Metro54 @ Framer Framed – A Funeral For Street Culture (2021)

Type: Exhibition Design
Concept: Setareh Noorani and Jelmer Teunissen
Client: Metro54, Framer Framed
Build: Framer Framed team
Photography: Eva Broekema

Selected Press
Samenkomen op Straat – Metropolis M
An interview with Setareh Noorani & Jelmer Teunissen, in light of A Funeral for Street Culture, Subbacultcha

The exhibition asks a fundamental question: if we are gathering for A Funeral for Street Culture, which spaces are our bodies, souls, and histories holding together? Which street cultures are we mourning, and for whom are we pouring one out, when our communities contain a complex mix of both mourning and celebration? This project began with a commitment to material circularity: the desire to reuse materials from a previous Framer Framed exhibition designed by Studio LA (From what will we reassemble ourselves). This choice directly shaped our spatial language.

Departing from the deep variety found in contemporary street culture, the design maps out and gives physical space to the “outsider-insider within.” The street is just as fragmented as the cultures it shelters, yet it acts as a physical timeline that binds different architectural facades together. Because capitalist cultural systems commodify street culture at a rapid pace, signs and materials are constantly appropriated, reused, and recombined. Through these different modes of occupation, we ask: how can the street counter appropriation and displacement? Can we give credit where it’s due while maintaining institutional street cred? By mapping these erasures and vantage points, the design forces us to reflect on what we are putting on a pedestal, what we are offering a stage, and ultimately, what kind of institution we are staging.

Using the space of a funeral as a metaphor, the project questions whether we are celebrating a rebirth, practicing resistance, or acknowledging that street culture is already gone. The architecture urges visitors to take a walk, halt, pause, and mourn across multiple timelines, while also coming together in joy as an affirmation of our ability to hold space. To achieve this, we proposed a non-hierarchical layout that accommodates the interlocking stories of street culture and its appropriation. The narrative unfolds through overlapping spaces and a grammar of flexible tools and surfaces built over different levels. By creating these diffuse border conditions where elements reference and absorb one another, the design moves away from rigid museum hierarchies to suggest new possibilities for viewing and being together.