Espectre — When Storage Rods and a Broken Trampoline Became a Light Installation

Sinopia Decor
Jul 17
4 min read

The rods were bought for a wardrobe system in Finland. They ended up on a wall in Palamós, lit from behind, supplemented by rods from a broken trampoline, and became the most complex piece the studio has ever made.

This is the Reshaping Collection at its most literal — a material so far from its intended purpose that the distance between what it was and what it became is almost comic. Almost. Because Espectre is not funny. It is one of the most resolved pieces in the collection, and the trampoline detail is only funny until you see it on the wall.

What they were

The storage system came first — the kind sold flat-packed across Northern Europe, fabric-covered modular wardrobes with metal rod frames that can be assembled and disassembled without tools. Practical, portable, designed entirely for function and not at all for beauty. They were bought in Finland during a period of transit between countries, used, and brought to Spain in pieces because the space they occupied flat-packed was negligible and discarding functional material had stopped feeling like an option some years earlier.

In Palamós, proper built-in wardrobes meant the storage system never went back together. The fabric covers found other uses. The rods — aluminum, lightweight, in varying lengths — stayed in the apartment without a clear destination.

The rods had already become something once before Espectre. When the studio opened on Plaça de la Vila, the first wall sculpture made from them was Sound of the Sea — gradient-painted in silver and deep blue, inspired by the rhythm of the sea and the movement of sound waves. It sold last September to a visitor from the United States, who paid €98 to have it shipped home. That signal — a piece made from wardrobe rods, bought on sight and shipped across an ocean — was worth noting.

Fissura and Ona came next. The same aluminum rods, painted in a gradient from deep black to warm gold at the center, mounted at varying heights on a fabric-backed panel. The same object in two orientations — hung vertically it becomes Fissura, a fault line, a geological crack of light. Hung horizontally it becomes Ona, a wave, a frequency moving across a surface. Both are still in the studio. They will not be there indefinitely.

The trampoline

By the time Espectre was being developed, the original aluminum rods were running low. The piece needed more — specifically, it needed rods with a different diameter, a different visual weight, something that would introduce variation into the wave form rather than a uniform thickness from one end to the other.

A mini trampoline had broken. Its leg rods — 2cm diameter, black, structurally sound despite the trampoline's retirement — were in the apartment. They went into Espectre. The black rods in the finished piece, the ones that anchor the wave form and give it its weight, came from a piece of fitness equipment that had reached the end of its intended life and found a different one on a wall in Palamós.

This is not a metaphor. It is simply what happened

The form

Espectre is 85 centimetres wide. Aluminum storage rods and trampoline leg rods in four finishes — teal, black, gold, silver — arranged in a double wave on a wood panel, the rods varying in length and diameter so the overall silhouette moves rather than sits flat. The four finishes are the complete Sinopia palette in a single piece — every colour the studio works with present simultaneously, the way a room that has been properly designed holds all its decisions in visible relation to each other.

The LED lighting is integrated into the panel — positioned at the back, top, and bottom, so the wall behind the piece is illuminated as well as the piece itself. In daylight Espectre is a wall sculpture. The rods cast their own shadows, the four finishes read differently depending on the angle of the natural light, the wave form creates movement without movement. In the evening, with the ambient light low and the LED running, it becomes something else — a piece of light as much as of object, the glow behind it making the wall part of the composition.

This is the same logic as Luna — an object that transforms between its daytime and evening identity. But where Luna is soft, draped, organic, Espectre is precise, structural, architectural. The two pieces share an understanding of what light does to an object and what an object can do with light.

What the rods taught

Sound of the Sea was the proof of concept. Fissura and Ona were the refinement. Espectre was the conclusion — the piece where everything the material had been teaching across three previous works arrived at once: the wave form, the gradient logic, the LED integration, the four-finish palette, the trampoline rods that gave the piece the weight variation it needed.

Espectre is in the studio now, on the wall. The storage system that started all of this is long gone — replaced by proper wardrobes, its rods redistributed across four wall pieces and counting.

The trampoline is also gone. Its rods are permanent.

Espectre is a one-of-one wall sculpture, 85cm wide, with integrated LED lighting.

→ Shop Espectre — The Reshaping Collection

→ Shop Fissura / Ona — The Reshaping Collection