Matters of Reassembly
Matters of Reassembly is questioning the concepts of waste and thereby the systems of assigning value to material in modern western culture. It proposes that discarded materials need to be considered as resource and to apply methodologies of re-using. Matters of Reassembly is about disassembling discarded products and finding a new purpose and function for these elements in the synthesis with natural materials, resulting in functional interior objects.
Graduation Project, 2020
Social Design (MA)
Design Academy Eindhoven
Connections
The connection of human-made elements with natural materials create visual tension as an aspect of beauty. Beauty = Order x Complexity (G. D. Birkhoff). The materials are connected in ways, that they can be easily undone for further re-use. There are 3 types of connections: rivets to connect metal with metal, screws to connect metal with wood, and pegs cut from the same wood to connect wooden pieces.
Nature
What we refer to as nature is actually an appropriated natural environment encroached by the invasive human species. When one speaks of natural forests in the context of Europe, it is inevitably about a human-made habitat, controlled by industries and markets with utilitarian measures. The elements gathered for this project are either windthrow or logging debris, neither of them is part of the wood industry, nor are they essential element of the biosphere – at least not at the point of gathering. At the end of a period of use, the elements can be returned to the systems of nature, as they stay untreated and unchanged.
Elements of Human Production
Matters of Reassembly is about the act of collecting unappreciated products from people, to disassemble them to the last piece in order to remove the classification as waste. And to give the single element a new purpose in order to stretch out the life cycle by re-using as an alternative to current recycling methods. These metal elements are familiar to most people, but put in such different application and setting, that it blurs the traces of origin.