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Exhibition view, Graduation 18, Design Academy Eindhoven, Dutch Design Week 2018

Copyright: Design Academy Eindhoven, Photographs: Ronald Smits

The Bonding Boundary: Fence as a Meeting Point

Social Design MA, graduation project

Design Academy Eindhoven, 2018

CALL FOR FENCES

Independence and privatisation have stripped us of the casual connections with otherness, therefore leaving us isolated and lacking social skills. Given this situation we need to return to a culture of fences instead of building a culture of walls.

The current consumerist society focuses strictly on individuals and the efficient fulfilling of their own needs. We can choose to live our lives by only confronting those who we get along with. The uncomfortable necessity of taking other people’s positions into account is being minimized by the restructuring of lifestyle and public space. Physical walls and mental hibernation have become the common solution to bypass the unwanted communication with those whose priorities differ to ours. Separation allows us to ignore the irritating otherness.

We are witnessing the era of walls...

Wait! Isn’t this then a contradiction of a city’s and the world’s greatest quality of being a place of cultural diversity and social exchange? 

We need boundaries, but they must be subtle. While the wall is blind and solid, the fence is porous and allows for interaction. By letting communication happen, as it defines the territory of both parties, it divides yet also binds. To remain in a stimulating and dignified connection with otherness, we must turn walls into fences.

The Bonding Boundary proposes an infrastructure for public space which creates a modicum of privacy while also promoting a communal atmosphere; much like the situation between two neighbouring backyards separated by a fence. 

The set consists of visually strongly spatial elements that are vertical and horizontal mobile surfaces of textile or rigid lines of poles, and by that an additional, more described space is constituted on top of the already existing one. The installation is a guiding medium, an indicator through which visitors can relate to one another.  The linkage between people through the infrastructure appears from the placement and movements of the textiles as well as of the bodies in space.  Every new visitor becomes a significant and integral part of the installation. 

Through this the city becomes not only hospitable for individuals but also gains a social value. Cultivating the culture of fences is to persistently manoeuvre within the duality of human relations, between private and public, between nearness and distance and between inside and outside. The culture of fences is the culture of dialogue. Coming to the fence can teach us how to remain interrelated...