Forêt DesCartes is a prototype of a postcard display designed by Belgian architect Christian Kieckens in 1995.

This curious object evokes Kieckens’ habits and practices: the collection of images and their arrangement in space, travel as a form of disciplinary exchange with a community of practice, and the teaching of architecture by means of references. Forêt DesCartes is an experimental spatial device for handling, transmitting, and producing tacit visual knowledge.

Forêt DesCartes, a play on words that combines ‘forest of cards’ with the name of René Descartes, proposes a visual system of accumulation and production of knowledge that, although based on a regular Cartesian grid, is structurally implicit and non-linear.

Submitted by
Filippo Cattapan is PhD candidate at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, working within the framework of the EU-funded ‘Communities of Tacit Knowledge’ network.

This object is part of the TACK Exhibition “Unausgesprochenes Wissen / Unspoken Knowledge / Le (savoir) non-dit”, in the section “Horizons and References”.