Tom Sachs has collaborated with Nike to create Space Camp – an immersive installation on New York’s Governor’s Island that will leave its visitors transformed.
There aren’t many multi-national sportswear corporations who would team up with an artist like Tom Sachs, the space-obsessed American sculptor best known for his DIY approach to immersive installations, to create an interactive Space Camp on Governor’s Island. But then, the ongoing relationship Sachs shares with Nike is an especially rarefied one, honed over many years of shared projects and through a mutual fascination with innovation and transparency.
Their newest collaborative endeavour, the aforementioned Space Camp, emerged out of many years of meetings between Sachs and Nike CEO Mark Parker. “It took a lot of conversation to find a simple thing – whatever we do must be 50% Sachs and 50% Nike,” the artist tells AnOther. “It must be something that neither one of us could do without the other, and I think we have achieved that.”
Launched in celebration of the NikeCraft Mars Yard 2.0 shoe, an updated and improved version of a pair of trainers created through a collaboration between the artist and Nike five years ago, the camp is a kind of public-facing version of a bootcamp Sachs already holds three times weekly in his own studio. With a routine designed by fitness guru Pat Manocchia of La Palestra, which comprises core-strengthening exercises teamed with mental skills, the entire concept is intended as a means of doing small things to think about bigger ones.
