Standing Stones
Objects of Common Interest
ADAM Brussels Design Museum, Belgium
February 21, 2020 – January 17, 2021

The ADAM Brussels Design Museum questions contemporary design and explores collectible design through the original and in situ creation “Standing Stones” by the Objects of Common Interest collective. The Brussels Design Museum has given carte blanche to the Objects of Common Interest collective, which will occupy the museum’s hall from February to January. This installation will be the contemporary proposal for 2020 of an institution that questions design, its history and creative process.

“Standing Stones” by the Greek duo Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis (Objects of Common Interest) underlines the links between design and art. Their work on inflatables opens up a contemporary dialogue with the museum’s collection. Working between Athens and New York, the two architects and designers reveal to the Brussels public their new project, “Standing Stones”, composed of several monumental inflatable structures inspiredby Cycladic culture – the peoples of the Bronze Age in the Greek islands in the 3rd millennium BCE – and, closer to home, the work of Constantin Brancusi. Indeed, the sculptor studied the abstraction of everyday shapes such as humans and birds, and the rendering of these shapes in materials such as stone and metal. Building on this heritage, the Greek duo presents a series of sculptures that stimulates reflection on softness in both the design and the quality of materials. Moulded like translucent inflatable structures, what used to be heavy and solid becomes light, airy and soft.

These changes provide a reinterpretation of old forms and enable visitors to develop new and original relations with the work. As architects, the two designers were eager to invest the space of the main hall with some pre-existing works such as a dozen of their “Opal Bent Stools” and several of their “Tube Lights”. Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis focus on the creation of experiential environments and objects, carrying out ongoing research on materiality, the conceptual, taking the form of tangible spatial experiences. Their work moves back and forth between the permanent and the ephemeral, the formal and the intuitive, marrying the handmade and the tactile, the experimental and the poetic. They conceive their projects through a creative process rooted in an abstract field, enriched by conceptual layers of reading: moments of unusual simplicity, sculptural self-expression and structural articulation.

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