Tomoe Matsuokaarchitecture / art / design
booth 1: garment + furniture = living space
The following three works are a part of the series I began with Holding Multiples garment + chair = shelter (2007). These works imagine a situation in which nomadic lifestyles are commonplace. They encourage sharing of resources and open public relationships. Transient individuals own garments that transform into various enclosure and shelters in combination with furniture owned by non-transient individuals.
The works were explored upon two scenarios: 1. Today’s society, in which nomadic lifestyles (such as homelessness, refugees, and people chose to live life traveling) is often considered lowlife or treated with societal stigmas. 2. My utopian society, in which private realm is much less autonomous (ex. A house lacks in such functions as bathroom and kitchen) and these functions are returned to public realm, which has expanded to serve a community instead of an individual or single family.
In the first scenario, I intend my works to encourage viewers to imagine what one object could be and how that will change the way we relate to a land and people and a community around them. Conventionally, a piece of clothes only serve one function – to be clothes. And so is a piece of furniture, serving specific functions such as sitting, sleeping, and working. By altering clothes and furniture to have capacity for transformation, jointly they are able to serve a new function in addition to their expected functions.
In the second scenario, I imagine people who live in different lifestyles inhabit in a community where they share facilities and resources in non-hierarchical manner. Expansion of public realm and reduction of functional autonomy in private realm create a situation that all people to meet, communicate and form a community together. With this scenario, I explore ways to establish a common language between transient individuals and non-transient individuals. As a piece of clothes often represent a wearer’s identity, I intend to create garments that are unique to each piece but have similar aesthetic language. So that when wearers come across together, they could identify one another as whom they could potentially share information and resources they gained through their nomadic lives. Same with furniture piece, I intend to build it with a generic appearance as bench or a low table, yet unique enough to suggest its transformability.
