Extra Moooi: in our next exclusive movie for Moooi, designer and artist Joep Van Lieshout explains how his Rotterdam-based studio came up with the branching form of its new lamp for the Dutch brand.
Launched at the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan last year, Atelier Van Lieshout's Statistocrat lamp features a series of cylindrical shades, which branch off from a central metal pole.
Van Lieshout reveals in the movie that the lamp's distinctive form is derived from his studio's ongoing Slave City project, which consists of a series of artworks and installations based around an imaginary self-sustaining, zero-carbon prison city.
"The origin of this lamp comes from a very obscure project called Slave City," he explains. "It is is a large-scale installation where I designed a whole city for slaves."
As part of the project, Atelier Van Lieshout designed a number of diagrammatic structures featuring different volumes that represent different statistics.
"It's a comment on the world that we're living in, that many process and many decisions are made because of calculations and statistics," Van Lieshout says.
"Out of this, I came up with the lamp, which is basically a kind of diagram. It is a composition of volumes and masses."
Statistocrat is welded by hand and is available in a range of 25 different colours in hanging or floor-standing versions.
The cylindrical shades house dimmable LED bulbs, while the the floor-standing version also features a larger cylindrical volume near the base that can be used as a side-table.
"The lamp itself is made out of aluminium," Van Lieshout says. "For me it was very important that you can see how it's made."
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"It is welded and put together very much in the way I would do it in my workshop. And for me it was very important to see this origin."
This movie was filmed at Moooi's Milan show in 2015. The music featured is a track called Aglow by US artist RyIm. All photographs are courtesy of Moooi and Atelier Van Lieshout.
The movie is part of our year-long Extra Moooi collaboration, which sees us working with Moooi in Milan, New York, London and Amsterdam to get under the skin of the brand, its products and designers. Read all the stories at dezeen.com/moooi.