My examwork at Design and Art MA at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Gurtnichair is a furniture, an arm chair which evokes a material from the 70's of Central and Eastern Europe, the gurtni, which is the white and red striped strap of the roller shutter.
Durig the examwork I worked based on the conclusion of my thesis - Narrative Furnitures. The research whith its three focuses turned into a narrative design method which was applied on my later work. I strived to create something what is meaning a lot for people and reminding them of some moments of their past. After creating several interwievs and online forms, I had a bunch of materials which reminded my interviewees of something, mainly of childhood. The most exiting was the white and red striped strap of the roller shutter, called gurtni in Hungarian. But only half of the people remembered of gurtni as the strap of the roller shutter. People here could buy only this kind of strap during the shortage economy of Soviet control and they used gurtni for a lot of things, as they didn’t have many options. They pulled sled with it, they used it for carry furnitures and also on the bottom of the chairs. The idea was to use it as they used it, to write a new chapter in the story of the gurtni and also higlight the story itself.
So how can I use this material? I made several experiments searching for possibilities for using the gurtni. The most exiting quality of the material was that it could be woven in really curvy forms. It was much better than the traditional materials used for this technique. So I made a seating furniture, a chair, which reflects this little piece of our past, highlights the story of the gurtniand at the same time creates a hungarian contemporary retro atmosphere.
The gurtni is the dominant while the frame - wich has a shape got from the memory chair-drawings of my interwievees - only serves it.
And to finally highlight the story of gurtni I also created a booklet called Gurtnitales which tells how the people used the gurtniwith fictive interviews and illustrations.