When designing, Supertoys Supertoys takes the perspective on the objects as an attempt to try and imagine which shapes and colors the objects themselves tend to in the desire to express themselves the best.
According to the designers, this can also mean that they want to be something else, for example, a table that wants to be a flower, and thereby maybe gets caught in the middle in between a table and a flower. Asking these odd questions helps the designers to find new intuitive aesthetics that work on an emotional level and give them a new mode to view the world: a modern animist view.
The designers consider themselves modern animists and see all things, objects, animals, people, planets as connected to one large network, where there is nothing that is necessarily more important or less important than anything else, where objects have a spirit of their own and where things enfold into themselves.
With their work, they invite the viewer to rethink our ongoing entanglement of ‘being human through things’ and rather reconsider the ‘being human among things’ possibility, where objects are designed for what they are and not what they are for. Where objects and things become co-protagonists of a bigger story of humanity with the centuries-old elusive existential question: “Who are we?”
For Supertoys Supertoys animism offers an intuitive alternative for our current systems such as capitalism, neoliberalism, or lately the dream of a share-economy. The main focus of all these societal systems is on production and (non-)ownership of objects instead of affection and intersubjectivity between humans and things. Supertoys Supertoys is a design duo formed by Merle Flügge and Job Mouwen, based in NL, with a focus on objects and furniture.
