Shoes suspended from electric wires is a common sight in cities, but swings, on the otherhand? Not as common. Max Mertens accomplishes the out-of-the-ordinary with Swings, a public installation in Luxembourg, where a vast array of colorful swings hang just over the heads of pedestrians strolling a regular street.Mertens tells The Creators Project that the swings were tailor-made by a carpenter, and the feat of suspending the wooden structures required an entire cooperative system. First, an engineer calculated the stability, and then the swings were fixed on cables and mounted in the sky. The construction of the swings took a month and a half to make, and took a large team to install over three days.
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Swings is a bit of change of speed for Mertens, who creates a lot of large scale installations that feature electronics, motors and other materials—in other words, machine art. The work, the result of a restricted art competition organized by the Casino Luxembourg, Forum d’art contemporain, and the Association des commerçants de la rue Philippe II, is as visually striking as it is playful.“The swing is an easily recognizable object that recalls childhood and evokes those long summer days,” says Mertens. “The simplicity of the object has an immediate impact on the viewer and a certain force of attraction.”
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