Wonderholland
Type: Exhibition design Location: Foro Traiano, Rome, Italy Client: Marianna Vecellio, curator Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water
Dutch design is known for shifting the boundary between reality and fiction, for its ironic re-interpretation of our everyday environment, for a search for the escape from the real.
WonderHolland proposes the confrontation of this attitude within the monumental setting of the Foro Traiano. But how can we re-invent reality in a context where reality is already based on the endless stratification of a thousand different histories? Where the everyday reality already confronts us with the superposition of the transient artefacts of our consumer age with the surreal presence of a solitary column, bearing the burden of a few thousand years?
We propose a single intervention that allows us to present the Foro Traiano in a new perspective; a single intervention as a device to allocate the territory of the Dutch Art and Design in the overwhelming monumentality of the historical context; a single intervention, based on the endless stratification of the historical context. We propose the addition of a new layer to the existing everyday reality.
This new layer consists of a framework, a layout of rooms. This lay-out is represented only by their foundations, a new ruin in itself. The rooms are connected by doors. These doors mark the threshold of another world, a new reality. There is no inside, no more outside. Like Alice, one tumbles from one room into another.