How to Handle at 3daysofdesign

This June, Bankston and FOR SCALE took the exhibition How to Handle to Copenhagen for 3daysofdesign — the second chapter in an ongoing inquiry into the objects we reach for daily. How to Handle extends the intellectual territory established at NYCxDESIGN Week, pivoting from the phenomenology of touch to the decisive nature of the act itself. To handle is to act. It is the knob turned in the moment before a room changes, the bar grasped when certainty is needed, the lever that separates what was from what comes next. At Berner Kuhl on Gammel Mønt 2, that argument was made in full.

The exhibition’s front windows were covered in blue frosted vinyl, a large decal casting a soft blue hue visible from the street, pulling people in before they had arrived. Inside, mirrors by Caleb Engstrom ran along one wall, dressed in the same vinyl and bearing phrases from the exhibition’s lexicon, HANDLE IT WITH ME across their surfaces. Furniture by Currie Ritchie gave the space its material weight, fitted with hardware that could be picked up, turned, returned to. Matthew Donaldson’s six short films played across the interior walls, doors opening into different circumstances. Deliberately strange, abstract, and hard to look away from, they gave the room its atmosphere. Printed copies of For Scale’s issue were laid out as part of the show. Graphics by Lowrie gave the space its visual language.

3daysofdesign rewards this kind of proposition. Copenhagen’s annual celebration of design culture, practised at the level of the city itself and woven through its studios, showrooms and institutions, is precisely the context in which a question like How To Handle finds its audience. The festival has grown to sit alongside Milan and New York, but has kept its human scale — personal rather than overwhelming, navigable on foot and by bicycle, with a generosity between participants that kept the energy up across the three days.

Copenhagen’s design community filled Berner Kuhl on the evening of 11 June — architects, designers and creatives moving through the space, drinks from Simply Grapes in hand, Fazeek candles sitting within the Zzzigurat Candle Holders grounding the space in something tactile and immediate. The collections were not roped off or rendered passive. They were handled, considered, returned to. Conversations formed around them. The hardware, encountered at close range in a functioning, inhabited room, made exactly the kind of case that FOR SCALE’s argument had always intended: that these are objects worthy of the reach. The evening felt less like an exhibition and more like a conversation; one that, by the time the doors closed, had already made its case.

Credits: 

Collaboration: FOR SCALE 

Graphic Design: Studio Lowrie 

Spatial Design: Currie Ritchie 

Film: Matthew Donaldson

Furniture Fabrication & Mirror Hand-Painting: Caleb Engstrom 

Sound: Omnitone

Drinks: Simply Grapes

Candles: Fazeek

Venue: Berner Kuhl