OFFCUTS
Private Experiments, 2014-2016
What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.
— Anais Nin
There Offcuts were gathered from things from other things, things that were left aside or thrown away, things from some of the most thoughtful projects, and other times not as thoughtful projects produced by the students of the Architectural Association’s model and prototyping labs.
In industrial design and economics, products lifespan is planned and designed to have a limited artificial useful life so that it becomes obsolete. Planned obsolescence. This maximizes repeat purchases in a time where the maintenance and sustenance of items often require more effort. As experimentalists, we often ignore the amount of materials we use up, searching to replicate what our minds tell us to make without realizing that the waste we produce as creatives.
Unintentionally, I ended up with a room full of forgotten models and prototypes back in London 2016. They counted as a new test objects for me - the exercise to beautify them became the exercise in using them as creative tools for my mind; constantly configuring them into abstract shapes, reconstructing them from what they were originally planned to be they’ve resulted to be something in their own terms.
