Formica Faux/Real, 2007
Formica Faux/Real was produced with Disonacias, an arts organization in Spain’s Basque region with a mission to form collaborations between international artists and regional industries. Our industry partner, Formica, a US based corporation that produces laminates for furniture and architectural interiors, has a very large production plant in Bilbao. As collaborators they offered rich visual material but had limited interest in our visual or conceptual input. Given these limitations we decided to use materials from their archives to represent our perspective on the psychosocial impact of Formica’s products after WW 2, and then to ask questions about their present practices as well as to propose future production methods and functions for their products.