Gesture, a campaign exploring our everyday actions, inspired by the world of performance art.
Interpreted through performance, day-to-day actions and gestures are exaggerated, amplified and heightened to create a synthesis between domesticity and the daily gestures which informed the creative process behind the Gesture Collective.
Performers, occupying a bare room, act-out a variety of situations which are reminiscent of daily gestures. Completely absorbed into these actions, people transform themselves into living and breathing artistic material. The act of creation is narrated from a lateral viewpoint that plays on the contrast between normality and individuality.
Gesture is a collective of 5 new rug projects exploring how the motion of hands and tools can quietly lead the creative process, conceiving entirely new aesthetic languages.
Performance 1: Stroke
The “Stroke” performance is an unconventional representation of painting, disguised under a common household activity: cleaning glass. Acting this out, with extraordinary artistic emphasis, the performer emulates the artistic gesture of drawing using a sponge as a replacement for a paint-brush. The designer of the rugs Sabine Marcelis considers every surface as a temporary canvas: strokes, wipes, and brushes in a domestic space serve as the inspiration of the new collection.
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Performance 2: Patcha
The “Patcha” performance is a homage to a collaborative, almost meditative, domestic routine – folding laundry. The four performers are observed whilst folding colorful bedsheets, layering them to form a vivid and multicolored pile. The overlapping of layers is the very concept behind Patricia Urquiola’s “Patcha” rugs which are the result of a spontaneous handcrafted creation.
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Performance 3: Mindscape
The “Mindscape” performance depicts a never-ending renovation. The continuous movement of white boards, abstractly representative of furniture and walls, illustrates a tormented process of constant replacement, searching for an unreachable harmony. The starring rug, Mindscape by Mae Engelgeer, investigates spatial and architectural gestures: mirroring, splicing and replicating elements to achieve a new environment, a journey to another space.
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Performance 4: Cultivate
The “Cultivate” performance stages a moment of play, an unusual game of battleships played with scissors. The useful everyday tool is utilized here in a light-hearted way to cut the threads of the rug. An illusory process of destruction, giving life to a surface and cultivating a sense of emotional attachment by the user to the rug. “Cutting becomes a process of creation instead of destruction” explains the designer Yuri Himuro. This playful interaction becomes the physical manifestation of change.
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Performance 5: Lines
The “Lines” performance shows the obsessive drawing of lines. The marks created by the performer with charcoal, are a nostalgic reminder of a childhood tradition of having your height marked on domestic walls. Past and present memories merge together in an excited gesture. Philippe Malouin’s “Lines” rugs were conceived by drawing with wax-crayons, the marks of which share the same imperfection typical of a freehand line drawn by a child.
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