Taking place at the Seoul Museum of Art, the 'Total Theatre: Interspace Dialogue' exhibition is featuring the Plushscape installation by Max Kuo of ALLTHATISSOLID. Curated by Regina Shin, the exhibition, which is also a film festival, borrows Gropius and Piscator’s concept of a new kind of theatre to realize a cinema inside of the white cube of a museum. In response to the curatorial agendas of Interspace Dialogue, Plushscape seeks to agitate and amplify the somatic conditions of the viewers’ bodies providing more spatial possibilities in their haptic response to the screening films. More images and architects' description after the break.
Plushscape is an immersive installation which also functions as lounge seating for viewers of experimental short films. Typically, galleries and museums construct black-box environments where single-channel video installations seek to disembody the viewer within the diegetic space of the film. Here, viewers can freely choose how their bodies will be nestled into this soft, plushy landscape, whether they are prostrate and languid, or upright and alert.
Using the found material bujikpo, a soft synthetic and felted fabric which is typically used as dust barriers on construction sites, no waste is created for the temporary exhibition. This common and low-brow fabric can easily be returned back to the product stream after the close of the installation. Each bolt of fabric (1.8 x 12 meters) is then tucked, woven, and ruched creating stuffed toy-like landscapes enticing bodily interaction.
One crucial and unforeseen effect of the fabric is its material ability to acoustically absorb ambient noise and enhance the films’ audio. The installation also borrows some techniques from traditional Shibori where, prior to tie-dyeing, the fabric is geometrically manipulated with stitching and binding patterns. With these methods, Plushscape accumulates volume, texture, and sculptural exuberance while playfully unraveling throughout the gallery.
The installation design consists of nodal points created from bolts of bujikpo that are woven into soft seating pouches and then attached to a rigid frame. These spongy nests allow for group lounging in a variety of positions and also serve as vertically peaked features within the gallery. From these peaks, Plushscape dissolves into a planimetricfield articulated by reflective streamlines that charge the open gallery space, an alternative to traditionally passive theater pew-seating. In this new landscape, seating, sculpture, and bodies all swerve and twirl about inducing a new socially activated viewing space.
For more information on the exhibition, please visit here.
