Container No.1 . Oct.2018
Container no1 is a collaborative project of 8 artists and designers, a room of 15 m2 built in the middle of the Temporary Art Center of Eindhoven, during the one-week event of the Dutch Design Week 2016. From the outside, it looks like a plain white cube with two openings of the sizes of doors. Contrasting with the busy surrounding of sounds and lights characterizing a design fair, the room can be passed by without being noticed. In opposition with the usual aim of a design fair, Container No. 1 offers a quiet environment, for people to stop, sit, observe and listen to the different aspects of the objects quietly.
This project started from a reflection upon the memory of the objects that we are living with on a routine basis. What do they say about us, as makers, owners and guests? I thought about them as holders of our life, in the marks that we leave and the use that we have of them. As makers, we give them a meaning, a purpose and part of our identity, that is, once the object is completed, left to the interpretation of the viewer.
It is with these objects bearing simultaneously ours and their own identity that I invited my friends and makers to built a familiar looking space: a living room. “The living room serves both as a space where time is enjoyed in solitude, or shared with significant others. It is a space where the symbolic presence of such people may also manifest through the object in it”2. Through the construction of this space, we presented our different identities as one and invited the visitor to meet us and reflect on his relation to his surrounding.
Besides, three microphones were displayed in three parts of the room. Each one of them had an individual speaker, and was recording and playing their close surroundings with different delays; thirty seconds, one minute and one hour. Two of them were hidden, in the intention to surprise the visitor and drag his intention towards the object that is repeating the moment just past. The other one was clearly in sight, allowing the viewer to consider the dimension of time within the installation.
Container No.1 by Alejandro Cerón . Text printed and available to read during the exhibition.
CONTAINER No.1 is a co-created struggle on object and subject formation, a process of collaboration through contamination1. The installation invites the visitor to take time to look, listen and consider what is around him.
Fanny Noel invited a group of friends to work together. The working process was fluid, maleable and unsettling, involvement was variable and our approaches to production very different. However, through a series of open dialogues, discussions and arguments, we created flowing friction: the necessary load of energy, reflection and emotion deployed in the space.
CONTAINER No.1 is a collective study on the notion of identity through the framework of a living room. This format allows us to negotiate the level of intimacy we want to share with the public. "The living room serves both as a space where time is enjoyed in solitude, or shared with significant others. It is a space where the symbolic presence of such people may also manifest through the objects in it"2. These objects, just like meaningful people in our lives, have identities shaped by their background and experience.
Reflecting our subjectivity, the things we make and choose to keep or discard, talk to us. In a perpetual process of contamination, these objects influence who we are, as much as we define what they mean to us. Together, these objects obtain a multifaceted agency that informs the ever-changing process of subject formation.
As a polysemic space hosting and sharing formal and intimate experiences, CONTAINER No.1 suggests that objects in our living rooms instigate and mediate contemplation, as well as regulate the amount of intimacy with our guests.
1A. Tsing, A. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) 27-29.
2Talya B. Rechavi, A room for living: Private and public aspects in the experience of the living room.
Participants:
- Fanny Noel
- Erik Campanini
- Michela d'Angelo
- Lorena Miguel
- Alejandro Ceron
- Kostas Lambridis
- Michael McCready
- Tim van der Lee
Event Website : container1.nynobo.com