Unless You Remove

Objects that ask for an action

by L_2xNe

This is the second object from my friend Luis final thesis. A beautiful carpet/blanket that one can sculpt by removing material from it. It is an unique piece that by the action of removing will confort and work as a self therapy.

Usually creating an object involves the addition of material. In this project by Luis Gómez Barquín, it’s the other way around. It is all about removing the excess to slowly tailor it to individual preference. In ‘Unless you Remove’, he has applied this method to a chair and a rug, but stresses that the idea can be applied to almost anything. In the beginning, his chair is not a chair yet. It simply has the potential to become a chair. It is a cube made up of layer upon layer of thin perforated wood. Only by removing parts of the layers, does it slowly ‘degenerate’ into a chair. In the same way, Barquín’s blanket starts off as a heavy, inflexible, thick mound of woven textiles. By picking away at the cloth it is transformed into a functional blanket. This process has been designed to take time. Lots of time. Barquín believes that relatively simple, repetitive tasks have a healing effect. “People nowadays think too much. Every time you physically remove something from the object, it’s like getting rid of some mental clutter,” he says.