Eindhoven’s Dutch Design week is imminent, meaning personally that two years ago, in 2023, myself and many friends were scrambling to finalize our displays for the Design Academy’s graduation show. Ward Lauwers and Nathan Raccah had been immersed in their ambitious Angeli’s Delight project, which had both instigated and absorbed a lot of events in all our lives during that last spring semester.
Key events were a series of picnics and dinners they organized. These were framed by the project on both ends: first, in that they incorporated objects and iconography collected or purpose-built by Ward and Nathan; and also in the resulting documentation and experimental findings.
On the graduating students’ floor in the academy building, Angeli’s Delight occupied significant floor space and we tended to converge there. A couple work tables were surrounded by banana boxes full of all sorts of tools, equipment, and surpus material, as well as a pottery wheel and some increasingly modded kitchen gear.
Angeli’s Delight was presented in a special section of the grad show for projects with an interactive/outreach component. The display was a condensed, cleaned-up version of that working space they’d built up in the school where you could fairly comfortably hang out despite the harsh overhead lighting. It was framed by the large custom shelf that held most of the artefacts of the project, like the intricately carved rice cooker lid and the airline-themed cutlery stand, but also a series of A5 booklets anchored by The ABC of Angeli.
This volume is a two-part index of terminology, themes, and objects from the project: a series of text files by Nathan with their filenames as titles, and a collection of image/description pairings by Ward.
Below are two of Nathan’s entries from The ABC of Angeli discussing the shelf.
File: Shelf.txt
We needed to build a shelf to store and display our materials, findings, and objects. The shelf will display our work, as well as itself. The work and the shelf are one and the same; the shelving is the work, the shelf and its objects are the work. The shelf just has to embody what a shelf is for us; it doesn’t have to be a pseudo shelf, it just has to be a shelf. We can use this as an excuse for stories along the way, building, assembling, mending, etc. It’s about making it solid, because we need something solid to play with. We are going to push it, embrace the Frankenstein, and use it as food for thought. It’s about playing the two of us in the workshop, learning, making the connection, and being poets.
Yesterday, on Saturday, Ward and I finished the shelf — I mean, we would have finished the shelf if the result wasn’t so underwhelming. So, I guess it’s not over, and we will continue to work on it. Let’s call it a food for thought. Because as sad as we were yesterday, we went to ask for some help from our friends. In the garden where the discussion happened, L gave some functional advice, from her architectural background; one in particular I liked was to reinforce the angles with triangles of metal sheet inserted in an incision made in the middle of the wooden corner. T, to underline that, while we can afford to improvise skillfully to cook a nettle soup, a shelf was another level, requiring more consideration to have.
It resonated as I remembered that one of the first seductive ideas about the shelf was from all these guys who had graduated with massive shelves that looked good in pictures; we would contrast it with a crappy one made in days in the workshops while they spent a semester. But once built, standing there, we were not sure we really liked it. As a proof, we would feel awkward bringing it to our space on the fourth floor, in front of everyone, and would play like it was from someone else. Although we got some compliments from Xander who said it had a good presence with a small laugh. But the stance of this shelf was ambiguous from the beginning. It was about playing with this idea of the shelf both as this DIY storage and functional unit in adad’s garage and the bright industrial display shelf from supermarkets and museums alike that you actually don’t see anymore as they disappeared behind the overflowing amount of product they bring to your face and hands and the familiar landscape they’re a part of. A bit like fridges, supermarket shelves are made in a very opaque way that hides their structured being. The spreading of product sometimes changes, but the shelf’s ground plan stays the same.
Now that we have this shelf, we’re going to start using it. We already brought it upstairs and put some stuff in it, but it’s not big enough, I’m afraid. Besides that, it means bringing this huge thing, emptying our shelves, which will stay there anyway, occupying the same amount of space when empty. Just by adding this one up to the floor, it seems like a shelf bought of as sacrificial, like we could build a pseudo shelf by piling things up so that instead of spreading horizontally, they spread vertically, stacked. A bit more ecologically, we could think of a pseudo shelf that mixes sacrificial items that are sacrificial because they hold a structural role; they are not accessible and sacrifice their usability as an object for their usability as support for other objects.
What’s wrong with having an object dedicated to the support of other objects? I think it’s the meta quality of this object that makes it a bit disturbing to me sometimes. It’s crazy; I can’t seem to need a shelf, I always believe I can do without. I can’t pile, hang, discard… It has an organizational, tool-like quality that I don’t like. It enables piling up stuff while feeling good about it because it creates a sometimes illegitimate space of belonging to some objects. On the other hand, through its unity and sacrifice, it allows for editing, curation, display, and a sense of availability, easing the life of millions of people… It’s the beginning of the end of abundance, but a nice, tidy end.
File: Bike_shelf.txt
From the cemetery of forgotten shelf ideas, building a shelf from techniques seen in bike manufacturing, such as tubing and welding, the bike frame pottery shelf idea is interesting because it’s like the Trojan Horse, faking that you are playing the game of building a shelf while actually learning to build bikes. The joke is that there is no reason why the administration would prefer you to learn to build shelves rather than bikes, nor is there any best option between building or learning to build bikes rather than shelves. Although, for some reason, it feels easier to me to imagine a shelf built like a bike frame than a bike built like a shelf, or like anything else than a bike frame. Other similar strategies can be found, such as when I was learning pottery as part of my design curriculum to back up my post-study, post-apocalyptic life. I can also easily imagine people seemingly doing something else, such as sleeping while cooking ratatouille, fighting while attending tax meetings in EEAAO, or a bit differently, melting down statues into weapons. Or when Airgoo, the air compressor company, started building pottery wheels. These strategies can easily have political applications as well, such as when the father of Charlie takes home the defective toothpaste cap to build a castle, or when the United States published a record on how to slow down productive work by being irrelevant at work without being noticed.
