Between spaces and objects
Project Index
2025
Invaluable Objects
Souvenirs of hypermodernity and their attributed spaces
Image series & Essay
2024
Away From Keyboard
Webseries
Genres: Social & Cultural
This programme is: Quirky, Sentimental, Relaxing
2024
The Solar Share
(Horizontal Photobioreactor Prototype)
Collaboration
2024
Mechanical Turk
Animation
2023
Unicode Standard
Publication
2022
Kylym
Installation & Publication
2022
Liminal Atlas
Print & Publication
2020
Territory
Design Dictionary
Exhibition/Space design
ISEA 2023 Paris, France
Ars Electronica 2024 Linz, Austria
Invaluable Objects
Souvenirs of hypermodernity and their attributed spaces
The production of contemporary souvenirs increasingly takes place far from the locations they
claim to represent, embedded within global systems of extraction, mass production, and accelerated
circulation. This project examines low-value souvenir objects—specifically keychains—as material and spatial expressions of hypermodernity, drawing on theories of non-places (Marc Augé), speed and dromology (Paul Virilio), and consumption and waste (Hannah Arendt). By tracing the production
chains of these objects and situating them within the overstimulating environments of urban souvenir shops, the research explores how abundance and bulk buying obscure systems of labor, material extraction, and logistics. It argues that such objects function as “invaluable objects”: materially negligible yet emotionally persistent artifacts whose circulation enables what I described as production chain escapism.
Invaluable object, Souvenirs of hypermodernity and their attributed spaces - Full Essay
Bulk buying
“
The possibility of bulk buying depends on a long and fragmented chain of production that
stretches across geographies and economies. A typical keychain begins its life far from the retail
environment in which it is eventually encountered. Raw materials—plastics derived from fossil fuels,
metals extracted through mining, pigments synthesized through chemical processes—are sourced from
regions often marked by environmental degradation and labor precarity. These materials are then
processed, refined, and transported to manufacturing hubs, where they are molded, assembled, painted,
and packaged at high speed and low cost. ,,
Maximalism vs.
luxurious minimalism
“
This contemporary trend toward luxurious minimalism points to a deeper condition: people are
adapting to scarcity by aestheticizing it. When abundance becomes unattainable, value is reassigned to
objects that appear meaningful, compact, and emotionally charged. However, the distinction between
scarcity and abundance is increasingly complex in the present moment. While minimal objects may
suggest restraint or simplicity, they often conceal a vast system of abundance embedded in their
production—an abundance of extraction, labor, and material entropy.
Although these objects appear simple and deliberate, they are supported by expansive and
resource-intensive systems. What is presented as minimal is, in reality, underpinned by excess. This
contradiction reveals how minimalism does not negate abundance but rather reorganizes and obscures it. ,,