Love stories of mattresses unwanted.
Most of us are born on it, we sleep on it, we share it, we fall in love on it, we create on it, some of us eat while we lie down on it, and when the time comes – with a little bit of luck we leave our last breath on it.
The mattress as an object carries the essence of our whole existence. Every tiny fiber has a story to tell and creates an incredibly personal memory map; an extensive collection of moments, an archive.
What happens though when a material connected with the notion of intimacy gets removed from the private sphere, thus escapes its context and achieves a new status, the one of the art object?
Well, it becomes the subject of an on-going project revealing a missing link between art and life. Discarded mattresses, ready-mades, awkwardly found on sidewalks around the city streets form a collection named matress_of_the_day by Christina Christodoulou and Nicole Nikolaou, being showcased publicly on the indefinite digital realm of Instagram.
Matress_of_the_day ’s first Instagram post was published on August 27th, 2017. However, the idea of the account came to Christina’s and Nicole’s minds several months before the official launch on social media.
N.N. & C.C.: "The fact that mattresses are being thrown away draw our attention and we started observing the frequency of this phenomenon. Each mattress we encountered became a source of discussion about how it ended up there.
So we started collecting photographic material without a clear intention of what we would do with it, a practice that slowly became short of an obsession. During a day walk, or even
when we were coming back home from a night out, or while road tripping, we stopped each time and captured discarded mattresses that came our way".
Although the account launched recently on Instagram there have been many submissions by followers who find its concept not only genuinely fun but also stimulating since its creators’ goal is to form a contemporary digital archive of intimate stories:
N.N. & C.C. : "Matress_of_the_day started out as an attempt to create an online public archive of the material we had already collected - and still collecting until this very moment, and mainly as one way to visually “narrate” the stories of all these mattresses that they would indeed carry with them no matter where they would end up. Then we started to incorporate material from followers’ submissions or content found in the “pool” of Instagram. Consequently, the archive constitutes of our captured visual material and anyone else’s who wants to share the mattress of the day from anywhere on the planet".
After all, Nicole and Christina explore unique stories expressed by these repurposed objects, so ordinary and common through which extraordinary aspects of life emerge.
N.N. & C.C.: " For us, each mattress reveals a love story, and by this, we don’t necessarily imply the romantic/erotic perspective of it. While observing them on the street, we think of what their former owners may have experienced on them and the reason why they are now far away from them. It is magnificent if you think about how much of our lives and how many significant moments we spend on our mattresses and at the same time how expendable they are. The name of the account is deliberately miswritten to be unique, just like any mattress making Matress_of_the_day archive".
Ph: ©Matress_of_the_day
Follow Matress_of_the_day on Instagram : instagram.com/matress_of_the_day/