Volcanic reaction

Is the most exciting thing in your sitting room a dusty yucca plant?  Is the only ‘sleeping giant’ in your home your partner/dog/dust-gathering home-exercise equipment?

Well, help is at hand – in the form of a home volcano.

French interactions designer Nelly Ben Hayoun is unleashing new project ‘The Other Volcano’ as part of the  ’Sunbury workshops Open studios’ during the London Design Festival. The aim is not only to liven up your living room, but to explore ‘the juxtaposition of the epic with banal details, the extreme with domestic’.

In collaboration with Austin Houlsdworth (explosive designer) and Carina Fearnley (volcanologist), Ben Hayoun has created a 1000 times scaled down revival of the Mount St Helen’s explosion in the heart of Shoreditch, East London.

The project will encourage volunteers to house their own ‘semi-domesticated’ volcano at home for a couple of weeks.  Ben Hayoun explains, ‘These designed supra-natural objects will be large, reaching almost to the ceiling, imposing, and extremely inconvenient – erupting dust and gloop into the living rooms of volunteers seemingly at random.’

You can learn to create these interior behemoths at the Home Chaos Workshop on 24 September.  Each participant has to bring four packs of ground coffee.

Ben Hayoun adds, ‘The Other Volcano imagines a love-hate relationship, a “sleeping giant” in the corner of your domestic environment, with the power to provoke excitement with its rumblings, and also perhaps fear (if not for your life in this case, then at least for the soft furnishings of your  clean and neat “living” room).

‘It is a project that domesticates the most violent of natural processes, addressing and reinterpreting different natures.’

The Home Chaos Workshop is at 8b Egerton Garden Mews, London SW3 on 24 September. For people aged 18 or over.