while preparing a portfolio for prof. mateo i took some pictures of a bronze cast that was done from a terracotta piece i made many years ago in italy. it is an old signora from the neighbourhood and she kept falling asleep while she sat for us...

last saturday i took part in a design charette organised by SUPERFRONT: you are given a program and then you have two hours time to come up with a design. a few days earlier we were given the general outlines and i came prepared with a general idea and with pieces for the boards. most of the others came with nothing and were working in teams of up to four. i was very impressed with their results!

everyone had a different program that was proposed by community members. my task was set by two artists and they wanted a space to exhibit a dress, a film and photographs. the name of their program was rainhole dress. luckily for me, that fit very well with what i had prepared...

by the way, one of the artists was kamilo nollas and it is thanks to this competition that i later discovered his wonderful photographs.

here are my boards:

and here the text on the first board:

BYOT - Bring Your Own Towel 

A towel, as Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy points out, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. It is also massively useful if you visit BYOT, the temporary public space in SUPERFRONT’s backyard. 

After having your towel punched and riveted in the gallery, you can enter the backyard and use it as a hammock, as a sun shade, as a screen or as a bag. You can also take some of the towels other people have left behind and build whatever you want out of them.  

The construction that holds up the towels is fairly simple: seven poles of the same length are erected to form a regular hexagon. At the top of each pole a lot of ropes of four set lengths are attached.  

By choosing the size of your towel, the lengths of the ropes and the poles where the ropes hang from, you can get your towel in almost any position despite the rigid geometric set up of the poles. 

Lighting and special needs like tables and shelves are catered for with simple solutions that fit into the general system. Like the towels they are moveable and can be rearranged according to programmatic requirements.  

Thus the backyard of SUPERFRONT looks different every time you visit, and over the course of the summer a landscape built out of heaps of discarded towels will accumulate giving the space its very own identity.  

in prof. kollhoff's studio that i started but never finished we were asked in the beginning to make a collage of our ideal city. i searched through all my pictures and this is what i came up with. needless to say, prof. kollhoff did not like it very much...

another picture i like and still never used. it is from the place, structure & hull exercise taken without the hull. i stumbled upon it when preparing applications for an internship in ny. somehow it never really fits the bill...