Milan Furniture Fair NABA Workshop
Class students: Leong Wei Ling Jessica, Lin Jia Hui Cheryl, Phang Ying Quan Royston, Phoebe Choo Hui Mei, Sim Kim Hong, Tan Bee Yeng Magdalene, Tay Lee Ping Esther, Ye Zi-Li Allen, John Spirydion Capogna.
This project is in response to NABA’s (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) invitation to participate to the NabaSutra - City of Desire - Workshop held in Milano during the Furniture Fair from 16th to 19th April, 2008. More NabaSutra information can be found at NabaSutra - City of Desire - Workshop.
The City Never Sleeps
Asian Cities are being re-invented. The changes are not simple, as cities have many layers, many ages, co-existing simultaneously. In these cities, stories and bodies mingle together and move in a cyclic time… What is that which connects and sustains a city? It is the desire of becoming a new center, where new technology transforms and sustains the culture. With this dynamic transformation, new stories, and new desires, emerge.
The project showcases the stories (and desires) within the daily lives of people in Singapore. New information from Milano during the Furniture Fair will infuse these stories, and add new flavors, new dimensions, to their desires.
How can desire be narrated?
“Newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant, Marco Polo could express himself only by drawings objects from his baggage –drums, salt fish, necklaces of wart hog’s teeth—and pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl… What enhanced for Kublai Kan every event or piece of news reported was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words, the description had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought … A new kind of dialogue was established…” from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
Can we transfer Calvino’s poetic vision into today’s city context, with modern tools?
Signboards are a common part of a city’s landscape, a universally understood language; Signs can be used as a narrative instrument. Signboards are normally used to “prevent”, but we intend to use them to “encourage” the expression of desire. We are in the process of creating an original set of pictograms to be used to tag objects. These pictograms are based on the exploration of common desires, through the analysis of human senses.
Tagging is a form of appropriation. It is a metaphor of desire. Tagging objects enables people to share their own story about the city, and to create a map of desirable objects or situations which can enhance or satisfy their desire. Two explorations - one in Singapore and one in Milano - will be done, and compared during the workshop.
Through the five senses we percive the world and we try to make our dreams to come true. Use the cool and the hot and the neutral icons to describe the desire or create your own icons on the blanks. Tell your story of desire by tagging the objects, the situations, the moments and build your own language.
Group in Milano:
Suresh Sethi, Fabrizio Galli, Leong Wei Ling Jessica, Lin Jia Hui Cheryl, Phang Ying Quan Royston, Phoebe Choo Hui Mei, Sim Kim Hong, Tan Bee Yeng Magdlene, Tay Lee Ping Esther, Kim HyunJoo, Choi HaeJong
