Muebles Manuel

Untitled is furnished with various pieces made by Muebles Manuel, an extension of Manuel Raeder’s graphic design and publishing studio. Muebles Manuel’s line of furniture explores the connections and boundaries between exhibitions, books, archives, and typography. Working closely with Witte de With to furnish the space, and knowing these pieces would be integrated within Federico Herrero’s Open Envelope, Raeder has conceived areas for contemplating, socializing, and browsing. Some of the furniture pieces were designed especially for Untitled, while others come from its existing catalog and were slightly modified to fit the purpose of this exhibition space.

The furniture design combines manual labor and industrial design. For example, the Adrián Chair, that accompanies the rounded and oval-shaped tables in the space, consists of a hand-woven cover made of palmtree-thread by Oaxacan artisan Adrián López, a collaborator of Raeder, which are placed over an industrially-made monobloc plastic chair. The Z-bookshelves consist of several powder-coated steel ladders that are held together by plastic cable-ties. The premise of their design is drawn from the Roman letters A and Z. The metal elements placed over the shelves are called Buch Arms, and were originally created as a simple cataloguing tool for librarians and archivists.