Famous worldwide for the drone dances with which they captivated the Burning Man festival, and for ‘completing’ the Sagrada Familia with an army of suspended lights and rebuilding the Colosseum, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, founders of Drift in 2007, are also the authors of Materialism, a research project that ‘dismantles’ the material and visual complexity of objects to represent them in juxtaposed blocks of matter and color.

An operation that recalls Malevich’s or Mondrian’s approach to abstract art and reveals the essential nature of the visible world that humans have constructed through overlapping levels of matter and artifice.

“Ever since the Renaissance, scientists have probed the world systematically, using reason and observation to unravel the mystery of nature, to understand its materiality and to question humanity’s relationship to it all,” explain Gordijn and Nauta.

“That process, which began centuries ago, has produced immense knowledge, but also the awareness that the heritage of studies is just a drop in the ocean of what is knowable. At the same time, humanity has introduced millions of new artificial species to the world through industrialization and trade, objects designed for our needs and pleasure, which contain a myriad of materials bonded, fused or assembled together.

On the one hand, we believe that we have mastered this complexity through the use of things, on the other, we do not know their intimate nature, indeed we often perceive a profound disconnect from this materiality, precisely because we are unable to grasp its nature, while we don’t understand the workings of artificial objects.”

Materialism, which has recently involved in this process of de-design a richly evocative work such as the All Animals armchair by Studio Campana, is moved by a conscious sensibility guided in an ecological key. Among much else, it is a way of investigating how much of the material of which an object is made is systematically extracted from the earth.

“We have a passion for exploring the new materials that shape the world, as they have a significant and profound impact on society. When dismantling objects, you can reduce them to their principal materials. This makes it possible to trace the path from nature to industry, to grasp their actual value and the societal impact of human production.