Exploded Kitchen

A discarded kitchen, coming apart from left to right. What begins as an ordinary run of kitchen units gradually falls open, until all that is left at the far end are separate parts.

The installation

The starting point was one complete kitchen: the one from the canteen of the Academie van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam, removed during a refurbishment. Not demolished but dismantled, and then rebuilt as a movement: on the left it still stands as it stood in the canteen, and towards the right it opens further and further. Doors swing out of their hinges, carcasses tilt away, worktops come loose from the base units. What you end up looking at is not a kitchen but an inventory of what it was made of.

That movement is the whole piece. A kitchen is an object we only ever see closed and flat; here it is unfolded through space, so that the construction, the dimensions and the sheer quantity of material suddenly become visible. An average kitchen turns out to be a great deal more than the wall you know it as.

Collaboration

Designed and made together with visual artist Pim Palsgraaf, whose work often brings demolition material and urban remnants together into new constructions.