Casual Ritual Totem with Movable Light by Thomas Ballouhey, 2020

The Casual Ritual Totem with movable light by Parisian designer Thomas Ballouhey. With a background in Product Design from ESAD of Reims and a graduation from the prestigious Contextual Design Master Course at the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2016, Ballouhey's artistic process revolves altering different techniques and materials, implementing them with various scenarios. The result is displayed in imaginary objects from another place, showing a landscape of ornate sculptures that could have been, imagining unknown artefacts if we had decided to take an unexpected turn at one point or another in time. A landscape strangely similar to ours, or at least strangely similar to our customs.

"The Casual Ritual Totem" is part of this mesmerizing body of work, alongside other enigmatic pieces like Morning Routine and Night Curiosities, Karaba Airways, and Lighting Options. It's a proposition to leave behind what we expect of daily life. To explore another direction of what day-to-day routines could be made of. The object seems familiar, the materials and techniques are obscure but not completely unknown, and the function is pretty usual. The mission statement of this object though, is uncanny. It opens up to another reality where the intentions of daily activities are different from our usual concerns.