Carpet knitting sessions with six-foot long needles; a café with only elderly people slowly serving up the meals; fashion designers dressing up an entire house; a ‘Tickle Salon’; and a store that only sells design ware under $100,-; just to name a few things to be found on the Governors Island during NY400 Week's 'Pioneers of Change', a celebration of Dutch design, fashion and architecture. It’s a typical manifestation of Dutch design, where quirkiness meets functionality.
The design experiences will be set up from 11-20 September in and around eleven vacant Commanding Officer houses at Nolan Park, Governors Island. The common ground for all projects is a more responsible and sustainable approach to living. Renny Ramakers, curator of Pioneers of Change and co-founder and director of Droog, aims to emphasize things that are hard to come by these days, such as space, fresh air, care, silence, slowness and time. ‘Pioneers of Change is based on a new movement in design and architecture’, she says. ‘It celebrates the blurring of low- and high-brow, encouraging involvement and valuing handcraft and the local context.’ (Read more about Renny's preparations for Pioneers of Change on her NY400 guestblog)
Driessen & Verstappen’s ‘Tickle Salon’, which is exactly what it sounds like, is one of the design experiences everybody can undergo. Literally, in this case. Designer Maria Verstappen: ‘You step into a room, lie down on the bed, and submit yourself to our stroking robot. But the striking thing is it can carry out sensitive movements over the skin without repetition. It aims for variation, unpredictability and flexibility. It's a robot without being robotic, really.'
Many of us can identify with the initial reason the couple Driessen and Verstappen came up with the Tickle Salon: they were always arguing who should tickle who. Maria: ‘Now we have a Tickle Salon permanently set up in our house, no more bickering!’
After a relaxing session in the salon, you can dig into some construction work as Platform 21=Repairing the first floor of Officer’s House 6a. Designers and artists will be working side by side with the public to fix walls, clothes, carpets, ceramics and furniture. ‘Expect to be surprised, because most repair techniques have been developed especially for this project’, says designer Arne Hendriks. (View Platform 21's 'Repair Manifesto')
Arne: ‘Lotte Dekker created a new technique based on the Japanese repair-art kintsugi, Heleen Klopper pretty much revolutionized the use of wool to repair and upgrade fabrics, and Daan van den Berg is still so caught up in developing a new and beautiful way to repair walls that I'm afraid to mention it here. We keep our fingers crossed.’ As pièce de résistance, Arne hopes to repair the ceiling of the dining room in the house with a Tesa tape replica of Piet Mondriaan's masterpiece Broadway Boogie Woogie. Arne: ‘In other words, we need help!’
More information on NY400 Week, September 8 - 13.
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