Benjamin Motoc grew up in the suburbs of Paris, where identity politics has fought its way to the forefront of cultural discourse over the last century.
With French, Vietnamese and Romanian heritage, he develops alternative crafting techniques which extend a search for a unique identity and belonging that began in childhood. Some of his pieces are objects as much as they are sculptures, flirting with the boundaries of labelling categories. After graduating from the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL), he moved to Rotterdam where he established his studio in 2020.
For his metal pieces, he was seduced by the idea of opposite forces generating something new ; Motoc started manipulating hot wax and ice into material choreographies to create organic shapes and unique textures. The core of this practice is to activate concepts by exploring the potential of materials through alternative crafting methods. For the legs of the console Kron, for example, the tubes that support the ice cast box are the channels through which the bronze was poured through at the foundry. The tubes (usually chopped off) have been placed symmetrically for the metal to flow efficiently down the mould, as well as creating legs for the object to be functional and a support structure to tell the story of how metal sculptures are already made for thousands of years.
Whereas the Functional Drawing chair is a project that deals with the concept of perspectives, positioning and the process of creating objects from simple drawings, there are many different ways and methodologies for designers to start their creative process, and sketching is the most common way to visualise a starting idea. The chair embodies this act and projects the drawing into a volume. It is a playful look in the production process of a designer which is intricate yet often taken for granted: starting on paper, and making a sketch become a physical object. This chair is a suggestion to reconsider our simplest blue ball pen drawings as final designs.
