(Mafalda Millies & Roya Sachs, Virtually There - A performance inspired by Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet, 2016 © Eliza Soros / Rework: Daedalus Observatory, 2018)

Mobile Statues

In this design studio we will exercise in many things: we will observe and speculate, explore and invent; and we will craft and characterize 'mobile yet immobile' furniture-designs – a collection of architectonic objects composed and put into play within our contemporary cosmos. The course will be organised in groups consisting of two people. Several guided tasks, mixing various materials (texts, images, drawings, objects) and combining different techniques (analogue and digital), will result in a rich catalogue comprising each group's work. 

Our space for that will be the Daedalus Observatory!
Have a look here: www.daedalusobservatory.net
 

 
He has waited for a very while, before "he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though he had been a stone statue walking."1 A guest in Hermes' and Hestia's home and well, 'as though he had been a statue', right!? Mobile Statues, "these things cannot happen: a statue cannot move or speak; it cannot open its eyes, nod, or call out, cannot tell a story, dance or do work; it cannot turn on the viewer or run away, banishing its solidity and repose, shedding its silence. A statue is almost by definition a thing that stands still. [...] Yet these things happen"2 and we can also, almost by definition, say that statues are 'set up to keep things present': "to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space) [...] they step into our life."3 By chance or invited, they are daedalic guests, finite yet unbounded.

The Mobile Statues design studio is an architectonic furniture project seeking to embody chance and necessity in contemporary figures of purposefulness. We will train ourselves in a critical and inventive practice and work within a series of speculative design methods to inform a multimaterial choreography – an abstract roundelay, an eclectic show of pygmalionian power.

1   Victor Hugo, Les Miserable, Planet eBook online-publication, 2018
2   Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, Cornell University Press, 1992
3   Benjamin Alexander, The Arcade Project, Harvard University Press, 1999
 

This course is part of the:
Mobile Yet Immobile Series