“SUSPENDED”

Just a few months ago the "suspended" installation in "Schloss Solitude" in Stuttgart has finished. The Serbian architect and and artist Iva Resetar was inspired by the basic idea of the hammock to create an interactive space frame which enables the visitors to reconfigure its spatial entity by participation.

A hammock is a great provisional habitation device, mobile and light. Although usually related to tropicality and pleasure, it had a long history in the domestic life and settlements of Native Americans.
When transported to Europe, it found its use in the navy as both a space saver and a tool for maintaining balance. In the Lunar Module missions from Apollo 13 onwards, the rest positions of astronauts were ensured by hammocks.

One room in the Akademie Schloss Solitude was transformed into an elastic environment through a suspended hammock created for collective use. The loose, hanging net changes the protocol of the room´s use, providing an alternative to those habits conditioned by the orthogonal space. Working with the gravity, weight and movements of the visitors, the hammock swings, stretches and adapts to their bodies and creates a collective search for own position and balance. It evokes a feeling of being physically connected to the room and to the others within it, playing with the idea of a collective, unstable and shared environment.

The project seeks to explore what happens when the entire physicality of a room is manipulated in order to challenge the conventions of both social and bodily interaction. Since the physical components of the net are continually varying in their size, density and position, and there is no prior knowledge of the structure's quality nor the instruction for its use, the gravity and the weight of the visitors, as well as their own immediate experience and the experience of the others, become key elements of the perception of the space.