Our Feelosophy from Amsterdam
In addition to our London office exhibition for the London Design Festival, Design Bridge Nederland will have its own Feelosophy exhibition as part of Dutch Design Double, which runs from 4-29 October. For both exhibitions we are expressing our Feelosophy of our local areas: for London we are focusing on Clerkenwell, and in Amsterdam on the Overtoom. Here is a brief description on what it’s all about:
The predicament of our lives is that we just don’t take enough time to be aware, to be in touch with our senses and to understand what they are telling us. The chaos and noise of urban life means we use every new app and gadget available to disconnect from the world around us cocooning ourselves in a blanket of music, texts, instant messaging and social network updates.
Ironically we’re so busy connecting with others virtually we’ve detached ourselves from where we actually are. So let’s stop. Pay attention, turn off your Blackberry, un-clutter your mind for a moment and allow your senses to guide you.
We instinctively Feel. We get a constant body-mind report about the state of the world through all of our senses giving quick assessments about whether something is good for us or bad for us and this motivates us to take action accordingly. You could call it intuition or sensorial thinking, it’s simply the adding together of different perceptions to create a whole experience. We call it Feelosophy. So much more than the just the physical sensation of touch, it is the conscious subjective experience of emotion gained through our five senses that we use everyday.
Using Feelosophy has allowed us to uncover and engage with a whole world of hidden life on the Overtoom we had previously been oblivious to. We had been walking around desensitized to the cornucopia of experiences on our own door step simply because we weren’t engaging and allowing things to be truly felt perceived and understood.
So what did we discover thanks to our deep curiosity and tuning ourselves back in? Something that our subconscious probably already knew the reasons that drew us here in the first place. We are privileged to work on a road steeped in history and ever changing contexts the main artery supplying life to the heart of the city, a bustling canal, a pilgrimage route, a gateway to parks and parquets, manure and menagerie, the human touch of rehabilitation or the touch of the oldest profession in the world. It is all here. The sights, tastes, sounds, touch and smells of the Overtoom reveal the shadows of the past and hint to the possibilities of the future.
Someone much cleverer than us once said ‘the hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes’, so next time you find yourself on the Overtoom don’t let so much of what surrounds you to pass you by unnoticed. Allow yourself a human moment and remind your senses that you would like to engage with them on a more regular basis.
Design Bridge Netherland’s Feelosophy exhibition is part of Dutch Design Double from Oct 4 till Oct 29, open from 12.00-17.00, Overtoom 373i – Amsterdam.
In: Exhibitions, What are we up to? · Tags: Amsterdam, Dutch Design Double, Feelosophy
on October 3, 2010 at 5:20 pm
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[...] Posted on October 3, 2010 by ovrtmfeelosophy Design Bridge blog about Feelosophy This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. ← Work [...]
on October 7, 2010 at 1:19 pm
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[...] week our Amsterdam exhibition kicked off, and not only our reception area changed into a modern art gallery, out on the streets [...]