Laura Dominici + Basil Schu
Austria
At COLLECTIBLE New York, LAZY SWIM is an outdoor bench crafted from stainless steel and pool noodles. This piece merges aesthetic simplicity with rigorous design, using just two elements: pool noodles serve as the soft, straight seat cushion, while the stainless steel, bent like a pool ladder, forms the sturdy frame. The bench evokes the refreshing feeling of stepping into cool waters, blending playful associations with minimalist design.
Laura Dominici is interested in the everyday realities of our lives: the new world of work, but above all the breaks and pauses in between, the idleness, the monotony, the routine and the joy that can be found in it. She designs utopian objects that highlight these moments for the user and serve as a seed of inspiration for their own imagination. This summer she collaborated with Basil Schu, a Viennese artist and botanist whose work explores how the rules of social coexistence are expressed in different concepts of landscape. He developed objects and instruments to manipulate and play with, sought allies and formed secret groups. Then he matured into a botanist to explore the other side. Together they work on the illusion of a garden. "LAZY SWIM" is the first glimpse of their collaboration.