Exhibition
The Soft Landings Showroom
20 Apr 2018 – 28 Apr 2018
Event times
Events Programme:
Forecast: Friday 20 April 19h00 – 23h00
Mapping: Wednesday 25 April 19h00 – 23h00
Soft Landings Showroom Launch: Saturday 28 April 19h00 – 23h00
Open for public:
20, 21, 22 April and 28, 29 April. Every day on view as a window exhibition.
Cost of entry
FREE
Address
- Frans de Wollantstraat 84
- Amsterdam
North Holland - 1018 SC
- Netherlands
The Soft Landings Showroom is an expanded view of industrial testing cycles made to determine the performance and functionality of an object by its compliance to human interaction and the natural environment.
About
Soft Landings appraises the phenomenon of industrialised speculation on unfortunate events and disaster. They map the interpersonal and corporate tendency to favor the worst case scenario, from a scratch or a burn to extraterrestrial attacks and solar flares. These conceptions of insurmountable problems are used as the basis of a series of examinations of discomfort and catastrophe. Whether opportunistic or circumspect, the responses to crisis by cyclopean commercial entities are brought to an empathic level through individual arts practice. How might the lone programmer, performer or wood-turner manifest an industrial response to the inevitable?
For The Soft Landings Showroom, 200 white injection-molded, heavy-duty transport cases are currently travelling from Ningbo, CN to Amsterdam, NL. Eventually, they will each house a series of artist editions – a hermetically sealable white-cube group exhibition. These cases purport to be future proof, totally resistant to water, dust, shock and impact. They will live for a far longer time than any visitors to the Showroom. For this reason, they take their rightful place as the protagonist in an examination of a fully materialised aspect of industrial speculation: the product testing phase.
The Soft Landings Showroom is an expanded view of industrial testing cycles made to determine the performance and functionality of an object by its compliance to human interaction and the natural environment. The de-industrialised bespoke devices and interventions of the Showroom invite the audience to engage with disaster through the experiences of their protagonist object, and speculate on what the cases may one day contain.
Events Information:
Forecast: Friday 20 April 19h00-23h00
The Soft Open of the Soft Landings Showroom – where visitors are invited to be components of an informal plotting session, speculating on the impending future of the project through a series of games and interventions based on product testing and focus grouping. Conditional wagers and judicious choices required.
Mapping: Wednesday 25 April 19h00-23h00
The Mapping event takes a step further into the predictive and unpredictable. Visitors will adopt new potential selves in a roleplaying game set at a rapidly accelerating series of New Years Eve parties. The players will draw and be drawn into situations related to unfortunate events and interpersonal dramatic cycles in order to collectively channel an intimate portrait of the near future.
Launch: Saturday 28 April 19h00-23h00
Official Launch and opening of the Soft Landings Showroom. Compiling the data from its prequel events, the ethos of Soft Landings will be finally revealed and formally realised.
Bio:
Soft Landings is an artist collective consisting of Eurico Sa Fernandes, Alban Karsten, Tom Kemp and Kitty Maria. All based in Amsterdam, the four members bring together a scope of performance, programming, film and installation-based practices. The first iteration of their togetherness concerns an exhibition space able to withstand extreme circumstances.
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This project is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) and Sandberg Instituut.
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