Negative Space
aut. architektur und tirol, Innsbruck, 2023

The new concept is a step away from our other installations and relies tentatively on our experiences with scenography and theatrical transformation. It posits a generic domestic interior (room) whose surfaces are fully covered in a thin layer of natural rubber. The room was painted over and over again with liquid rubber (latex) to achive a thick and elastic skin that encloses all the furniture and objects inside, and is strong enough to eventually carry their weight. The space thus assumes a strange, muted appearance, akin to it growing a skin of a living body. As the air is “breathed” into the structure, rubbery membrane gradually rips away from the walls and floors, inverting the entire house like a glove. 
The Installation was first commissioned for the exhibition "Negative Space" in ZKM, Karlsruhe but wasn’t exhibited due to insufficient gallery space.

Photos and Movies by Günter Richard Wett
Technical support by https://www.latex-24.de/

Its contours and masses fill up and deform as if driven by a sudden flood, dragging along various paraphernalia of domestic life; chairs, tables, cups. When the process reverses and the air is sucked out, the skin returns awkwardly into its old coordinates and the room shifts back into place. The whole aspect of strangeness hiding within the familiar, of borders that are not fixed, of body-space mimesis, is entrenched firmly in the terrain of perceptual uncanny where objects come alive and reality is unstable. While the first transformation is one of invading mass and morphed silhouette, the second one seems temporal, with time trickling backwards - like a footage in reverse, a warp.


The Project was developed in close collaboration with bewegende-architektur.com

 

 

 

 

 

Making of

 

1:1 Testing Model

Index