On the second floor of the Miami Design District’s Melin Building, the Marina Abramovic Institute has installed a long wood table with repeating sets of three things: a mixed pile of dry rice and lentils, a blank sheet of paper, and a red pencil. The visitor’s task is to separate the pile and tally.
“You might think it’s crazy to sit at a fair and count rice, but this is exactly what you have to do to reclaim time,” performance artist Marina Abramovic said at the opening of this week’s Design Miami, as the New York Observer reported. “If you can’t count the rice for three hours, you can’t do anything good in life.”
The wood table for “Counting the Rice,” on display through Sunday, was designed by New York–based architect Daniel Libeskind, AIA, and made by Moroso. The dramatic lightening bolt-esque piece is called a table, but it is more of an all-in-one bench and desk, almost like a student workstation. Moroso has also produced 30 smaller, less claustrophobic-looking versions of the Libeskind table in concrete. The concrete table is on display at Design Miami.
