EXHIBITION
Come To My Place - Project Image

Come To My Place

“Show me your home, and I’ll tell you who you are.” More than ever, the way people arrange and decorate their own homes reflects their individual personality, like a self-portrait. For that they rely on a sheer limitless supply of designed objects for the interior, provided by an ever-changing international multitude of designers. As the influence of local traditions and cultures wanes, designers now guide us in expressing who we are through the choices that ultimately shape our living environment and create a sense of home.

With the global spread of design culture, designers too are less tied to their places of origin. Their work is no longer pervaded by the traits of a national or local design culture that would be mirrored in the home and its fixtures. Today’s internationally operating designers are individual voices whose themes, interests and concerns transcend geographic and cultural boundaries and connect with a world-wide audience. But in today’s increasingly mixed, nomadic, global context, one thing remains unchanged - we still need an “existential foothold,” as architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schultz termed it. At heart we remain firmly residential and, far from forsaking our identity, we redefine it using the multiple dimensions of a dynamic networked culture that converges on the place we call home.

Interestingly, the mental space, which we call home is today often a hybrid of design products that are sold around the world, and things we collect at the local hardware store. Best-sellers by design heroes meet the unassuming products of local engineering in our homes. The internationally iconic TV-set is fed from a socket that unmistakably tells us where on earth we are. These often overlooked, but standard, details of a home are among the last surviving products of local manufacturers and small industries that have resisted the pull of the global nomadic design culture. The sockets, the door handles, the standard lighting fittings that modestly adorn our houses, reflect the aesthetics and sense of place of local cultures around the world.

We have asked eight designers and design teams from different countries to solve this paradox for us: to create a place out of an anonymous “cell” space, make it into a home, using both design pieces and objects picked from local building supplies’ warehouses and hardware stores. Come to my Place is a laboratory experiment reflecting on how we make a space our own through design, confronting and combining the global design culture and the vernacular of local production.


Curated by Experimenta / Participants Folkform [SE], Maxim Velčovský (Qubus studio) [CZ], Meriç Kara [TR], Miguel Vieira Baptista [PT], Design MVW [CN], OVO [BR], POLKA [AT], Tobias Wong & Aric Chen [US] / Exhibition Concept and Design EventArchitectuur [NL] / Communication Design Hansje van Halem [NL] / Production Loranne Roozendaal, ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam
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Westerhuis Gallery
Westerstraat 187, 1015 MA Amsterdam

H 11:00 – 18:00
Closed on Monday – Tuesday
Admission : €5

T 0031 (0) 204 221 339

Bus: Stop & Go
Tram: 3, 10 stop Marnixplein

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PARTICIPANTS

Design MVW
Folkform
Maxim Velčovský (Qubus studio)
Meriç Kara
Miguel Vieira Baptista
OVO
POLKA
Tobias Wong & Aric Chen

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www.marcelwanders.com