The Decorators is an interdisciplinary design collective founded by Suzanne O’Connell, Carolina Caicedo, Xavi Llarch Font and Mariana Pestana in 2011. With backgrounds in landscape architecture, spatial design, curation and psychology, they work on spatial design projects that aim to reconnect the physical elements of a place with its social dimension.
The Decorators’ projects can be read as the testing of possible infrastructures for communal life, designing programmes and physical elements for a space that turns an individual into a collective. In particular they have produced tables, seating configurations and frameworks for collective eating. Commensality – eating and drinking at the same table, is a fundamental social activity, which creates and cements relationships, but which can also defy dominant power structures. For The Decorators, the act of eating is a political act.
During their fellowship they want to consolidate this experience and build an inventory of objects and situations that produce collective experiences based on the consumption of food. By staging a series of design experiments both in and outside of the Stanley Picker Gallery, in collaboration with students and the local community, The Decorators seek to develop a series of observations, situations and working sculptures which they will exhibit, use, photograph, draw and compile into a catalogue of (political) commensality.