Exhibition Design Workshop with Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöft

Invitation to students of the Kunsthochschule Mainz to the digital workshop

Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöft – Exhibiton Design Workshop June 7th and 9-11th

The lecture and workshop introduces Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöfts ‘somatic’ approach to exhibition design, offering both an extensive historical perspective and a survey of current practice. Display is not only understood as an act of disclosure, but importantly as an authorial act of framing and the negotiation of content.

How is an exhibition apprehended? The visitor’s experience of an exhibition is central to its reception and yet this aspect is seldom given as much emphasis during the organizational process as the selection of theme, objects, and information. How to create a physical experience that encourages understanding, participation and emotional engagement?

As part of the workshop, the students will be creating a 3D model of a contextual space (digitally or physically).

This exercise is specifically about exploring spatial agency itself, by thinking spatially in relation to a concept or theme, without the limitations of the typical requirements for the display of ‘objects’.

The idea is to let go of practical ‘solutions’ by not limiting ‘display’ to specific art objects but focusing on being creative about spatial display in itself. The intention is to increase sensitivity and awareness of spatial conditions and their experience in order to explore the spatial possibilities of a concept or theme.

Witthöft & LaTourelle is a project-based collaboration between Danish designer Louise Witthöft  and Canadian artist Rodney LaTourelle. Working in Berlin since 2007, they have completed a wide range of projects including exhibition design for galleries and museums, art installations and public art commissions, as well as architectural light and colour concepts. Their interdisciplinary approach activates relationships between colour, pattern, space and user experience. The use of colour is central to their practice, which is characterized by chromatic immersion, interaction and sensuality. By employing colour and pattern to re-structure spatial systems they expand typically disembodied aesthetics into direct experience.