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eet designers Mike & Maaike at this week's International Contemporary Furniture Fair (booth 2337). They will be there presenting recent works, including blankblank's limited-edition curated bookshelf, Juxtaposed: Religion, the first in the Juxtaposed series. Here's what they had to say about the concept and development of the bookshelf:
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Tell us about the design process for Juxtaposed. |
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We had been thinking about the concept of selling a bookshelf that included the books. We wanted to take a curatorial approach by inviting different people to curate different collections of books. We worked with John to select the first series of books. Each book was measured to the millimeter and input into a 3D CAD program. Through sketches and 3D experimentation, we explored different approaches to integrating the books with the shelf. The challenge was to keep the shelf looking like a shelf, while creating a new way of interfacing with the books. In a conventional bookshelf, the bottoms of the books are naturally on the same plane- this inspired us to do the opposite- arranging the books so that their tops are on the same plane. We liked the idea that the books are brought to the same level. The idea of using a solid block of wood was also something that came about after we tried many different approached to the construction. This was the most direct approach-physically and conceptually heavy. Reclaimed hardwood was used in order to maintain a level of sustainability.
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Why these 7 books? |
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The process of selecting the books is by nature controversial biased, and - some would say - arbitrary. Why these seven religions? Are they more important than other religions? If so, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of placing them side by side? Aren't we just reinforcing the gatekeeper mentality that has led many within some of these traditions to torture, maim, and kill those who aren't true believers–all in the name of God or the names of many gods? What about the many religious traditions that have long histories and diverse rituals but that don't rely primarily on any one text or group of texts?
I considered all of these questions, and honestly, they still trouble me when I think of the fact that my name is permanently attached to this grouping of texts. I didn't engage in a scientific process, but I thought of some general criteria to go by. First, the religion itself had to either be based on a particular text or rely on a long-standing oral or written tradition that is still important within the context of belief. This is obviously more true of certain texts (the Koran, the Torah, the Christian Bible) than of others, in which the text plays a different role. Second, the religion or belief system itself had to be influential. This is perhaps where the selection process will receive the most criticism. Why, for example, include the Torah by itself when it's already included in the Christian Bible, and why include Judaism at all when its adherents number fewer than Sikhism, which isn't included? The short answer is that Judaism is one of the most influential living religions, and both its lived experience and its seminal text are important to other book-based faiths, including Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism. Younger faiths, including Sikhism, Mormonism, and Baha'i Faith are fast-growing and popular; there is no inherent reason to omit them. And yet the shelf could have become a library of religious texts; many religions include multiple sacred texts. So I drew a line, perhaps arbitrarily, and tried to include the great monotheistic traditions of long standing as well as the most seminal faiths of the East. Some, including Taoism and Confucianism, are as much philosophical and ethical systems as they are religions, but their influence in Asia cannot be underestimated, and isn't it a very Western notion to separate religion from practical philosophy in the first place?
These seven books are meant to be neither a crash course in world religions nor an accurate summary of the last four millennia of human philosophical, ethical, and religious thought. They stand on their own, of course, but it is only within very specific contexts that they make any sense, either as historical documents or as the texts on which billions of people base their everyday lives. These specific contexts are usually missing in our world. We claim to understand our own way of life, but we have little time to learn about other people. They are alternatively strange, backwards, irrational, faithless, and reckless. But how many of us truly understand the historical, religious, and legal reasons for our way of life, the things we hold dear and the things we fear? Even the Enlightenment, the great Western reaction to and abandonment of the “irrationality” of Christian hegemony made use of religious terms, concepts, and logic. Rather than try to escape or destroy religion's influence–as Freethought, Secular Humanism, Rationalism, and many other movements over the millennia have attempted to do–we should try to understand it, if for no other reason than to be able to live with each other rather, peaceably, without the need to try to prove that our way of believing (or not believing) is superior to our neighbor's.
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