Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow will be the first comprehensive solo show by artist Thomas Thwaites — internationally known for iconic works such as the Goatman: Taking a Holiday from being Human and The Toaster Project. Within a presentation of existing works Thomas Thwaites will work on his newest project Harmless Car, turning Het Glazen Huis into a workspace where together with visitors he will speculate on the (im)possibilities of ‘harmless’ design during a residency from 9 through 22 July.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow brings 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 in-progress new work: the Harmless Car. The exhibition venue, het Glazen Huis in the Amstelpark, will be 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’. His envisaged Harmless Car will be an inflatable electric/methane/hydrogen powered ‘family car’ made from bio-materials, that is also a figurative vehicle for examining how design is a process of transferring harms and benefits between actors. During this exhibition Het Glazen Huis will become a public workplace in which visitors are invited to explore the questions the project raises as well as work together with Thwaites on the various stages of designing the car.

This doomed process, attempting to make a completely harmless yet road-legal car, is a means of exploring and questioning our design processes and who we design our technologies for. It is an attempt to question how we design technologies and towards what goals. The continuous production process of the Harmless Car will ultimately be translated into a research documentary, a publication, a publicly engaged arts practice/workshop space and an art installation emerging from the process of the impossible quest towards a truly ‘harmless’ car.

The Harmless Car will be the third major project of Thwaites in the iconic series of his two internationally successful works: The Toaster Project (where he tried to make an electric toaster from scratch), and Goatman (about his attempt ‘to take a holiday from being human’ by becoming a goat). Harmless Car directly responds to these earlier works. As with the first two projects the aim isn’t to build a Harmless Car, but as described above to fail to build a Harmless Car in a way that enables the true aim: engaging audiences with the calculus of harm, costs and benefits that underlies design.

The exhibition can be visited from 9 July through 24 September, from Friday to Sunday between 1pm and 5pm at het Glazen Huis, Amstelpark, Amsterdam, and on request.

Read the exhibition booklet here, with an exclusive text written by Thomas Thwaites!