 15 years of seminal practice, it is the first to present Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen both together and as individual artists, charting the energies of their solo trajectories alongside their shared design language. Approaching the monograph as a collage, the book traces what has unfolded over the past decade and a half, what preceded it, and what may yet come—shaped, as the title suggests, by a lot of work. Raw and ruminative in structure, it draws from their private and public archives to allow ‘images to speak through adjacency rather than explanation’, as Hannes explains in his opening text. The result ‘feels less like a retrospective and more like a pause’, he writes—‘A breath’. Edited by Nicolás Barreto and Nacho Alegre, co-founder of Apartamento, the book sits somewhere between an art book and something else entirely—an elusive object poised between visual storytelling and asynchronous narrative. A 224-page invitation to witness an oeuvre of design sensibility and all the work behind it, A Lot of Work allows meaning to arise through proximity and contrast, offering a glimpse into how the pair find permission to cut, question, rearrange, and gently unsettle the objects that surround them.