SS / DW

[ SS / DW ] is a site-specific device conceived to establish a relationship between our design workshop and the art gallery upstairs. The physical proximity of the two spaces and their morphological correspondence within the same building made the device-ruse inevitable.

Hovering over two meters above floor level, the visitor is lifted into the suspended pod to discover a production spread over eight screens displaying consecutive panoramic surveys taken from the same spatial coordinates on the two consecutive floors. The gallery’s panorama gradually mutates into the workshop space while the visitor gets transposed virtually and vertically from one space to the other.

As the workshop confines begin to dematerialize, the surrounding cityscape reveals itself in the background. Implanted in the foreground, we present archives of our work stretching over fifteen years of experimentation; these works are de-contextualized, stripped of their materiality, and reduced to their pure form. Initially conceived for specific contexts, the projects originated from our workshop and once aspired to exist in the material reality of the distant urban panorama. Rejected from that reality, they are transposed from their space of production to another state of representation, and are condemned to fatally roam the infinite cityscape.

With much gratitude to Ranya Sarabki for her involvement