Thank You all for participating in the NO-CHAIR-DESIGN Challenge!
Here is a sneak preview to imagery we have been making, to promote the campaign in the upcoming Now Here Finland exhibition. The Invisible Chair was build for Habitare Fair (Helsinki) and now we took it out in the open.
We are exited about painter René Magritte. Between 1928-29 he made a painting called “The Treachery of Images”. Underneath the picture of a pipe there is a text “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe). Here is a photo and a long text by Foucault interpreting the work and here you see our melancholic pastiche of it. “This is not a chair” is written all over it. Jesse is dressed in his Magritte mockup suit waiting for departure… So what has a construction guy got to do with this all?
We went to the construction sites at Jätkäsaari, Helsinki. A place which is currently hyped as a urban design dream – a place which will develop 6000 new jobs for the city while being green, innovative and cosy for residents. For us construction sites are dystopian landscapes. They host temporary shelters for workers and you salvage all sorts of material from the premises.
We had the opportunity to visit Berlin Design Week (2011) with Demos Helsinki and friends and during that trip we met with a lot of designers working with scraped wood in furniture design. It seems to be a trend. The aesthetics of these kinds of furniture remind me of Mad Max like dystopias.. People salvage stuff to repair the things they absolutely need. These aesthetics are something which have motivated us to build Ore.e Ref. in the first place. The construction guy character is sitting on “the future of sustainable design” just a belief that things will get better.
This is us in the summer of 2013. Just imagine.. We hope to earn money by sitting on thin air while playing guitar. These kinds of tricks are common for street performers and while earning bucks we can also promote sustainable design in an easy going manner. The device which Jesse is sitting on (yes, there is a hard structure in his pants) has various hooks which can be attached to different kinds of structures. The sitter can be swapped on the fly and we can change the site we are working pretty fast. If you happen to be around in Helsinki summer of 2013 look us up. Event schedules will possibly be announced on the Alternative Design Capital site.
Just to proof that there is no photoshopping. Here is a lo-res picture of the “third leg” which was build at Oshipala Airhammer Studios. By the sea we actually drilled a hole to the bedrock and used a 10mm bolt to secure the leg. The illusion works better on video but stills have some effect too dont you think?