Project Lead: Kevin Walker
Project Overview
Interior Futures inverts the norm as well as the form, treating interiority as a temporal condition, and the future as a destination – indeed many possible and impossible places. Far from the shiny, singular future of showrooms and advertising, these futures draw from many places and times. They’re disruptive and distributed, embracing uncertainty and other creatures. Objects and spaces breathe and talk and complain; they’re situated on faraway planets or in the same dusty buildings that have stood for hundreds of years. Interiority as a condition is the bubble you carry around you, equally handy in a rapidly failing terrestrial climate as in outer space, as you step around the bodies on the stairs of overcrowded cities.
An exhibition as a medium enabled us to explore a selection of futures in an inferior present, through spatial practice. Museum director James Bradburne points out that an exhibition is not a book, with no control over linearity unless you’re Walt Disney, forcing people into cars on a track to pass them in front of corporate conveniences. Against this singular vision we present a plurality, with narratives of feminism and decolonisation, welcoming a wide range of materials and agencies. Work by Interior Futures authors was mixed with that of emerging artists working across nationalities, cultures and media. The temporal was turned back into the spatial, formation into form, with transition and contradiction becoming the norm.
Project Outputs
- Brooker, G., Harriss, H. and Walker, K. (Eds) Interior Futures. Crucible Press, 2019
Interior Futures, a multi-volume compendium of close-packed essays, features outsider, avant-garde – even renegade – perspectives on the future of the interior and intentionally probes and provokes readers to envisage alternative practice frameworks. It is unlike any other volume written by or for interior designers. Responding to a framework of questions and scenarios, the consequences of pervasive, emergent, and often disruptive behaviours, technologies, materials, and actors are followed through to imaginative conclusions, forcing a departure from the comfort of any one disciplinary position. Far from suggesting that what can only happen next in an uninhabitable dystopia, this creative, inspired, poetic, and portentous confection posits that despite a sense of infinite instability, the equilibrium of non-aligned bodies set in constant motion, still offers a sense of belonging. - Walker, K. (curator) Interior Futures, exhibition, Royal College of Art, London, 14-15 Mar 2019.
Funders
Crucible Press, Royal College of Art
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