Julius Dusch & Suraya Latul

Stay Flexible! - A Myriad of Interludes is a reflective research on community and collaboration materialised in a graduation exhibition by Suraya Latul and Julius Dusch.

We saw our graduation project as an opportunity to design and curate our department’s graduation show together. And, as a collective, the class trusted us with our expo and this position. We see exhibition design as an important topic within our department. Finalizing four years of interior architecture and furniture design, we want to take this last opportunity to celebrate our class and department. Thus, we worked on the spatial design, graphic identity, and curation. We also programmed a library, radio show, and screening space and organized dinners, drinks, and gatherings.

Our motivation is to connect. We believe designing, and especially designing architecture, is a social practice. It is collaboration that enabled this project to become more elaborate and layered. Initiating conversation, facilitating, and prompting we looked for ways to navigate the social aspects of spatial design, curating, and programming.

We facilitated agency by creating space, allowing everybody to come into that space, deeply grounding the project in the group. Closely looking at what was available to us, the project focussed on reaction and continuation. Building upon what is already there, holding on to it for a moment, and guiding it towards its next journey. Working with re-used material – curved tubes, sewn and cut textile, left-over floorings – the materials all leave traces of their previous use. These material cues influenced the spatial design. The process towards the exhibition has become a constant interaction between us, our classmates, the materials, and our studio space, which is its context.

This interaction generated an entangled and layered group effort as a context where boundaries between ownership have started to blur. Placing the projects close to each other, the works become entangled. This resembles how our natural working spaces have looked. In this collaborative practice, it can never be said that what you do belongs solely to you, it is the accumulation of interactions with those around you: material, immaterial, living, and non-living.