Alexandra Selmeciová↓

About the work

Flatness and Disappearance

#flatness #container #logistics #work #disappearance

What is your graduation work about?

When creating objects, we often employ a specific image or metaphor. Usually, the starting point is a tool and its use in a particular situation. In the case of the graduation work, the unifying tool is a shipping container. The motif is probably stacking.

When we think of the author Ursula K. Le Guin, we can view a vessel as the first cultural device and a way to resist the linear techno-heroic narrative mode. Using a bag, basket, or carrier can serve to develop various stories of everyday things.

When we think of a vessel in the form of a shipping container, we can imagine the Earth flattening, subject to constant smoothing, often with a docking station at the ends. On the other side of it, behind the metal envelope of the logistics hall, are somehow hidden Amazon employees, today called pickers. But their gear is an endless series of seemingly meaningless day – to – day tasks instead of fruit baskets.

When we imagine a bag as a thermal box filled with food of all kinds, we can think of all the lowpaid work and all the time people have to sacrifice merely to dwell somewhere.

When making shipping containers, we think about the relationships between an object and an activity, reality and a model, and creating useless things.

The graduation work installation will incorporate several earlier series: objects missing from them or second versions of the existing ones. Constant returning to earlier things may earn us a little extra focused time.

What do you do besides your graduation work?

In addition to the diploma work, we are developing two architectural exhibition projects, producing a piece for a public space in Slovakia, and regularly designing the visual identity for galleries. We also serve as installation technicians, and recently we have also been making furniture and other utility things.

In what conditions would you like to work on your graduation work?

We enjoy each of our current jobs. However, in an ideal situation, we would not need so many at once. It constantly shatters our concentration. It would be nice to have at least three months of focused work.

What would you imagine to be an alternative culmination of your studies at AVU, in place of the defense of your graduation work?

Summer holidays.