Joana Schneider’s overwhelming rugs for overwhelming times

If you’ve ever been to Dutch Design Week, you know it’s a bombardment of ideas wherever you go. Walk ten feet and I’ll guarantee you’ll miss at least concepts that…tsk, tsk…you really should have seen. With their ultra-fluorescent colors, however, the textile hangings by Joana Schneider were pretty hard to walk by without at least looking. They were bold, they were beautiful and they were making a statement – although it took me a while to find out what that statement was, but I’ve found it! Apparently, this series of rugs is called ‘Demiurge’ and serve asa a warning against the world’s first long-term storage of nuclear waste in Onkalo, Finland. Very Zeitgeisty, as Douglas Coupland used to say.

Now, let me give you my two cents. I really think Joana’s work deserved a better place than the industrial parking garage that is the Veemgebouw. Can I say that? Sure I can! Because if there is one interior design lesson I’ve learned these past twelve months, is that it is all about context. I mean, just imagine those wild and crazy colors and textures not in a former factory but rather in a sophisticated setting. A bon chic bon genre Paris townhouse  perhaps, or an upscale boutique hotel. Now that would be a political statement (instead of preaching for the choir as they seemed to be doing at Dutch Design Week).

And now that I think of it…one of these Joana Schneider rugs would look stunning in a certain international art and design writer with an all-pink apartment *cough*. Sure it would be kind of overwhelming, but then again we live in verwhelming times and I wouldn’t mind if interior design got a bit more rebellious and political. F*ck good taste!

Joana Schneider doesn’t have a webpage of her own just yet – but her Instagram feed looks quite promising!