Please allow 7 working days to process before shipping

Ships flat-packed, unassembled
Comes with building instructions & nails
Dimensions of built chair: 18.25"x17.5"x35"

"Design is always education" -Enzo Mari

In 1974, Italian designer Enzo Mari published the first edition of “Autoprogettazione?” which can be roughly translated with “Self-design?”, a manual which included a number of furniture projects that could be realized by anyone through wooden boards and simple tools, basically a hammer and some nails.

The book provides exercises which should be carried out individually in order to understand how good design works, “good design” meaning, according to Mari, a design which responds honestly to human needs. In the words of Mari, these projects do not want to be alternatives to industrial production, but exercises which may help each one understand how industrial products work and help to develop a critical eye towards them.

The technique to be employed in order to build the furniture is elementary, but the user may carry out the projects in different ways, changing some details and shapes while understanding the basic structural component of an object. “Autoprogettazione” is an activity of research made through practice.

“The problem with form is the search for its soul” -EM



What is your visual bond today is borrowed from an essay by Hito Steyerl titled, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image.’ Referencing Soviet director and theorist Dziga Vertov’s concept of ‘visual bonds,’ Steyerl imagines the utopian implications of the distribution of low-resolution digital images. Circumventing verification, homogenization or regulation, GIFS, thumbnails, JPEGS, and memes, may offer digital space for alternative sharing economies and niche visual languages.

e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars - Benjamin

Phenomena are redeemed through ideas. Ideas, for their part, need representing in the world of phenomena. The human mimetic faculty is the means to bring ideas into the world.  Concepts simply group individual phenomena while leaving them as individuals. Redemption transforms individual phenomena into totalities, through conceiving their relations.

Phenomena are not incorporated in ideas. Rather, ideas are virtual. They are the objective, virtual arrangement of phenomena. At the same time, they belong to two different, incommensurable worlds. Ideas represent phenomena in terms of something radically other. ‘Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars’. Phenomena limit how they can be represented by ideas. But ideas are necessary to symbolically construct relations among phenomena.

The main role of the idea is to represent the context in which phenomena – especially their extreme, and most telling, cases – coexist and interact. Ideas are obscure unless phenomena actually ‘gather round them’. Just as phenomena need salvation, so ideas need representation – their expression in phenomena.

Benjamin writes that "ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars." The meaning of its perception, the way in which a star is appropriated by a viewing subject, is dependent upon the vantage point from which the subject perceives,
upon the constellation within which the star is seen to exist at the moment of perception.

Similarly, the way in which the object is to be represented depends upon the critical arrangement of concepts in a particular constellation: "The history locked in the object can only be delivered by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects — by the actualization and
concentration of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge."

The form of subjective cognition thereby structures the objectivity of that which the subject appropriates, opening the seemingly closed world of the object to a multiplicity of meanings or realities.

Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another – Kristeva

Kristeva postulates that any literary text inserts itself into the set of all texts. Reading and writing are an appropriation of the other. Since (s)he writes while reading the anterior or synchronic (contemporary) literary corpus, the author articulates the discourse of otherness in his or her own texts (by appropriating, transforming or reformulating).

In this way, "all of the texts in the space read by the writer function" within one text. From this perspective, the literary text appears to be a correlation of texts; any text is constructed in relation to another; thus signification is not based solely on the end product, but also on the exemplary discourse of otherness. Every literary text has a double orientation. In short, what comes into play is the relationship between the texts, a relationship that energizes signifying productivity.

"The book refers to other books and [...] gives those books a new way of being, elaborating thereby its own signification”. So although each text is unique, the emergence of signification is only made possible through the relationship maintained by this unique text with other texts. As shown in the following equation, this signification is based on the dialogical mode. One is never just "one"; it is the double of all the others in "the space read by the writer”.

A relationship that energizes signifying productivity: 1 = 2.

The writer must be four people:

1. The Nut / The Obsédé - Supplies the material

2. The Moron - Lets it come out

3. The Stylist - Is taste

4. The Critic - Is intelligence

a great writer has all 4 — but you can still be
a good writer with only 1) and 2); they’re most important.

-Susan Sontag 12/3/61

Pine wood sourced & cut at Platz Hardware in Ridgewood NY, opened in 1909