Odd Matter are Dutch natives Els Woldhek (1984) and Bulgarian-born Georgi Manassiev (1985). They live and work in Rotterdam,The Netherlands, after having lived and worked for six years in London, where the pair met, while undertaking their MA studies in the Design Products department at The Royal College of Art. The pair’s common interest in the borders of creation, process and materials has put them on a shared path: operating across a wide range of disciplines and seeking to work with existing industries to create products, interiors or concepts truer and telling of their creation and will. Driven by curiosity for the strange
and wonderful, Odd Matter believes that by working with existing processes and notions, researching these from a different, more naive perspective, a different kind of product can be created: unique and specific to the place it originates from.

I was here
Every day we have to decide on what to invest our energy. The same can be said of the choices we make regarding the places that surround us. We can choose to preserve, maintain and restore what is present and existing; we can decide to add objects, information, technologies; finally, we can opt to abandon, lose and throw away what we believe to be no longer valuable. The room in Schloss Hollenegg in which Odd Matter chose to explore these ideas, is one of the Gobelin Zimmer (Tapestries Rooms). A warm space in red tones, it is an eclectic mix of different eras and cultures, with seventeenth-century tapestries, oriental objects, renaissance furniture and boiserie doors inlaid with gold leaf. The four-poster bed is in red velvet with a consistency and brightness that, together with the gold leaf and glazed ceramic, are the inspiration for the project. Odd Matter have focused their attention on the old and worn rug: some parts are lost, some can be preserved and something will be added. They have chosen to preserve a fragment from the old rug and add a recognisable digital intervention by deforming it. All rest is lost. The new rug has been hand knotted in Nepal and produced in collaboration with Nodus.