A Moth in the Room is an exhibition featuring graduation works by eight researchers and designers from the Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design (MIARD) at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, who explore what it means to practise within the field of spatial design today. The exhibition includes projects by: Silvia Elisa Bianchini, Mila Broomberg, Anna Krikke, Josephine Goverts, Nicole Jessé, Artemis Mitsiou, Sungryul Jun and Anna Maria Zuech.
In Gallery 3 an unruly moth was found nestled within some production equipment, challenging the gallery’s regulation that “anything alive cannot be in the gallery space”. As a harbinger of disruption, the moth intuitively seeks out spaces of seclusion to hatch larvae and devour material. It acts as an intermediary between the institution and the outside world, as well as a marker of change and transformation.
A Moth in the Room derives from the work of eight researchers and designers who map, trace, cast, carve out and (re)construct different critical spatial narratives to propose non-conformist approaches to architectural practice. Within the show, scavenged images depict a museum storage depot archiving contested histories while screens become portals between fact and fiction. Life-size charcoal rubbings of intimate interiors challenge traditional perceptions of public and private, as an amplified sourdough colony gives voice to a previously unheard world. Salt is traced through both geologic and human timescales while furry tools speculate on future urban seed dispersal. Soil and clay mourn stories of displacement and the memory of Dutch furniture objects is obscured with Calico.
As we graduate, institutional education spaces around the world are being galvanised as sites of collective rejection of infrastructures of violence. We cannot fail to acknowledge the role of architecture and spatial design within these systems. The projects in this exhibition all share a common thread of revealing what is not able or meant to be seen. By lending attention to the critters and creatures that have infiltrated the gallery’s borders; A Moth in the Room, the show speculates on the power of these intrusions to challenge and transform our understanding of space and its boundaries.