Dezeen Magazine

Modus Operandi by Matylda Krzykowski

Polish design graduate and former Dezeen intern Matylda Krzykowski has tortured and destroyed a series of chairs.

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Called Modus Operandi, the project involved making thirteen plain spruce chairs and destroying each in a different way.

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One was shot with a rifle, another submerged in a pond for weeks and a third was tarred and feathered.

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Subsequent chairs in the series were burnt, burried, hanged, covered in blood, chopped up with an axe, neglected in the garden or chained up.

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Krzykowski completed the project while studying at Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht in the Netherlands.

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Watch a movie by Daniel van Hauten about the project here.

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Photographs are by Mueller3000.

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Here's some more information from Matylda Krzykowski:

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Modus Operandi

Matylda Krzykowski presents ‘Modus Operandi’ (method of operation), a series of wooden archetype chairs that are reinterpreted through a distinct pattern of methods.

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Led by an obsession for clean-cut form, the product design graduate has created a number of archetypal forms that relate with the common conception of a chair.

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Used by furniture makers for a millennia, spruce was seen as a natural choice of construction material to make the series of chairs.

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A chair, in most contexts, is a functional object of utility, commonly used to sit on.

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Yet, Matylda distorts and extracts the functionality through her ‘modus operandi’, exerting and gaining dominance over the chairs, transforming them into her conceptual pieces.

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She proceeds like a remorseful serial killer, demonstrating a hedonistic and sometimes crazed approach, before reassessing her ‘victim’, realising her conduct and ceasing.

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