Germany, 1994
leoniehennicke.de
Very Clear Instructions
How do ambiguity, tenderness and bewilderment influence work? How to work within structures that leave room for openness and vulnerability and how to produce with the clash of instructions and interpretation? Very Clear Instructions is the result of finding and testing strategies to work.
I started researching into ways of setting up an autonomous project by giving myself assignments or by getting assignments from others. Meanwhile a group of teenage girls asked me to design the yearbook for their graduation and I started working for and with them. We gave each other project suggestions and instructions that created an exchange of different works.
The hanging meadow as such, is the result of one girl’s suggestion (which reads as following: “upside down → visual gravitation → ceiling as meadow, many oversized flowers”) and two days of collective working.
The project was not about finding one perfect way of working or defining a set of rules that apply to every design process, rather about investigating how this process can stay soft and – through subjectivity and ambiguity – oppose an exclusive and closed nature of design.
