De Appel Arts Centre, December 20, 2016.
The Soft Landings Charity Gala is constructed to kick-start the funding of our collective ambition to build a building on the hanging man island of Amsterdam, the NDSM. As a headquarters for our new art foundation, and an autonomous appendix to the Dirty Art Department of the Sandberg Institute. Here alumni and students will work and exhibit for the coming three years. By end 2017 this building should be functioning as a space for forecasting and sensing the cultural climate on the island.
The architecture will compose as a situation room, of which the walls can shift to confine, to display, and as a backdrop for foreign affairs. The space with its continuous problem solving character, will allow the configuration of an exhibition to transfer within moments into a crisis room when necessary.
During the night of the Soft Landings Charity Gala we’ve dipped into an economy build upon the speculation on unfortunate events: an economy of insurances, doomsday prepping and preventing household accidents.
Soft Landings Charity Gala, the objective
Selling and auctioning handmade limited edition goods such as Fat Reserves, Soft Uniforms, Just in Case Currency, Memory Foam, Modesty Clothes Patches, Orgon Donors, Bala Blankets, Malware, Fruit Preserve & Terror Management, Tribal Time Watches and many more. These editions combined the core of each student’s practice with the pragmatics of edition design.
Set & Moderation
For this Charity Gala a set was made that was partially your classical charity gala and partially a run down grocery store; with deformed skirted tables, a rotating platform for the edition mannequin Kitty Maria and some interior displays of shortage. The event was guided by show host Alban Karsten and one-man-background-band Valentin Noiret. A maquette of the building was present live as well as virtually, as presented by Tom Kemp, interspersed with a VJ-performance: A Permanent Sense of Falling, and an odorless toilet proposal by the architecture group.