Mise en Abyme: A Recursive Domesticity

A meditation on projected memory, recursive space, and the fictions of furniture.

Presented during 3daysofdesign 2025, Mise en Abyme is a spatial and cinematic installation by Wedge that investigates the shifting boundaries between architecture, memory, and fiction. Drawing inspiration from Alain Resnais’ 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, the exhibition echoes its disorienting play with time, narrative, and perception—transforming both furniture and projection into tools of recursive storytelling.

Originally designed for a hotel in the Swiss Alps, the Epoch II: Anomalies collection explores the ambiguity of form through LIDAR scanning, computational simulation, and digital modeling of chaotic attractor systems. The resulting pieces—hauntingly precise yet materially unstable—occupy a strange threshold between object and apparition, signal and structure, memory and matter.

Staged within a reimagined domestic interior, Mise en Abyme turns furniture into a screen: a spatial surface that absorbs and reflects fragments of cinematic memory. Projected sequences from Marienbad reanimate as shadowplay across digitally-formed geometries. Here, domesticity becomes a zone of ecological and psychological inquiry—where data, projection, and physical matter coexist, collide, and loop.

The installation embraces a new kind of intimacy in design: one shaped not by stability, but by recursive feedback, temporal distortion, and material entanglement. It questions how digital processes not only form objects, but also reshape our sense of narrative, perception, and emotional space.

Organised as an architectural hallucination, Mise en Abyme invites visitors to navigate a sequence of fragmented rooms—composed of simulation, signal, and recursive materiality. Time folds. Memory loops. Meaning slips.
The form never fully settles.

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For more on the Epoch II collection, visit the full catalogue here →.
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