Laying Down Memories: the Cultural Mobility of Tejo Remy’s Chest of Drawers

This article examines Tejo Remy’s 1991 chest of drawers, You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory , as a ‘cultural event’, a definitively mobile object, which must be understood as being constituted not as any given iteration of its multiple nature, but in the intersection of these multiplicities as it moves in the flows of culture. Consequently the discussion is centred upon a partial biography of Remy’s piece that traces some examples of its incarnations: as a student project; as a part of the Droog collection; as an exemplar of the ‘Dutch inflection’ in design; and as a decoration for a casino in Las Vegas. In this way the intention is to demonstrate how culture is now defined by the mobilities of its parts; how products such as Remy’s strange chest of drawers can be understood as not simply things that are made and then mediated, but as objects that exist in the operation of their mediation.