In this project, Daniel Jacoby takes Amsterdam’s phone shops as a point of departure: the successors of the now-obsolete internet cafés. The congestion of made-in-China smartphone accessories displayed, together with their eye-catching decorations, render these shops into representative specimens of hybridisation in our globalised world.

The phone shops he is focusing on in Saldo are often stamped with a big Lebara sponsor sign They serve as hubs for all sorts of third-party digital, transactional, and delivery services. The resourceful ways in which these merchants exploit their mostly narrow spaces has been an inspiration for the series of works exhibited.

Extracting visual elements from these establishments’ front windows and borrowing the format of the fashion collection, Jacoby made a series of ‘wearable shops’. By assembling a large number of the products sold in these stores into flat panels that can be attached to a person’s body, he created a cross-breed between sculpture and garment. 

With movement in mind, Jacoby is currently producing a larger collection of wearables following the concept developed for the works exhibited at the Amsterdam Museum. These works have been liberated from the more rigid structures. As in the prototype sculptures, the textiles of these blankets have been extracted from elements from our immediate urban landscape, like supermarket shopper bags, ornamental tablecloths and second-hand clothes. All these fragments are being patched together through quilting: a technique that not only honors the departing spirit of resourcefulness, but also results in compositions that resemble ancient Peruvian textiles and that way closes a circle of associations. The works come to life in a video in which they are carried through the urban landscape. 

Credits

Project: Daniel Jacoby (@daniel__jacoby)

Quilting: Anastasia Starostenko

Performer: Luca Hillen (https://www.facebook.com/jensharzer)

Video: Melissa Opti (@melissa_opti)

Music: CEPH (@more.than.non.human)

Support: AFK, Mondriaan Fonds, De Appel