Our first stool failed to do what we asked of it. Instead of abandoning it, we began listening to the object – and to the ground beneath it.

Please Do Not Improve This Area asks whether “unfinished” and “overlooked” environments might already hold values that disappear once we try to regulate, optimise or complete them.

Our first response was a stool.

Made from reused wood, it consists of a few simple parts held together by a red belt. Its sharpened, uneven legs are designed not to rest neatly on a finished surface, but to pierce, sink and adjust to soft ground. On concrete, the chair fails. On soil, it finds its balance.

We placed it beside the Vilnelė River in Užupis, hoping its unfamiliar presence would invite someone to sit, pause, notice and reflect. 

Instead, someone moved it next to an existing pallet and apparently used it as… a stool.

Our first iteration failed beautifully.

The object invited sitting, but not necessarily reflection. We had underestimated the distance between affordance and intention. Curiosity alone needed something more: choreography, instruction, perhaps a ritual.

Yet the failure revealed something else. What we considered a construction principle became a statement: the chair refuses the concrete. It needs soil. Against increasingly hardened riverbanks of Vilnius, its limitation became its position.

Perhaps our task is not to improve the stool, but to understand what it is already capable of.

And here begins our next experiment within the experiment. If one object can alter how a body encounters a landscape, what happens when the object changes? We are now expanding the stool into a small family of prototypes, each testing a different affordance and perspective.

The stool sinks. The bench connects. The swing lifts.

One brings a single body close to the ground and invites individual observation. Another makes room for dialogue. The third suspends the body above the ground, introducing movement and an unstable view.

Soon, we will test them collectively through a Fluxus – inspired riverside ritual: assembling, walking, stopping, observing, listening, documenting and reflecting together. 

We keep documenting what happens – perhaps it becomes a replicable ritual, an assembly manual, or simply a journal of struggles.

For now, failure is becoming our method.