"A Table with Too Many Chairs” An Augmented Reality Exhibition 06th June 2025
Part of the fictional series: “Decadent Media – The Dysfunction of Too Many Dinner Parties”​
​
“A Table with Too Many Chairs” is a fictional exhibition exploring the excess, performance, and dislocation inherent in the rituals of hospitality within diasporic and post-migration realities. Using augmented reality, the viewer enters a lavish dining room that endlessly expands — more plates, more guests, more noise — yet no one ever really arrives, and no one is truly fed.
The project plays with the seductive visuals of curated dinner parties on social media — long tables, fine linens, overstyled meals — and contrasts it with invisible hunger, exclusion, and the emotional exhaustion of performance. The "decadence" becomes dysfunctional when the dinner party becomes a never-ending spectacle of identity, belonging, and consumption.
OPENING DATE: 06th JUNE 2025
TIME: 18:00 - 20:00
LOCATION: Gerrit Rietveld Academie - Amsterdam
Augmented Reality Experience
When users activate the AR layer through their phones/tablets, they see:
-
A golden dining table stretching infinitely across any surface.
-
Empty chairs that fill and disappear in loops, representing ancestors, friends left behind, and imagined guests.
-
Plates with QR codes, which when scanned, reveal fake documentation like:
-
"Certificate of Belonging" (denied)
-
Menus with dishes titled: “Bureaucratic Delay”, “Assimilation à la Carte”, and “Memory Soup (now with added nostalgia)”.
-
-
A soundscape of multiple overlapping conversations in different languages, laughter, and cutlery clinking, until it distorts into white noise.
"Decadent Media" becomes a metaphor for how platforms turn stories of trauma, migration, and identity into digestible bites, much like a shared meal. The “dysfunction of too many dinner parties” reflects the overwhelming expectation for migrants to constantly perform their stories in palatable, curated formats — without ever being truly seen or understood.
The work critiques how media spectacles of inclusion often mask deeper exclusions, where everyone is “invited,” but few are truly welcomed. The too-many dinner parties become too many performances of identity, eroding authenticity and leaving only ghost guests behind.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RIETVELD ACADEMIE AUGMENTED REALITY PRESENTS:
“A TABLE WITH TOO MANY CHAIRS”
An Augmented Reality Fake Exhibition by Laura Notari
AMSTERDAM, June 2025 – Rietveld Academie Augmented Reality is pleased to announce the launch of A Table with Too Many Chairs, a new augmented reality installation by Argentinian-Spanish artist Laura Notari, opening as part of the imagined series Decadent Media: The Dysfunction of Too Many Dinner Parties.
This haunting and immersive work explores the hyper-performance of belonging in diasporic communities and the invisible exhaustion of curated hospitality. A lavish golden dining table stretches endlessly through the gallery space, seen only through augmented reality devices. Each place setting is adorned with a QR-coded plate linking to surreal bureaucratic artifacts: denied visas, nostalgia recipes, and fictional menu cards featuring dishes like “Memory Soup” and “Bureaucratic Delay à la Carte.”
Through visual storytelling, sound distortion, and dislocated presence, Notari critiques the polished façade of inclusion and the burden of performance placed on migrant identities in a hyper-connected world. The empty chairs evoke both presence and absence, ghost guests, ancestral silence, and the ever-growing expectation to “show up” and assimilate.
“This work is about the invisible labor of appearing 'at the table,'” Notari says. “It’s about being invited, but not welcomed. Fed, but never full.”
The installation will debut virtually and physically at Gerrit Rietveld Academie on June 6, 2025, and will be presented physically in academic and speculative exhibitions worldwide.
For more information, media access, or to download the exhibition app, visit:
 https://lauranotari.com/artexhibitions
Curator’s Note – Dr. Sander Brakel
RIETVELD ACADEMIE AUGMENTED REALITY
"In A Table with Too Many Chairs, Laura Notari weaponizes hospitality. The work seduces viewers with gold and ritual, only to reveal the burden of hyper-visible identities and the silence of those left unseated. In a world of curated narratives, Notari’s table questions not who is missing, but who is expected to perform, and at what cost. "
