Assembling Chairs is a presentation of four constructed instructionals.
Three are assembled from patterns included in Enzo Mari’s autoprogettazione?. Published in 2002, the book collects a selection of the Italian designer’s proposals from the 1970s and 80s for constructing furniture from cuts of wood and nails. The fourth is from Erik Eje Almqvist’s book Hammer and Nail, a tribute to Mari in which Almqvist reinvigorates instructional designs for the present. Curator Daniel Malan and the A4 team followed the patterns provided by Mari and Almqvist to assemble the chairs. You are invited to sit down.
Mari’s project, Proposta per un’autoprogettazione (1974), presented methods to self-construct the designer’s object proposals. Including only the elements he saw as essential for a design to carry out its purpose, Mari challenged would-be consumers to become their own furniture makers. Offering the performance of honest work as an antidote to the capitalist industrial complex, Mari encouraged reestablishing the bond of ownership between product and labourer, where participants could come to understand the means of production in practice. “It is a form of research and research can only be carried out through direct experience,” he wrote. Alongside the four hand-built instructionals, Assembling Chairs features a selection of publications about furniture and DIY design.
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Goods is a project space for work in process and thinking aloud. The location’s transitory nature as a thoroughfare encourages a light-footed navigation of curatorial and artistic practice and rapid prototyping of ideas.
In the Library a collection of books continues the installation. Among these, Erik Eje Almqvist’s Hammer & Nail (2022) is an accompaniment to his design included in Assembling Chairs. On the theme of DIY, a palette chair designed by Martino Gamper (providing the reader with an estimated cost, as well as time it will take and instructions for making) appears in the book Do It Yourself: 50 Projects by Designers (2015). Gamper is known for 100 Chairs in 100 Days and its 100 Ways (2007) having constructed a new chair a day, for one hundred days, by collaging discarded ones. How to make Rietveld Furniture (2022) provides information for the construction of simple pieces from renowned Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld, who influenced Enzo Mari with his instructional, minimally-processed designs. American artist Donald Judd’s MOMA retrospective catalogue includes an essay on utilitarian designs, where furniture-making is separated from aesthetic and art practice. Collected together, the publications share and show ways for visitors to DIY furniture that emphasises function over form.
These books are from curator Daniel Malan’s personal book collection together with books that can be browsed in A4’s free-to-public Library.
