Category : Residents' news
Resident Profile - Gabriel Fontana
Gabriel Fontana, resident of Les Ateliers de Paris, with his social design studio combining art, sports, and alternative teaching methods
With his social design studio combining art, sport, and alternative teaching methods, Gabriel Fontana is literally redefining the rules of the game. A graduate of the École supérieure d’art et de design de Saint-Étienne and the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, he advocates a cross-disciplinary approach to design that straddles the boundaries between visual art and performing art.
This questions the way in which our bodies internalize and reproduce norms of gender, identity, and power.
With sport as his main research topic, he invites us to reclaim sports spaces and reinvent their uses in an inclusive way. His approach thus integrates the design of spaces and objects, but also games, choreography, workshops, and discussions.
WithMULTIFORM, the designer has developed a new game consisting of three teams that evolve during the course of the game, questioning participants about their sense of belonging to the group while inviting them to develop new forms of sociability. The game has been implemented in numerous schools across Europe and will be presented at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Beyond the practice of sport itself, Gabriel Fontana also invites us to rethink our spaces and equipment. He trains other designers in his approach and works with Nike, among others, with this in mind.
WithSIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness, presented at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, he proposed an alternative sports bar where visitors could discover inclusive furniture, a foosball table that challenges binary thinking, and "anti-trophies" celebrating values such as solidarity and vulnerability.
In pictures
His work has been recognized with numerous awards: Gender Design Award (2025), Pierre Keller Award (2023), Dutch Design Awards (2023), Rotterdam New Talent Award (2018), and Forum Design de Paris Award (2018).
Its news
Multiformwas acquired in 2025 by MoMA (New York) for its permanent collection "Architecture and Design."
In 2026, Gabriel Fontana will present his first institutional exhibition in France at Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse, enriched by a six-month off-site educational project with two ninth-grade classes from Collège Jolimont.
