What does it mean to think in cardboard? How can ideas undergo a process of folding, creasing and tearing, and what is the process of rendering tangible these ideas, these ways of conceptualising and seeing, through the tactile nature of cardboard?

In September 2021, The SO | Academy hosted the Thinking in Cardboard Mentorship programme. As part of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s 8th Season, the 6-day programme saw 12 participants (based in Johannesburg and abroad) being mentored by Brussels-based artist and theatre, opera, dance and exhibition designer Sabine Theunissen.

For Theunissen, to think in cardboard is to embrace the intuitive and the repetitive through materiality. As such, her methodology prizes the intelligence of the hands, and pursues the tangible and the incidental through ways of working that, while imperceptible at first, find a rootedness in the material.

What emerges are tactile structures, visages and whole worlds in miniature. Through a literal and conceptual process of bending, cutting, folding, twisting and layering, there emerges something of a palimpsest – an archive of process and a physical model that holds its narrative in its material history.

Ways of seeing are crucial, too. To observe a room, a world, a universe in miniature is to identify and expand on its flaws and follies, its possibilities and its hidden potentials, in ways that are not possible through conventional methods of performance, architecture, or design.

The Thinking in Cardboard mentorship programme was produced in collaboration with the UNITA program and Scenography Today.