One example: barred from travelling to Kosovo for a 2011 project with Red76, I built two Mari tables in a disused storefront in Long Island City in parallel with two tables that were to be built within the hosting art center in Priština.  The tables became work surfaces for a project called Kosovo Reading Room (2011), an open access bookmaking studio and library which I operated with Kendra Sullivan that summer. Skype calls with Red76 and talks and screenings in the Long Island City space that were broadcast to Kosovo created a link between and a mirroring of the two sites, reinforced by the presence of Mari’s tables in the two sites. Moreover, Mari’s aesthetic served as a touchstone to the project’s focus on the “parallel education system” that operated clandestinely in restaurant backrooms and cellars to ensure the education of Kosovar nationals in the years surrounding the Kosovo War (1998 – 1999).

As much a toolkit a philosophy for a pragmatic and socially-engaged form of design, Mari’s Autoprogettazione aims to “teach anyone to look at the present state of [industrial] production” with a critical eye. Mari suggests that good design must orient toward “real needs” rather than aesthetic innovation, because “everything exists already.”  His work calls the user of an object to play an active role in the object’s design and construction.  By extension, we are encouraged to remake the world with our own hands, based on essential needs.  While you do find reproduction Mari furniture on the Internet these days, the authentic Mari is the one you build.

For Accompaniment, Mari’s tables are (re)constructed in collaboration with specific needs and requests by the curators and other artists in the Accompaniment exhibition.  Enzo Mari is contacted and asked to be interviewed about his work as it has figured as a site of and support for accompaniment.

Inspired by the Lumières Brothers’ 1895 film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon, in which the filmmakers turned their cameras on their own workers as they leave the worksite.  In the process, the worker is effectively recast as the first film actor in their moment between work and leisure time.  Workers Leaving the Museum, turns the regard of the cultural institution back upon itself, and to follow museum workers beyond their work on the “production lines” of the cultural factory, to register their comportment as they are leaving the museum, and to inquire about their role in the creation of culture.

The project was presented this Summer at MASS MoCA as one of three pieces commissioned by James Voorhies of Bureau for Open Culture for the exhibition “I am Searching for Field Character.”