Numen/For Use, a Croatian-Austrian design collective, installed a large scale site-specific art project in Melbourne, Australia.

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Description from Numen/For Use:

Tape Melbourne was specially commissioned by Melbourne’s main civic centre and cultural district Federation Square as a part of their Creative Program focussing on experimental large-scale public art and its social and communal relevance. The full 16 meters stretch of the Fed Square’s Western Terrace is the greatest span traversed by a Tape Installation thus far. The structure had to be constructed with the help of special platforms as it projects from the external walls of the Fed Square’s SBS building at the height of 6 meters above ground. Its more slender and tenuous, distinctly willowy form is dictated by the specifics of the bridged span and setting. Tape Melbourne is the first Tape Installation to be executed outside Europe and below the equator.

Tape installation was envisaged as a site specific, parasitical structure invading an arbitrary location. The straight lines of main trajectories are stretched across a given area and these tendons are then wrapped diagonally with layers of elastic tape, giving shape to a complex organic form through a process similar to the emergence of such structures in nature. With the further layering of the tape, the figure becomes more and more corporeal as it picks up on the slow increase of the curvature. The interior of the structure is supple, elastic, and pliable while the form itself is statically perfect, as it ideally follows the trajectories of forces, being literally defined by them. In the moment when the audience enters the installation, what started off as a sculpture seamlessly morphs into architecture.