heavy metal chairs

2019

Etage Projects
Copehangen

The title Heavy Metal Chairs refers to the physical weight, the music genre and its emotional state as the parts playing a role in the making of the project. The word heavy is in contradiction to the lightness of the carbon material while representing the music genre of the two songs that accompany the show and the burdensome mood that characterises Heavy Metal music in opposition to the more comforting mindset of object design.
Conversely to what the name suggests, the structure of the heavy metal chairs is built of carbon fibre material, giving them mechanical strength and allowing lightness and extreme thinness. Their weight ranges from 1,6 to 2,2 KG. The parts covered with paper and finished with colored resin reminiscent of corrugated cardboard makes the chair seem unreal; the encounter with the object as a result is loaded with disbelief. Broken lines imbedded in the drawing induce the impression of collapse. The chairs seem to be hand drawings, and not made for seating.
For this project the poet Coco Fitterman was invited to write the lyrics of two songs A design object nestled somewhere in time ︎︎︎ and You make my life easier I make your death Swift ︎︎︎ in which she addresses the chairs with hostile energy, an adverse mood against design and the realm of objects. (Your furniture disgusts me / Fuck your chair / Mortal fools / To live is to suffer). The lyrics were put into music by Berlin band 100 000 Tonnen Kruppstahl (100 000 Tons of Krupp Steel︎). Both songs set a context for the chair to exist. Something for themselves and against themselves synchronically in which they stand while collapsing.
Heavy Metal Chairs intersects the design object and the downcast mood of heavy metal music. The bleak disposition of heavy metal (pain, nightmare, guilt and suffering -) meets the optimistic mood of design ( projection, problem solving, pride, status ) a mindset that makes the object enviable and its place in life possible. Within the emotional state of heavy metal, the object and often the self seem loaded with detestation, thus giving rise to a world of abjection. One offers a position in the world as the other withdraws from it. The process of making establishes and undergoes conflicting energies.