Numen / For Use
Austro-Croatian Design Collective By Adriana SzkolnikMulti-faceted designers create an architecture of lightness.
Numen, in Roman religion, referred to a divine power or spirit believed to inhabit an object or place. Numen / For Use is a design collective formed by Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljkovic in 1999: the studio creates products under the name For Use, while design and site-specific work is carried out under the Numen banner. For Use has created some interesting furniture designs, but it's Numen's installation work that's really worthy of note, particularly their surprisingly poetic work with that everyday office staple, transparent adhesive tape. Small-scale installations at historical buildings or industrial concrete structures began around 2008, followed by a complex, dazzling set design concept for a dance performance in which tendons of multiple layers of tape transformed and evolved with the movement of the dancers. In 2010, a monumental installation won an award at the DMY International Design Festival in Berlin: almost 45 kilometers' worth of tape, stretched into an amorphous human spider web that observers were allowed to explore. By rediscovering simple materials to assemble an architecture of lightness, Numen created an eye-catching structure almost with a life of its own.
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