'How to Dress ...'

competition for a mobile bar by KunstCocktail - invited entry

exhibited @
Galerie Engelhorn, Vienna 2004
WUK Projektraum, Vienna 2005

published in
'Mobile Bar'. hotelstyle 6A - OKT 2004
'Webvoting: Designwettbewerb für eine neue mobile Bar', in: derStandard.at/LeichtSinn, 8.5.2004
'KuCo-Bar', online exhibition

  

  

The proposed mobile KuCo Bar shares an important common interest with the KunstCocktail community: it dresses to the occasion, i.e. it chooses outfits which go well with the respective art event. From pinstripe to leather, from jeans to sari, from risqué to ritzy, from postcolonial camp to surprisingly mundane, from overdressed to underdressed – there is no end to the imaginative expansion of the bar’s wardrobe.

The construction of the dressed body of the KuCo Bar is based on a flexible plug-in system of upholstered monolithic ‘body parts’. Each ‘body part’ weighs less than 20 kilos and the entire bar can be moved by one person within less than 30 minutes. The tactile qualities of the chosen fabrics extend the sensuality of the soft body of the bar and enable it to develop its character in line with a multitude of events, moods and fashions.

The changing dresses of the KuCo Bar not merely provide a different visual appeal for each single event but offer a constantly changing inhabitable environment. This space of becoming allows the bar to enter into dialogue with both the event and its audience enhancing its nature as a focus point of contact and exchange.