Chantal Prod’Hom

Chantal Prod’Hom

You can get far on enthusiasm.

by Florence Grivel

If she were an object, she would surely be an Italian Bialetti coffee maker, beautifully crafted in aluminium, designed to bring coffee into the home, now iconic and available in all manner of sizes; a daily treat made even more enjoyable by the ritual of grinding your own beans, breathing in the aroma and listening out for that characteristic spluttering sound as the coffee rises to the top.

To put it another way, the grand ambassador of design approaches the world with open arms, takes it all in, infuses it with the poetry of ergonomics, propagates Swiss successes internationally, brings the international community to French-speaking Switzerland, and above all stands as a paragon of boundless creativity.
Her career has been both sensitive and audacious, and it came from precocious beginnings.
Chantal Prod’Hom, the youngest of four siblings, was lively, curious and outgoing and sought out the intense, the sensual and the concrete from a very early age. This became her way of existing in the real world.
She was an instinctive observer who liked to compare things and study their relationships with one another, getting the measure of them, getting inside them, becoming as one with them.

Prod’Hom was inspired by dance, having taken classical and modern lessons as a child, and by skiing, qualifying as a ski instructor to earn enough money for the journeys she was so keen to make out into the big, wide world – once again mixing practicality and pleasure, here and there, the epitome of a designer’s mindset.
While her early years were all about physical activities, her future as a designer was already taking shape.
In fact, it would later be a natural progression for her to invest energy and talent in her favoured artistic discipline, which serves to fulfil needs, solve problems and improve people’s quality of life – and is thus conceived for or through both the individual and the social body.

It can be exhausting tracing the career that Prod’Hom never planned out but has nurtured by meeting the right people and working hard.

Having enrolled at the University of Lausanne’s Faculty of Arts, she chose to study archaeology and art history. She liked to learn by doing, whether it was getting her hands dirty on a dig, following the restoration of a mediaeval mural or delving into the history of Lausanne’s first museum of fine arts.
Prod’Hom later headed to the US, where she completed internships at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum and learned about the wide range of skills needed to run a large institution. While there, she lived to the beat of a city where Warhol and his entourage were never far away.

On returning to Lausanne, she was hired by Erika Billeter, then Director of the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts, as deputy curator. It was in that role that she met Pierre Keller, an outstanding advocate for culture, unifying figure and tireless servant of design, and the great collector Asher Edelman.

The 1990s got off to a flying start with the fast-tracked creation of the Edelman Asher Foundation (FAE) in Pully near Lausanne, French-speaking Switzerland’s first museum of contemporary art. Prod’Hom proved to be a perfect fit and spent five intensive years at the helm, hosting exhibitions by Jeff Koons and Cicciolina, Ileana Sonnabend, Frank Stella and other international stars of contemporary art in that little corner of Switzerland that was perhaps not quite ready for them.

She met Oliviero Toscani, the photographer behind Benetton’s controversial advertising, at one of the Edelman Foundation exhibitions, and he invited her to help him run Fabrica, a workshop for young creatives in Treviso. The task was both enticing and daunting, and after two years scouring the globe for fresh talent, the future Director of the mudac returned to Lausanne, where she was met with an attractive proposition.

The powers that be were impressed by Prod’Hom’s ability to bring projects to fruition without going over budget, so they placed her in charge of setting up a Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts (mudac) on Place de la Cathédrale.
Leaning more towards the experimental and visionary than the traditional, the museum would host exhibitions at a steady rate of five or six a year.
The mudac went on to make a name for itself through themed exhibitions mixing contemporary art and design. With its finger on the pulse, and sometimes ahead of its time, it challenged its visitors and catalysed their imaginaries. Air en forme, the first exhibition in 2000, Cache-Cache camouflage in 2002, Nature in a kit in 2009, and Nirvana in 2014 are just four examples.

All good things come in threes, and Prod’Hom has been instrumental in the creation of three museums during her career: the Edelman Foundation right at the start of the 1990s, the mudac in Lausanne’s Maison Gaudard in 2000 and the new mudac as part of the Plateforme 10 arts complex in June 2022 .
The City of Lausanne awarded her a Gold Medal in 2022 in recognition of her remarkable dedication to developing the mudac and Plateforme 10 (where she was Chair of the Board of Directors from 2015 to 2020) as well as her vital contribution to cultural life in the capital of Vaud.
What comes next for Chantal Prod’Hom now that she is “retired”?
Moving, feeling, continuing to observe, to live, to perceive the world through the eyes of those who think about it and express it through their creativity, continuing to give them a voice.

Florence Grivel was born in 1969 and is an art historian, visual arts specialist at RTS, author of fiction and autobiographical stories, painter (she has published two albums of watercolours in dialogue with the poems of Julien Burri), exhibition designer, and producer of audio guides for exhibitions at various cultural institutions.