Michel Cova

Contemporary Curiosity Boxes – Scenography of the Taipei Performing Arts Center

Each new cultural project is a source of excitement for its creators. Finding spaces in which artists will offer their talent and work to a curious public is an ambition that is renewed each time. This ambition is also that of the client and is expressed through a brief that only defines certain quantifiable objectives, often far removed from the underlying artistic wishes.

Inside Outside has been collaborating with OMA since the late 80s, when my design studio was still a one-woman affair – I was working as a free-lance exhibition designer after leaving my job at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I was invited to work on the interior, furnishing and stage curtain of the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague and, immediately after that, I curated and designed OMA’s exhibitions that spread over Europe and the United States (1987-1992), together with an enthusiastic team inside and around OMA: photographers, inventors, lighting and sound specialists, model makers, architects, craftsmen – and Rem Koolhaas himself. What I contributed as an individual designer to the Dance Theatre and other earlier OMA projects in the past – interiors, curtains, exhibitions, gardens and landscape designs and - masterplans - were what my Inside Outside team and I have offered to architectural and urban development projects since then. Generally, we combine interior and landscape architecture, as we see the creation of environments, both inside and outside, as an integral whole. In collaboration with engineers, architects, clients and local specialists and craftsmen, we work in all kinds of climates internationally.