A typographic installation by Team Thursday, exploring how a flexible facade can transform a small space into a possible indoor billboard.

In their ongoing exploration of city surfaces, Team Thursday likes to look at cities and their own daily environment, as if they are a permanent tourist. They like the “fresh eyes” that one can have just arriving in a place, not totally comprehending this place yet (maybe never comprehending it). The small and big things that one notices the first days, and quickly become more ‘normal’ as the days pass. 

They like to scan a city surface visually, make as many photos as possible, and add these to their ongoing database of surfaces. From those photos, they extract “tools” to design with, like the “Does a Face Have a Chronology?” book where actual bricks are transformed into elements that build letters and eventually a typeface (this book is also on show at Around the world: Between Pages). For the hidden letters in this space, they took inspiration from a shadow of a stainless steel bookcase they designed for Kunstinstituut Melly (together with Koen Taselaar and Tomas Dirrix). They made wallpaper of this shadow, and morphed it again into a much smaller pattern, made out of the stacked shapes, forming a kind of “saliva-print”, that they screen printed on tongue-shaped cushions. 

Eventually, they are morphing this saliva again, and this time into letters. Testing size and shape, they transformed their exhibition space into an all-consuming type specimen. The text, “clinging to the surface” or now in Italian “aggrapparsi alla superficie” is a fragment of the text shown in their book DAFHAC?, written by Michiel Huijben. They like to envision these letters becoming cityscapes again.