BRANKOPOPOVICBLOG: Design Academy Eindhoven

Hsin Min Chan

Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) presented the Graduation Show 2021 during the Dutch Design Week from 16-24 October.
After a year of restrictions, it was again possible to physically admire DAE's graduation projects. The exhibition includes many valuable projects that convince in research, agenda-setting narratives and above all hope that the current generation of young talents are exploring solutions for the future of our world.

The show was held at the Beursgebouw, in the centre of Eindhoven. Rather than an overarching narrative, the Graduation Show 2021 presented a navigational index as an invitation to explore the themes, keywords, materials and methodologies of the 163 graduation projects. The index topics reflect the expansive nature of the graduation projects, ranging from ‘Afrofuturism’ to ‘archaeology’; 'sculpture’ to 'silence’; 'theatre' to 'truth’, and many more!

Within these works, such as Leo Maher’s 'Glimpses into Unfamiliar Passions', we see that past realities allow us to contextualise the present through design. Maher has created a series of objects representative of the history of homosexuality in Western civilisation through identifiers, legends and euphemisms. Conversely, current realities may allow for the prediction or forecasting of future possibilities, as seen in Ginevra Petrozzi’s 'Digital Esoterism', which explores Tarot and other witchcraft rituals to interpret the content of smartphones, reclaiming agency from algorithmic prediction systems.

Iris van Hagen

Hsin Min Chan created a striking large dress installation as a response to an experience of 24-hour surveillance. She developed the design, called To-be-looked-at-ness, after being detained by Taiwanese authorities and placed under constant surveillance. The dress is designed to empower its wearer by making them both highly visible but also unapproachable.
Croatian Ines Borovac presented Collo, a project based on re-choreographed Croatian folk dances to challenge gender norms and the often coservative and patriotic fields of heritage.

Eun Gyun Kim's project Dis-ease deals with the idea that many people must live with a disease of some sort but much of the resulting suffering is caused by factors beyond the body, such as prejudice and racism. "The word ‘disease’ consists of ‘ease’ preceded by the prefix ‘dis’, indicating a negation. I wanted to stress that sickness is nothing more than a physical ‘discomfort’ that has no bearing on a person’s self-worth. By basing the forms and colours of fashion collection on medical conditions, I wanted to say that a disease, like clothing that can be put on and taken off, does not inherently affect human dignity."

Ida Blichfeld presented Color Dialogue, multidisciplinary work that contains video, performance and knitted and handwoven wearable and non-wearable armours to show the vulnerability and strength in creating non-language in colours and materiality. Living in a world in which language abilities denote power and words are wielded as weapons, it is in materiality that Ida Blichfeld found refuge and expression for her dyslexia.
Aurélie Defez's project Eat the Rich shows a collection of garments that satirise how luxury brands appropriate aesthetics that emerge from working class clothing.
Laura Deschl explores the therapeutic potential of combining knitted acupressure garments and yoga-based embodied movement practice for emotional healing. The Healing Imprint contains custum-knit garments and textiles that have a grid throughwhoch small massage balls can be moved to reach specific acupressure points.
Fittererr created a male alter ego Horst in search for a figure that could guide even the most passionate meat eaters into a more environmentally friendly eating behaviour. "Horst and I went on a journey together exploring our reasons for loving meat so much and our identity attached to it. Our research led us to investigate the influence of mandatory military service onto German society and hegemonic masculine identity. We made a sculpture expressing our love for chicks and meat, a corset to discipline our insecurities and a video reflecting on narratives that shape our world view and acceptance of violence."

With La (Re)Constitución de los Andes, Carlos Sfeir reflected on the ancestral values of his home country of Chile, field research among scientists in the last remaining wilderness - the Atacama Desert - and a desire to delink from the self-fullfilling binaries of coloniality/modernity. On behalf of the Andes Mountains, the copper from the Euro cent coins os contra-extracted and returned to its mineral beauty.

There were also a remarkable number of projects that are concerned with sustainability of the fashion and textile industry. As in the work of Alice Watel, Elena Naumann, Laurianne de Rocha, Seok Park, Anabel Poh and Ruben Warnshuis.

Wendy Owusu - documentary Hidden Heritages

To accommodate the expanding definitions of design developed by graduates, a new hybrid platform The Stage was placed in the core of the exhibition. The Stage offered a digitally-mediated setting next to the physical exhibition. Led by Dr Ian Biscoe, twenty-five of the 163 graduates presented their projects via custom environments in a real-time visual world.

Take a look at all the Graduation projects here

Here is a visual report of some of projects.