Ever wondered what it’d be like slithering down the insides of giant snake skin? The visitors to the Numen/For Use installation Tape Paris at Palais De Tokyo, as a part of the ‘Inside’ exhibition held in January 2015, got a chance to have a similar experience. Tape Paris took twelve people about ten days to wrap up tape membrane above and around the columns in the main exhibition space of the Palace- thus exploring the potential of these usually dead and empty overhead spaces in a highly interactive way.
Courtesy of Numen/For Use
This play of translucent biomorphic skin against the formal concrete columns invoked romantic notions of the material’s aspiration for lightness. These accessible passageways provided the visitors with an extremely different psychological experience and an interesting play with their senses as they climbed, slid, relaxed, or simply moved through the elastic insides.
Courtesy of Numen/For Use
According to Numen/For Use, “The main idea was to transform the whole building into a convulsive mind/body organism whose slippery inner limits a motivated explorer has yet to trace and confront.” Tape Paris is an installation which is truly befitting to the firm’s motto of designing within firmly set typological frameworks, without any great experiments or breaks with tradition, but with a subtle and careful coordination of all the constituent elements of the product.
Courtesy of Numen/For Use
BY: Priyanka Shah
