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Since autumn 2005, Gloria Zein met with nine contemporary philosophers to talk about the bed - about retracting, sleeping, dreaming, stretching out, making love, being born, dying, losing control, arranging oneself and one’s life, about the conscious and the unconscious, about privacy and public.

She has then dedicated a "bed" to each philosopher.

This (ongoing) project is an attempt to develop of an idea of individual positioning („eine Idee individueller Verortung").

The first philosopher I met for this project was the Italian Roberto Nigro. He was interested in the project, currently working with the idea of individual positioning („Verortung"). In Paris,he laid out the focus of his work. According to Nigro, there is no defined or fixed personality ‘A’ or ‘B’, but the story of a ‘A’ or ‘B’. Everything, including one’s personality, is constantly changing; we are part of this movement, and thereby at the same time transformed and transforming our environment. Consequently, in every situation, there can be found spaces of liberty, of action and transformation.

But how should the bed (as a place to rest and recover) be like in a world of perpetual transformation? If, to the extreme, every night is different from the last, maybe we should analyze the given situation each time we want to lie down and chose the most adequate (solution)?

But, on the other hand, returning home from our daily business, we want to find our bed where and how we left it. Homeless people seem to have „their" spots to spend the night. So, maybe, the bed is, in the best case, stable, immobile, and immovable to comfort us, to allow the sleeper to withdraw?

I remembered Odysseus’s bed. Returning after the Trojan War and the following 10 years of travelling, his wife did not recognize him. As a test, she told him that she had moved the conjugal bed during his absence. „That’s impossible!" exclaimed Odysseus. He had cut a tree to use it as one of the four legs of their bed and had then built their house around it. Odysseus’s bed was the origin of his house and therefore immovable.

For Roberto Nigro, I then made an immovable bed of reinforced concrete, steel wires hooking it to the concrete floor.

American philosopher Susan Neiman, known for her research on evil in modern thought, is the director of the Einstein-Forum in Potsdam (Germany) and former teacher at Yale. Neiman had the most specific wishes about the bed that would represent her.

When we met at her home in Berlin, we soon found ourselves in a conversation about the professional perception of women — even though we agreed not to work about or be specifically interested in gender-issues. But, with this project, Susan Neiman instantly reflected upon herself as a woman. I find this point very interesting, as, when talking about the bed, none of the male philosophers evoked the notion of their masculinity — they simply seemed to perceive themselves as philosophers.

We spoke about the beds mothers conceive for their daughters: One of her teenage daughters got a canapé bed and, back then, I had one, too.

For this project, Susan Neiman asked for a canapé bed, too — as long as it would be clear, that in her philosophical reasoning, she is no different from a male colleague, but in bed, she is a woman.

The model turned out as the sketch of a female self-conception: feminine sexuality next to an ideal of reasoning and control not based in gender.

When I first wrote Ruwen Ogien, he did not respond. A few weeks later, I insisted until he finally agreed to meet me. There had been two reasons for his scepticism:

Ogien, director of the philosophy-department of the French CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research), has a scientific approach to his work, due largely to his Anglo Saxon training. Because of his Interest in uncomplicated language and applied reasoning, Ogien removes philosophy from its pedestal. As he points out himself, being small and skinny, with wild hair (looking like a re-incarnation of Andy Warhol to me), he questions the traditional image of philosophers.

The centre of Ogien’s research (much debated in France at the moment) are the supposed ethical criteria we tend to apply when talking about (or judging) pornography, unusual sexual practices, laziness or other "misbehaviour" — which I had thought to be a very interesting point of departure for a conversation about beds. But my interlocutor turned out to not be specifically inspired by my subject — which was the second reason he had not answered my inquiry in the beginning.

Since the first meeting, we have frequently spoken about pornography, Sex, S/M, morals, philosophy and love. At the beginning, it was basically Ruwen Ogien asking me questions about my moral concepts — then me questioning him.

The bed I designed for him is an intuitional response to what I believe his modus operandi might be.

Berlin based Ludger Schwarte is part of the younger generation of philosophers that are interested in the exchange between philosophy and the arts. He has written about the logical categories of art, the function of architecture and the functioning of public spaces.

During our conversation, Schwarte evoked the bed as a place for encounters, skirmish, exchange and communication.

- To debate, ancient philosophers used to lie (and often drink) together (each of them using a separate ‘bed’). Their meetings are known as ‘symposions.’

- Seeming a good place to pout, the bed can be a place for (semi-public) demonstrations.

- The use of the bed can reflect the political construction of a society. In family-centred countries, we sleep alone or as a couple. We don’t share our bed with other people. On the contrary, the idea of socialism is that of a society where genetic affiliation is neglected for the sake of a more generalized notion of responsibility and community.

Following these ideas, could a bed be a public space?

At one point, I asked Schwarte, how many beds a person would need? "Three," he replied. "First is one’s own bed, second is the bed waiting for us on our travels (in a hotel, at our friends’ house…); the third is the alien/foreign bed, for the pleasure of sleeping in alien/foreign beds."

I decided, that Schwarte should get a fourth bed that he could invite people into. This would be a communicative space: a place to share, to meet, to skirmish. This bed would be a transmitter of physical, emotional, sexual and/or intellectual information.

"Ludger Schwarte’s fourth bed" is extra-large, with enough room for at least three people. It has three cushions and one single, extra-large blanket to encourage encounters, transformation and appropriation.

The German Friedrich Kittler has been the Chair of the Aesthetics and History of Media department at Humboldt-University in Berlin since 1993.
Kittler and I visited at his institute. Having become internationally famous for his publications on Media-Theory, he recently published a book reflecting on ancient Greek Philosophy and Culture.

I was a bit confused, as, during our meeting, this new field of research defined the viewpoint of our conversation about the bed. Kittler switched back and fourth between Greek mythology (especially love stories of gods) and very personal ‘confessions.’ His narratives were about seduction, tenderness, nervousness, relaxation and dreaming.

Intuitively, I proposed him a magic bed, which he liked. "I am always for magic."

Considering Kittler’s interest in mythology (in his recent book he writes that, most frequently, gods "knew" people during their sleep) I dedicated to him the "Magic Mattress to see God" ("Magische Gott Erkenntnis Matratze") — consciously leaving open the exact definition of God.

I had a magic of colored light geometries specially made for this mattress. According to the magician, they develop their effects within the person touching the mattress if he/she is open for the effect that this magic can
have in his or her life: an individual recognition of God.

German philosopher and curator Hajo Eickhoff’s focus of interest is the history of culture and the development of (morally) sustainable design. He has first become known for his analysis of how Western society has been transformed by the use of the chair and furniture for sitting. After several publications and expositions, Eickhoff removed the spine-damaging chairs from his household. At home, he now stands at his writing desk, squats on a diagonal surface or lies on carpets, blankets, and in his bed. Considering his research, I found Hajo Eickhoff an interesting interlocutor on "confinement and the art of decoration," the title of the exhibition this project was first presented in.

Eickhoff brought to our meeting in a Berlin café his recent book on the ethics of design and the responsibility of creators. This book, which conceives of an applied philosophy, was the result of his collaboration with a consultant for managers and industry. Eickhoff says that design effects and influences people.

Despite the objects’ "Gestalt," talking about functions, there are only four types of furniture: the table, the cupboard (or shelf), the chair and the bed - all of them declinations of an elevated horizontal surface

The bed I dedicated to Eickhoff refers to this definition, being a staple of social and cultural circumstances claiming to be beds. Using a common symbol of architectural plans, 12 materials (ranging from felt and cardboard to satin and finishing of with black foam) have been designated "beds."

Hans-Joachim Lenger teaches philosophy and the history of media at the art school (HFBK) of Hamburg, Germany, and at the University of Bale, Switzerland. He was immediately fond of this project, haven written a book about the farewell, the parting of the philosophy from itself ("Vom Abschied").

In Hamburg, we discussed our common difficulty of finding our way into and out of bed. We were talking about the blockage (that he has experienced and I still live) of buying a proper bedstead. Is that because every time we fall into sleep, we say farewell — not knowing, if we will come back?

When we go to bed and turn to the wall, what do we turn to? Lenger asked. What do we see, what lives do we live in our sleep? What is the precise difference of mind while sleeping and waking? (Which one is ‘reality’?)

I decided that Lenger’s bed should have something separating — a ‘cutting edge’ between the stages of sleep and awakeness — and that it should be a place, one has to conquer. I dedicated to him an object, square and high like a tower, with slick edges and filled with water: a mirroring surface into which one can dive.

On the top, it has a plateau projected above the water.

A friend once told me, that, according to the philosopher Heidegger, "being" means "being held into the nothing." I very much like this expression; it was the inspiration for the plateau.

From the very beginning of this project, I had sincerely hoped that French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy would be interested in participating. He has become internationally famous through his books, essays and lectures on ontology, art and culture. "The experience of freedom," "Corpus" and "L’intrus — the intruder" are three of his books, that have accompanied/escorted me while establishing the concept of this project.

The two entities of the couple were like two columns, bending to one-another and forming a vault. This vault, according to Nancy, develops its most perfect shape, whenever the couple shares a room - and a bed, to sleep next to one another.

As Nancy puts it, by "extrapolating in a strange way" I went beyond his initial ideas and conceived of a "bed" that "becomes strictly ontological": I imagined that, by the mere fact of being and moving together over a long period, a couple beats down the earth, creating a mould in the ground. When sleeping in there, their breath ascents and crystallizes in the air, forming a vault of "stars" — an ephemeral universe particular to these two people.