Notes
June 25, 2012

Confronting fragility and power of life – Suspended Fields by Numen/ForUse

The Suspended Fields represent contemporary spatial project related with our comprehension of nature, its resources and our attitude towards nature. Designers are growing the Fields, which are not tied to the ground, but floating intently inbetween closed walls, symbolising the entire vegetative cycle, from sprouting to disintegration.

Visitor in the Fields by NumenForUse at Dan D (Design Festival in Zagreb). Photo: Numen/ForUse.

At the Croatian Design Festival DAN D in June 2012 where Fields were installed for the first time, we’ve spoke with Christoph Katzler from Numen/ForUse: „The basic idea came up somehow from our work with textile that started already with Tape installation, NET and recently with Tuft project. Also, in our scenographies we like to use a lot of curtains.

Watering the installation Fields. Photo: T. Bartakovic.

Nature is often seen as a machine to humans and we use it like it’s a machine, the other context of the installation that it’s a kind of green fabric which brings us back to design. It’s sort of Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. It’s different kind of development process, you literally observe it growing, and there we go – watering it and taking care of its fragility.“

Experiencing the suspended Fields. Photo: Numen/ForUse.

The process of emergence of this artificial, yet lively installation, puts the designer in a new context, in a position of dedicated farmer, whose efforts and investment may be ruined by bad weather, parasites or bad seed, in other words uncontrolled and arbitrarily factors. In this case, the skills are all about optimization of the density of sowing, the choice of the right sowing culture and determining the precise dosage of irrigation.

We witness the incredible fact that plants grow out of cloth. Photo: Numen/ForUse.

This process makes us aware of both the fragility and power of life, which could also serve as a metaphore for the process of creation – designing. From one side, we witness the incredible fact that plants grow out of cloth, and from the other we face the fatal consenquences of  insufficient or over irrigation.

Tatjana Bartakovic

Tatjana Bartakovic

Editor in Chief of Design Agenda. Works as Design curator and writer but mostly living from the work in public relations, branding and content marketing.

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