Manufactured Sacredness: IKEA

The making of our Ikea based assignment named Manufactured Sacredness, challenged Tess and I both conceptually and intellectually. After much deliberation and research on both the psychological and sociological effect of Ikea we decided to capture our interpretation of Ikea and the ‘Ikea Experience’ in reference to both its maze-like experience and it’s psychological connection to religious centres, especially the catholic church.

Before we approached the site (Ikea – Richmond) Tess and I formulated three questions that we would use as loose guidelines for the annotation, photographic and video capturing processes’.

What direction leads to sacredness?

Can you put a price on belonging?

Does familiarity outweigh fabrication?

Our three chosen questions touched on both our overarching themes of religion and mazes and other more subvert themes of perception, belonging and placelessness.

Tess and I decided to represent both the film and photographical interpretation of the question ‘Does familiarity outweigh fabrication?’ in an overt manor as we felt it was important to establish a strong connection to the public perception of both Ikea and religious centres. Our photographical representation of this concept tried to outline Ikea’s striking similarity to both religious symbolism and physical structures, this was highlighted in the pictures of the ‘mystical’ Ikea catalogue and the blue Ikea building juxtaposed with the skyline, which Tess and I used to outline the alarming similarity it shared with the bible and religious buildings. Our remaining pictures and video were used to try and expose the dichotomy between Ikea’s careful self representation and it’s true representation, evident in the picture of the ‘sun-like’ yellow light transposed with the grey industrial roof and the fake toilet bowl sequence featured at the start of our video.

We decided to use both overtness and abstraction in our representation of the question ‘What direction leads to sacredness?’, as we felt it was important not to overly represent our idea of Ikea’s maze-like design. We decided to explore light and specifically shade and shape in our photographic representation of this question/concept, which was evident in our portrayal of a range of differing shades created by different Ikea products, which we used because we felt there is a strong intrinsic connection with shape and sacredness. Due to the difficult nature of representing a maze/labyrinth like area without continuous footage we decided to exploit footage of Ikea’s projected arrows, which we altered in post production to exemplify it’s disorientating effect.

We explored surface and recognisable themes in our representation of the concept/question ‘Can you put a price on belonging?’. We believed this concept was important to clearly outline as it brings into question what we believed was the crux of our research , the idea of Ikea’s simulated sense of belonging and place. We outlined this in our pictures of the ‘stairs to nowhere’ and the various surfaces that are synonymous with the Ikea brand yet eerily recognisable and comforting. Our video portrayal of this concept was portrayed in a more overt sense, which were highlighted in the various video frames of the differing faces, which were used to portray a sense of artificial or at least nonorganic form of belonging.

Tess and I decided on a simple minute long soundscape of one of the display rooms in Ikea for our video. The soundscape had an intensely dark and repetitious aura which I decided to exploit using Audacity, where I compressed and altered the speed and pitch of the audio a number of times until Tess and I decided on a dark and more importantly disorientating finished product.

Tess and I worked extremely well together in the making of our presentation and together went on an intense conceptual and thematic experience both on location at Ikea and during the research phase. The seemingly never ending fountain of inspiration and material surround Ikea and the broader psychological and sociological areas surrounding Ikea have left us with a fascinating area to further explore.

Link to presentation 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dGP8hxsLqCofgT7tzRY7Zd-asVtHXsj_oO5MtHqG7Zw/edit?usp=sharing

AG