COHORS (2019-2021)

Design label as artistic practice

COHORS started with a question: why do talented artists I knew never get the space, time, or means to earn a decent living? I'd spent 18+ years as curator, mediator, waiting for funding to pull off temporary projects. I looked at the art world—biennials, fairs, subsidy systems—and realized the structure itself was the problem. So I decided to build something different.

Not another gallery. Not another funding application. A commercial label that operated by different rules.

I created COHORS in close cooperation with art director Rianne Petter, developing a visual language that was playful and cheeky. We used the "O's" in COHORS as portals, access points to other worlds you hadn't seen before. Rianne worked with winking Lego heads, strange round forms. Video producer Joost Kraan (Joost Camaro) made absurd 3D animations. The aesthetic was deliberately odd, humorous, refusing the slick commercial design world's codes.

The concept: each product opened a world. You weren't just buying an object—you were buying an exhibition. Every artist involved got carte blanche. I chose makers I trusted and invited them to work from their autonomous artistic practice, not to fold themselves into product logic. The product was the starting point, but it had to be a way to showcase their own work.

Our first product was the Trouvé lamp (with designer Marten van Middelkoop). Every contributor—composer, photographer, animator, AR designer, packaging designer—received equal billing and creative freedom. Dutch manufacturing, technical precision, fair compensation.

During COVID I produced one more piece with Rianne and her partner Mark Mulder (Studio for Visible Pop.Culture): Tele-Exotica, a 2D wall object about skin hunger. Landscapes behind acrylic, constructed from skin in all colors and types—including people with vitiligo. Longing made visible.

Then it stopped. But the plan had been bigger: a product with artist/ curator Charles Landvreugd about blackness, something sleek and glamorous, fell through the cracks. Parties where artists would perform. More worlds, more portals, more ways to value artistic labor outside institutional frameworks.

COHORS lasted one more year before COVID made it impossible to continue. But the principle stands: you can build commercially without surrendering to commercial logic. You can produce objects that respect craft, compensate fairly, and still function as art.