The bookshelf interlocks without mechanical fasteners or glue; able to be disassembled & flat-packed for easy storage, transportation, and re-assembly.
Cut-sheet illustrating layout of parts with dog-bone connection details on five 4’x8’ sheets of 3/4” plywood.
With a limited budget, we proposed starting from a standard 4’x8’ board so that it could be CNC milled to minimize cost of labor & ensure precision for interlocking pieces.
(above) Assembly diagram for reference and to ensure future usefulness. Since the exhibit, the shelf has gone on to live another life as an integral part of the Parsons Live Project exhibition in collaboration with the Stonewall National Monument Visitor’s Center & Pride Live.
Conceived by C& Co-founders and Artistic Directors Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, the project offers a selection of key, and, at times, unexpected texts that spark discourse on the enduring structures that continuously undergird colonial legacies in modern society. “Unfinished,” here, subtly echoes the “post” in postcolonial—hinting at an incomplete reckoning with colonialism and its evident and insidious aftermaths.
Launched in 2017, the reading room has traveled to art spaces and museums around the world, connecting in various ways with institutions such as ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Transmediale in Berlin, school in Vienna, Musée Les Abattoir in Toulouse, Para Site in Hong Kong, or for its first US iteration the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
Read more about the installation here.
"As with previous iterations, the reading room upends traditional forms of display in both content and form. Books meander through angular shelves next to, above, and across from each other in challenging, experimental, unconventional ways to mirror the tension and discomfort historically embedded in discussions on colonization."
