The Slow Room
- Milan
- Rune Bakke
- Exhibitions
- 2025
The proposition was simple to describe and difficult to get permission for: one room, four people, no time limit, no photography, no staff inside.
We built a room within a courtyard building in Brera — plastered walls, brick floor, one long window with a linen blind drawn to a fixed height — and furnished it with nine pieces, all of them made for use rather than for the fair. A table. Four chairs. A bench in the window. A low cabinet. Two lamps. A rug. Nothing was on a plinth and nothing carried a price.
The light was set once and never adjusted: roughly the level of a north-facing room an hour before dusk. Visitors queued outside, entered in fours, and left when they wanted to. The median stay across six days was nineteen minutes. Several people stayed over an hour. One returned three times.
We were repeatedly asked what the room was advertising. The answer was that it was a test of whether a furnished interior, presented without any of the apparatus of a trade fair, could hold attention — and it turned out that it could hold considerably more of it than anything else we have shown.
The whole installation was dismantled in a day and the nine pieces went into a house in Sweden.