nendo

An installation in the Friedman Benda Gallery in New York featuring forty of our cabbage chairs.

Previous cabbage chairs were made out of paper; for these chairs, we processed the fibres into a non-woven textile, allowing them to retain the light pleated feeling that characterized earlier versions while increasing their durability as furniture. We showed chairs in three colourings: black, white, and a mix of black and white material.

To give visitors a sense of the drama we felt when we first saw the top-lighting that poured from the back of the gallery space, and to heighten the cabbage chairs’ very particular infinite gradations of layered light and shadows, from the minute they stepped inside the gallery, we suspended 6800 threads from the ceiling.

The infinite shadows cast by the threads gathered up the entire space like pleats, as though the gallery space itself had been pleated for the installation. We used a Magic Marker to colour each of the individual threads black at different heights, creating boundaries between light and shadow in imitation of the light beams pouring forth from the rear of the space.

Because the threads are lit from only one direction, the boundaries between them appear and disappear depending on spectators’ positions, thanks to the same phenomenon that allows us to see into lit rooms from the dark outside, then to reverse this effect when the interior lights are switched off.

We named the installation ‘ghost stories’ for the many faces of the space, depending on the play of light and shadow, and for the way that edges of the objects in the space appear to blur and melt away in the ambivalent light.