Forsaking Function – ‘The Uncomfortable’ by Katerina Kampani, a series of inconvenient objects.
It was Picasso who told us to learn the rules like pros, so we could break them like artists. Breaking rules were the premise which Katerina Kampani, a Greek architect based her collection on. The Uncomfortable is a series of random, everyday objects with one common denominator – they’re all impossible to use. What makes these products so amusing is how inconvenient they’re purposefully designed to be.
For Katerina, ‘The Uncomfortable’ was an act of rebellion, a deliberate eschewing of everything she learned in design school. After retaining the core properties of an object like material, form or colour, she proceeds to turn it on its head by tweaking an element essential to its functioning, subtly tricking the viewer into a slow realization of its obvious pointlessness. The idea that art doesn’t have to be utilitarian springs forth from this collection, as does an appreciation of the functionality we’ve known to take for granted in the everyday ordinary.
Here’s a list of our favourite pieces from the collection. While some of these are prototypes, others are virtual 3d models.
Photographs via Katerina Kamprani
