Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow – Thomas Thwaites

Zone2Source, het Glazen Huis, Amstelpark
7 juli – 4 september, 2023

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow brings Thomas Thwaites’ works produced over the past decade together for the first time, but also extends the exhibition format to be a workshop space for his new work-in-progress, a project dedicated to create ‘A Harmless Car‘. The gallery space will become part art exhibition and part car mechanics workshop, that aims to show how objects are political, through the humorous narrative of his absurd attempt to make a car that is simply ‘harmless’.

Thwaites’ envisaged ‘Harmless Car’ will be an inflatable electric/methane/hydrogen powered ‘family car’ made from organic materials. It is also a figurative vehicle for examining how design is a process of transferring harms and benefits between actors. In the course of working on the Harmless Car Thomas will approach researchers working in fields such as vehicle manufacture, safety and testing, inflatable design and manufacture, life cycle, assessment, mineral extraction, biomaterials and so on. The exhibition becomes a public workplace in which people are invited to explore the questions the project raises as well to work together with Thwaites on the various stages of designing and making the car.

Thomas Thwaites is an artist and designer whose body of work at first appears rather eclectic, encompassing fictional speculative futures (Policing Genes) and counterfactual histories (Unlikely Objects), straight documentary film (Nine Episodes), mechanical sculpture (Voodoo Economics), and process-performance works (The Toaster Project and Goatman).