New Bagdad
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Aluminum profiles table
Manufacturer: Edra Design Company
Perignano, Italy, 2003
The surface of the “New Baghdad Table” is made of a myriad number of industrial aluminum profiles. Each piece has a specific purpose in composing a map of Iraq’s capital city. The variously shaped pieces have individual identities, but together they orchestrate a cohesive plan that is made of diversity and illustrates that there is more than one truth and that truths can live together.
The many tiny pieces can be thought of as magical, mystical ideograms arranged in a multifarious but harmonious pattern. The table represents the ritual dimensions of hospitality. And hospitality, in a biblical sense, invites us to welcome the outcast to our table and share our meal. The project is a gesture of hope: a hope that something extraordinary will be born from chaos. In design, just as in nature, there is a harmony in disharmony; there is perfection in imperfection.
The New York Times: “Israeli designer Ezri Tarazi used stock aluminum components to create the New Baghdad Table…. The idea behind the table – that each shape’s various identities are merged into a cohesive plan- is Tarazi’s statement on diversity.”
Fiona Rattray, The Observer, London: “More than one person I met during the Milan week (designers, curators, magazine editors, store buyers… they’ve come from the four corners of the earth to be here) was singing the praises of Ezri Tarazi’s New Baghdad table. The Israeli designer’s map of the Iraqi capital, which forms the table top, is cleverly constructed using a patchwork of industrial metal components. The spaces between them cast shadows on the floor.”