Zu zweit

2021

"The sensation of unbridgeable distances, the difference between thinking and trusting to speak, the awareness of being subject to a form of communication that creates beauty upon ambiguity and impossibilities, oftentimes, leave me wordless in encounters with others. In such instances, I wish my body would be enough, my presence and awareness, the way I move and situate myself could transcend the importance of spoken language and words.

The static and mute encounter with the objects around me aids this discomfort – words are not needed, useless anyways. This series is intended to make the possibilities and concepts of interaction and dependence explicit. The chair – facilitator of many encounters, yet also of human individuality – taken into flexible contexts of two (you and the other person): a request for realities, in which the silent language of objects facilitate bodily experiences of the other, the chair, reencountered to support a dynamic notion of interaction and dependence."

︎︎︎ Design Academy Graduation Projects
︎︎︎ See how some of the objects were made (PDF)

“Single furniture objects were made into pairs – ‘zu zweit’ – that emphasise how furnishings affect our interactions by determining factors such as physical proximity and eye contact. If these unconscious physical and visual cues are ignored and intellectual priority given to only verbal communication, miscommunications and discomfort can arise. For the designer, the making process itself served as a cathartic negotiation between the linguistic analytical self and the embodied intuitive self. It is not only each other, but these two sides in each of us, who are invited into commune through these objects.”

– Nadine Botha, Graduation Catalogue DAE, 2021