JAM ON THE FLOOR

Opening: 28.10.  17 h  |  Exhibition: 29.10. - 26.11.2026

 

Floor Stories
Text by Simon Keane-Cowell

A rug is a slippery thing.

Not literally, you understand. (At least, one hopes not.) But as objects that dance between two and three dimensions, and which serve at once to provide comfort, to help shape interior space and, last but not least, to serve as a vehicle for graphic narrative, they're always on the move.

Haptic, optic and semantic, rugs punch above their weight and rarely take things lying down – in spite of doing just that.

Given the micro-architectural nature of their construction, it’s little wonder that designers often return to the rug as a testing ground for building out new concepts – as evidenced by a quartet of established Swiss creatives who have coalesced to show their latest sorties into the terrain of the textile under the show banner of ‘Jam on the Floor’.

Jörg Boner’s ‘London Rug’ for Maana Studios foregrounds the very process of weaving, making a visual virtue of the grid-like interplay of vertical and horizontal, in contradistinction to Adrien Rovero’s ‘Tapis Exquis’ for Chic Cham, which comprises a programme of differently shaped, boldly coloured elements that invite ludic configuration.

Mia Kepenek’s contribution ‘A Collection of Memories’, produced by Kramis Teppich Design, deploys material and textural difference across its surface to create a work that evokes the feeling of reminiscence itself. And Frédéric Dedelley’s ‘Arabesque’ rug for Ruckstuhl, designed for the Swiss Consul’s residence in Rio de Janeiro, references the city’s iconic Copacabana promenade (designed by legendary landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx) thanks to its evocative composition of contrasting colours and graphic rhythm.

All four pieces speak to the fertile creative ground that is the rug. An ancient production technology with a rhetorical relevance that is contemporary. Underfoot but never to be underestimated.