Inside Outside creates spaces that are interrelated and hybrid, interacts with specific surroundings and challenges our expectations through an often startlingly unconventional use of materials and techniques. Two large-scale curtains produced for the exhibition present a retrospective of Inside Outside’s work. They literally unfold the studio’s production strategies, as illustrated by Blaisse’s “recipe drawings,” which not only detail the craft involved in production but also give an insight into the studio’s systematic approach to design.
These curtains are hybrid since they both exhibit and display; they are translucent and move in space. Their use in the exhibition quintessentially illustrates the studio’s blithe disregard of the conventions dictated by materials. The fragile, diaphanous textile out of which the upper part of the curtain is made defies its colossal size, while the lower part, a translucent PVC, serves as a support for archival material documenting the studio’s wide-ranging projects in interior design and landscape architecture.
The curtains are mounted in the center of the building by German architect Gottfried Semper. Semper emphasized the crucial and intricate relationship between architecture and textiles, assigning strong space-defining qualities to the latter. Inside Outside have responded to this with a site-specific intervention consisting of soft architecture that creates the illusion of a false perspective and enables us to perceive the space differently.
During the exhibition, there will be a programme of lectures and talks with renowned protagonists from the fields of research and practice, that will unfold along central topics inherent to the practice of Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse (see below).
Forbo Flooring Systems is the main partner of the exhibition.
Inside Outside talks
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
ETH Zurich, Zentrum, HG E 7 (fully booked)
Live transmission: HG E 5
5–5:20pm:
Petra Blaisse, An introduction on “Exhibiting Architecture”
5:20–6pm:
Penelope Curtis, “Art on Display—The Post-War Context”
6:30–8pm:
Sarah Morris, Introduction and screening of “Finite and Infinite Games”
Thursday, October 18, 2018
ETH Zurich, Zentrum, HG F 7 (fully booked)
Live transmission: HG F 5
6:30–7:30pm
Rem Koolhaas, lecture on “Inside Outside”