26-11-2020

Dutch Design Daily

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Designmatter X Hypothetical Studios www.orangecube-designmatter.com

Hotel Symbiogenesis

By 26-11-2020

Reimagining symbiosis through speculative craft

Hotel Symbiogenesis unfolds a story of an island in the near-apocalyptic future, in which various animal species, including humans, coexist symbiotically. In a speculative hotel room, a collection of artifacts made of fur and leather of the fictional animals is presented.

Hotel Symbiogenesis rethinks the human-nonhuman animal relationships by questioning how the human species have been valuing animal-derived clothing material. The aim of the project was to create alternative mythology, which is not a denial of autonomy and subjectivity of nonhuman animals, specifically concerning the consumption of their skin and fur. Hypothetical Studios speculatively constructed an island as well as the human and nonhuman animals dwelling in it.

The island is a big, sympoietic cell that survives the nearly apocalyptic time, operating through the symbiosis of its dwellers. Humans are not exceptional in this relationship. Various rituals of the human residents of the island have co-evolved with the animals through multiple directions without exploiting any species. They make their garments and objects using materials derived from the animals, which gives us a glance at how those humans cohabit with the animals.

Designmatter and Hypothetical Studios invite the guests to a hotel on the island and provide sensorial performative experiences around the residents’ artifacts. The audiovisual experience performed around the installation is filmed and reformatted into an online exhibition platform.

Online exhibition ‘Hotel Symbiogenesis’
still up and running till the end of the year
www.hotel-symbio.com