USM

USM x Claudia Comte Skateboards

The Concept
Swiss design icon USM is teaming up with social entrepreneur THE SKATEROOM to create change, at this year’s Milan Design Week. They invited renowned Swiss artist Claudia Comte to design a limited collection of USM modular furniture and skateboard art editions featuring her intriguing artwork. The bespoke collection will fund a substantial amount for a social project in Jordan, bringing skateboarding and education to underprivileged boys and girls through the non-profit organization Seven Hills.

The Art
Claudia Comte’s characteristic black and white patterns are inspired by the rhythm of single structures creating dazzling surfaces that flow from their movement. The lines of the zigzag evoke a backward and forward motion that represents a gliding through past, present and future times. Derived from nature such as waves or radiation, the pattern provokes a sense of empathy and closeness, creating an immediate emotional connection between the object and the viewer.

The Collection
Merging Claudia Comte’s dynamic morphology of nature with the timeless aesthetics of USM and the skateboards, the bespoke collection celebrates the power of the language of shapes to communicate something that goes beyond the written word.

The limited collection will be available to order online and consists of:
•3 x 50 distinguished USM Haller pieces—a highboard, a sideboard and a sidetable

•3 x 50 pieces of different skateboard art editions triptychs

Furthermore, one unique edition piece by the artist Claudia Comte, combining THE SKATEROOM’s skateboard art editions with a larger USM Haller shelving solution, will be on display in Milano.

The Social Project
The collaboration will fund a social project by Seven Hills empowering at-risk youth in Jordan. The non-profit organization develops safe and inclusive skateparks and public spaces, runs free-of-charge skateboarding sessions, informal education, and arts programming for all youth from Jordan’s diverse demographics. Skateboarding has impacted the lives of countless people—boys and girls of all ages, from every walk of life. It is, at its most fundamental, an exercise in resilience.

About Claudia Comte
Claudia Comte (b. 1983) is a Swiss artist based in Basel, Switzerland. Her practice is guided by a longstanding interest in teasing out the history and memory of biomorphic forms through traditional hand processes, industrial and machine technologies. Comte’s site-specific installations bring together monumental wall paintings and sculptures playfully inspired by organic patterns and morphology, paying testament to the intelligence and transformative capacities of the ecological world.