Tuesday, March 13, 2012

NUMEN/FOR USE: AVANT GARDE MIXED WITH PLAY

By NANTIA BOUFA
Imagine you open your window and jump inside a net constructed between houses in your backyard for a sun-bath or visit a public space and take your shoes off to crawl in a tape installation.


Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljkovic are part of a Croatian- Austrian design collectivity firm called Numen/For Use; their mission is to enrich new spatial experience for the public. They are widely known for the massive interactive tape installations, installed in numerous cities such as, Melbourne, Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt and Belgrade. 

The group started as a team of industrial designers—all having been keen experience and interest in experimental design.   Since 2004 their focus expanded into large scale events and then by the year 2008, they began to emphasize on more hybrid and experiential constructions. Their approach is to serve people by doing things that they could use and bu ultimately giving their works some sort of function.

Initially installed to serve as a dance performance, thereafter the installation was left for the audience to enjoy the remnants of about 45 km of tape and 700 transparent adhesive pieces of tape, which were used to create the Tape installation.

The Tape installation received the International Design Festival in Berlin in December of 2010.

Numen collectivity has also constructed a “net” experience of perception, spatial and perspective with a community hammock.  A creation of a “floating landscape,” it's accessible to visitors to climb in and explore.  This forest of huge nets gave Numen the possibility to play with different shapes and sizes, using them in different ways, so as to be accessible and approachable as can with the crowd.

Their first effort to connect their fantastical architectural settings with theatrical play was The Inferno from the classic Divine Comedy by Dante. They covered the space with glass mirrors, inciting the possibility to look inside the actors, who in contrary could not see the exterior, as their side was covered with spy glass to experiment with their own multiplied image (see image below). The cold, sterile infinity gave an interpretation of the hell. They could not escape from themselves and everywhere they looked was a mirage of them. 

Have a watch at this interesting interview (featured right) as well as some photos to take an idea of their unique constructions of avant garde mixed with play.



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