TAPE WANÅS
Numen/For Use is an industrial design collective established by Nikola Radeljkovic, Sven Jonke, and Christoph Katzler in 1998. The group has actively worked to erase the barriers between design, architecture, and scenography, and describe their work as a playground for testing ideas in relation to various tasks. At the request of a choreographer, they created an installation of tape that documented and related to dancers’ movements in 2008. Since then, they have continued experimenting with tape, rope, and nets in elaborate forms and spatial constellations.
The site-specific installation Tape Wanås, at Wanås Konst, was not constructed digitally in advance but was created on site in an analog and a physical process. The sprawling tape lines in the barn from the 1700s, show different stages of the undertaking. One part of the installation forms a tunnel to crawl through, and another place features an opening to look up through. The installation examines the old, cathedral-like building as it continues through the space and outward through an open hatch, and affixed to tree branches outside, creates a portal that can be walked beneath. Visitors are invited in the cavities of the hovering large structure, which opens for discoveries for both mind and body.
Parallel to a fascination with the possibilities of the material, the group began working to find a sustainable replacement for conventional tape, and over a ten-year period, they have been investigating the production of alternatives. Step by step, and in close dialogue with a manufacturer, they have developed a biodegradable version of tape. The installation at Wanås Konst, is the second one created with this new material. The first was at the Garage Museum in Moscow in 2019 as a part of the exhibition The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100.