Muebles Manuel at Kunstinstituut Melly
Untitled is furnished with various pieces made by Muebles Manuel, an extension of Manuel Raeder’s graphic design and publishing studio. Muebles Manuel’s line of furniture explores the connections and boundaries between exhibitions, books, archives, and typography. Working closely with Witte de With to furnish the space, and knowing these pieces would be integrated within Federico Herrero’s Open Envelope, Raeder has conceived areas for contemplating, socializing, and browsing. Some of the furniture pieces were designed especially for Untitled, while others come from its existing catalog and were slightly modified to fit the purpose of this exhibition space.
The furniture design combines manual labor and industrial design. For example, the Adrián Chair, that accompanies the rounded and oval-shaped tables in the space, consists of a hand-woven cover made of palmtree-thread by Oaxacan artisan Adrián López, a collaborator of Raeder, which are placed over an industrially-made monobloc plastic chair. The Z-bookshelves consist of several powder-coated steel ladders that are held together by plastic cable-ties. The premise of their design is drawn from the Roman letters A and Z. The metal elements placed over the shelves are called Buch Arms, and were originally created as a simple cataloguing tool for librarians and archivists.
Inaugurated in May 2018, it is sited in our now freely accessible ground floor gallery. Untitled is conceptually conceived as a Matryoshka doll, where one work holds another work, which contains another work, and so forth, infinitely. To offer this multi-layered experience, there are a variety of display mechanisms and presentation formats in the gallery. Each of these involves different exhibition time-periods and engages with varying spans of attention in terms of how they’re rolled-out and experienced.
For its part, new books are added every month to the bookshelves in Untitled and can be browsed through or purchased on site. This progressively growing inventory of the bookstore component of Untitled is made by the Witte de With team and guest participants, who select a theme and related bibliography. The bookstore also includes titles relating to artists participating in Witte de With’s exhibitions, and titles published by Witte de With over the years. Additionally, it features publications selected by TENT and CBK Rotterdam, which center on artists living here in Rotterdam and on local topics more broadly.
In Untitled, a series of events and public programs take place on a regular basis, especially on weekends. Please check the Calendar for event listings. We tend to serve refreshments at every program, and offer a casual atmosphere to engage with contemporary art and culture, to openly exchange ideas and hold conversations, and to make meaningful encounters with people.
Kicking-off in Autumn 2018, is a new initiative involving a work-study fellowship program for Rotterdam youth. Including courses ranging from art history to hospitality to business, the new initiative entails a hiring program that sees the participants collectively running the program and operations of Untitled in collaboration with the Witte de With team. Not just a gallery or classroom, not fully a bookstore or café, Untitled is designed to be both a site and an occasion for collective learning.
