3daysofdesign files: Marta LA Explores the Future of Flatware

There is something profoundly human about the objects we touch every day without even noticing. A spoon, a fork, a knife: seemingly neutral tools, invisible in their familiarity, yet deeply charged with cultural memory, ritual, and social transformation. Contemporary design increasingly returns to these elemental objects not out of nostalgia, but because it is precisely within the ordinary that the most radical shifts in society become visible. 

In the midst of a new technological revolution, one shaped by artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, and the dematerialization of production, the themes of materiality and gesture have become central once again. We live in a time when almost everything can be replicated, automated, accelerated. And yet, perhaps more than ever, we feel the need to redefine our relationship with objects: how they are made, by whom, and with what ecological, social, and symbolic implications.

The dining table, in this sense, is an extraordinarily political and anthropological space. Eating is a collective, cultural, and deeply identity-driven act. Cutlery may be the most democratic tools of design: they cross social classes, geographies, and generations. They are extensions of the body, but also indicators of civilization, taste, and ritual. Their evolution tells the story of modernity — from craftsmanship to industrial production — while also reflecting the changing relationship between individuals, technology, and consumption.

It is from this reflection that Knife, Fork, Spoon 3.0 emerges, the new project presented by Los Angeles gallery Marta together with curator Dung Ngo during the 14th edition of 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, from June 10–12, 2026. More than an exhibition, the project presents itself as an investigation into the future of the everyday object. Twelve international artists, architects, and designers were invited to rethink contemporary flatware through stainless steel 3D printing, transforming cutlery into a site of formal, cultural, and technological experimentation.


© Marcin Rusak

Simone Lorusso: Marta has always operated at the intersection of art and design. In what ways does Knife, Fork, Spoon 3.0 represent an evolution of that ongoing investigation?

Marta: It's not so much an evolution (save for the technology itself) as it is a continuation of that same intersecting spirit into a new typology, prompted by Dung's invitation as well as his longtime admiration for, and collecting of, cutlery from all over the world. We've always loved providing artists with the occasion to make functional or everyday objects (and have explored similarly prosaic categories like Bookends and Toilet Paper Holders in the past), and we similarly enjoy tasking designers and architects with the creation of artful or just-useful versions of what are typically understood to be designed objects. Some of these forks have tines, for example; others have mere suggestions of tines.

SL: Why did you choose flatware specifically as the subject of this project? What do these objects reveal today about our relationship with everyday life?

Marta: In this instance, flatware chose us—or rather, Dung Ngo, the exhibition's curator, did. Dung has been working on a beautiful tome, entitled Knife, Fork, Spoon: Modernist Cutlery, 1900–2025 that will be released later this summer under his August Editions imprint, and wanted to include several contemporary entries in the publication and larger oeuvre. There are very few items that one interacts with every day here in the West; among them are the tools we use for nutritional maintenance that end up connoting something like Ritual, due to the sheer repetition of their use, and the nourishment they ultimately facilitate. Flatware, though tremendously specific in its form and function, carries with it a similarly tremendous capacity for metaphor and meaning: from conversations around care and sustenance, to those about family and community. Cutlery is ripe with allegory.

SL: 3D printing is often associated with technical innovation, yet in this exhibition it seems to become a cultural, almost philosophical, tool. How important is the question of production within contemporary design today?

Marta: As important as ever! The term 'flatware' comes from the production processes that were historically used to realize these tools: To oversimplify, flat sheet metal that is stamped out, shaped, forged and/or embossed, and then finished and/or polished. When we think about even this very straightforward manufacture, a tremendous amount of up front investment is needed to fabricate a die, gather material, access machinery, etcetera. With 3D-printing — as we have seen in myriad other fields for the last two decades or so — rapid prototyping and parts-making has now become the viable norm. However the three-dimensional printing and sintering of stainless steel is still only just coming to the fore as a feasible — which is to say, affordable — option. With this in mind, we provoked many of the participating artists and designers to imagine a trio, quartet, or quintet of pieces that couldn't otherwise be made in the historical mode. This prompt, alone, led to results that were more poetic, more sculptural, and more dynamic than those we commonly recognize upon a tablescape. 




© Jacqueline Rabun

The title itself — Knife, Fork, Spoon 3.0 — suggests an evolutionary reading of design. If “Version 1.0” belonged to craftsmanship and “2.0” to industrial standardization, the “3.0” envisioned by Dung Ngo introduces a new phase: one defined by additive manufacturing, flexibility, decentralization, and seemingly endless creative possibilities. 3D printing here is not treated merely as a technical innovation, but as a cultural language. A technology capable of freeing design from the constraints of traditional industrial production, allowing impossible geometries, radical customization, reduced waste, and new models of local and on-demand manufacturing.

The strength of the project also lies in the plurality of perspectives involved. The invited practitioners come from different disciplines, aesthetics, and geographies: from the playful and almost biomorphic forms of Misha Kahn and Jolie Ngo to the architectural investigations of Johnston Marklee and SO–IL; from the reflections on global material culture by Lagos-based designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello to the sculptural sensitivity of Seoul-based designer Minjae Kim.


© Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Each flatware collection becomes a micro-narrative about the way we experience nourishment, gathering, and shared rituals today. No longer simply utensils, these objects become cultural devices speaking about identity, technology, sustainability, and contemporary rituals.

SL: The participating designers come from very different generations, disciplines, and cultural backgrounds. What kind of dialogue were you hoping to create between these perspectives?

Dung: Food has always been a common denominator for all of us, whether you are an artist, architect, or product designer — yet each individual and their practice have unique insights into the rituals of dining. We invited a diverse group in order to survey the current direction and mood of dining today globally. For instance, in addition to the knife, fork, and spoon, designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello decided to also design a bowl for washing one's hand before the meal, a common practice in Nigeria where he's from. It's a practical yet potent ritual that we all should adopt.

SL: Many of Marta’s projects seem to challenge the very idea of function itself. Does design still necessarily need to be useful today?

Marta: Yes. If function or utility is core to an artist's or designer's intention in a given output, we believe the work or object must deliver on that promise. However, a work that flirts with or trades in the histories, modes, methods, typologies, and connotations of designed objects need not purport to be Design itself! That slippery, liminal, spectral zone is territory we find quite interesting.


SL: In a historical moment dominated by digital speed and immateriality, why do you think we still feel the need for physical objects and shared rituals such as those connected to the dining table?

Marta: As we talk about certain trades or professions being evergreen or permanently girded from obsoletion, we might also ask ourselves which objects might prove similarly protected. Cutlery may very well be among them. We all must eat, whether in communion or isolation, and while the tools with which we do so might shape-shift or morph — as some have, even, within the bounds of this presentation — it may be quite some time before the pill-for-dinner or intravenous-nutrition dreams of speculative fiction become reality. And thank goodness! For now, the symbolism of dining, of sustenance, of custom is too rich to resist, perhaps especially so in time where so much of what we consume lacks the substance we crave.

© Minjae Kim

With Knife, Fork, Spoon 3.0, Marta further confirms its position as one of the most compelling voices at the intersection of contemporary art and design. Founded in Los Angeles by Heidi Korsavong and Benjamin Critton, the gallery has developed a curatorial program that continuously challenges the boundaries between function and experimentation, inviting artists and designers to move freely between utility and imagination.

Maybe this is the most powerful move in the entire project: that even the most mundane objects might still find themselves in the position of being reimagined, and that design does not only have the capacity to change the way things look, but the way that we relate to them and the behaviors and rituals we perform through them. If an object as mundane as a fork can become a point of intersection between technology and identity, what else can we revisit?

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Words: Simone Lorusso