Spacial

Al(l)

AL(L): Projects with Aluminium was our first solo museum exhibition, mounted at the Centre d'Innovation et de Design at Grand Hornu in Belgium and running from 31 January to 29 May 2016. The show was curated by Maria Cristina Didero, with whom we had developed a long working relationship, and it brought together the full breadth of our aluminium practice across furniture, lighting, transportation and limited edition collectible work. AL is the chemical symbol for aluminium. The works were laid out in an L shape referencing that symbol directly, following the architectural silhouette of the Grand Hornu building itself, which Didero and I had taken as our starting point from the very first visit. A graphic legend of aluminium shaping processes accompanied each piece throughout the exhibition, from die casting and extrusion to CNC machining and sandblasting, so that visitors could understand exactly what had gone into the making of each object. The Oxygen chairs were shown alongside the moulds used to form them. Chair 4A was dismantled and spread across an entire wall. The Moke was shown at 1:1 scale. A secondary space within the building, which we called the Crypt, was given over to a curated selection of historical and contemporary aluminium objects chosen by Didero and myself on personal taste alone, placing our work in dialogue with Jean Prouvé, Charles and Ray Eames, Marcel Breuer and Barber Osgerby. The exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive monograph published by Stichting Kunstboek, with texts by Max Borka, Aric Chen, Maria Cristina Didero and Marie Pok.