## **Valerian blos shows Speculative design in the light of materials** There is a dinner table at the center of Valerian Blos’s practice. Not a real one, though he has built a few, and this table appears in Substance of Power, a performance installation where guests sit beneath red light, surrounded by **neuron**-shaped ceramic dishes and architectural miniatures slowly crumbling under piles of vermillion sand and cracking salt. Each evening, the guests are invited to taste something: a substance, an idea, a truth they would rather not confront. The substances change each night. One evening it was mercury, then, plastic. Another, the quiet accumulation of technological consumption entering the body with the **food** chain and the air. It’s not a comfortable meal, and that’s the point. Valerian Blos uses the table as a metaphor for ‘friction.’ The Berlin-based designer, artist, and educator’s practice moves between installation, **speculative** design, material research, and teaching.…