El Ultimo Grito is a design collaboration founded 1997 in London, which moved to Berlin in the spring of 2007. The two designer-directors are Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado. They define their work as a way of thinking that materializes itself in many different forms and changes our way of seeing and enjoying design.
In 2002, they started exploring viral on-site installations, which they made out of cheap materials and waste and covered with stickers. “We like to work with stickers and tape as immediate tools for making objects and spaces real, and we use their graphic qualities as a secondary layer of meaning. We like the ephemeral character of these constructions. You can constantly change them. If you’re tired of the color or even the shape, simply add another layer. If it breaks, you fix it with more padding and tape or more stickers — or whatever. Through layers you can create a truly individual object."
Installed in the summer of 2007, their latest intervention is a public seating arrangement for the patio area of La Casa Encendida, a contemporary art center in Madrid, which is used as a place to gather and relax by visitors and working groups. The bench is a solid structure built on-site by El Ultimo Grito with participants of a workshop over the course of three days. The improvised and spontaneous process was a direct response to the location, and it generated an open dialogue about preconceived ideas of design and the particular qualities of the space itself.
The visual art group Zaunka recorded this process, and the resulting film works as part of the installation on an additional level; it gives the public insight into the creative process, and thus demystifies the production of designed objects.
The installation is part of El Ultimo Grito’s objects and obstacles series, which “... sprang from the discovery that the word “object” comes from the Latin root of “obstacle,” which in a way is quite revealing, since objects are always things that are in the way, but mainly because the objects are the main obstacle to thinking differently about the nature of objects altogether."
