“In contemporary society we experience a disappearance of rituals, because we have moved from a society rich in symbols towards a society based on data and information. This society is centered around objects-as-images, which, by default, are symbol poor, resulting in a web of signal without internal structure. This project attempts to design for a person’s internal structure in the form of a series of objects exploring the ‘psychology of physical use’, the ‘object-as-experience’.

It hopes to questions the way we use and design products in today’s society by proposing specific products for very specific fears and desires and so offering (re)new(ed) basic human experiences. It’s these experiences that could potentially provide new rituals for contemporary and/ or future society.”

BIRD PEOPLE is an absurdist tale of the ideal of a secret society, a cultus of people that want to transgress and transform into the experience of being an animal, a bird. The story is they feel disconnected and unreal in the bureaucratised and mechanical overpopulated environment of the metropolitan city and want to experience to feel alive again.

This project plays with the eternally old man as animal dialogue in philosophical thought and in that sense is an appropriation of an old narrative to inform a contemporary story where objects from the catalyst of curious actions.

Otherwise they are just mere tools designed to assist them in this. They are extensions of the body. This form follows function approach results in shoes looking like animalistic claws. The fetish is not only in the transgression of the experimental element of the footwear, but also in the visual hybridisation of the merging of the man and animal image. The shoes grab and cling on to the urban environment and aggressively clamping on and bringing the interior, the inside out through a performative action. And in doing so turning reality into a fantasy through physical action. In this way the critique operates as contemporary reality that is confronted and temporarily turned into an alternative state through a surreal intervention into an animalistic reality.