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DDW 2018 in the Vertical Gallery: Les Récréateurs

During Dutch Design Week 2018, Vertical Gallery is exhibiting a project from our educational partner École Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Valenciennes: Les Récréateurs by Nolwen Major Francès & Rémi Mahieux.

Following common questions about citizen participation on the one hand and the “recreational city” on the other, the designers chose to work in pairs under the pseudonym les Récréateurs, with the aim of carrying out a project in the heart of the city of Anzin (Northern France), a city they both know well. In order to work with local residents in the development of an alternative playground, they have established and implemented a creative process in five steps : Investigate - Meet - Deconstruct - Imagine - Construct

They focus on tools, such as board and construction games, graphic content and models, to develop participation processes around the theme of playground.

They both studied Design at the Valenciennes School of Art and Design where we began to work together on this project for their Graduation Project.

At the Vertical Gallery of Plug-in-City, their process and tools will be shown in order to activate a dialogue with the public around games, questions and various participation acts.

Let’s come and recreate together!

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Vertical Talks #7 - FICTIONAL CITIES

Sunday 29 October 16:00-17:00 @ Plug In City

w/ Fictional Collective (Lorenzo Gerbi, Raphael Coutin, Corradino Garofalo, Joan Vellve Rafecas) and Plug in City (Tim Kouthoofd, architect NL). Check their bios in the pictures below!

In 2015 a group of international creative practitioners members of the Fictional Collective, Raphael Coutin, Corradino Garofalo, Joan Vellve Rafecas, together with Gabriela Baka and Lorenzo Gerbi from graphic studio Protocoolers join the collaborative project of Plug in City, Eindhoven. The project that developed from this common initiative is the Vertical Gallery (VG), an exhibition space and workspace for a diversity of creative interventions, located in Strijp-S area. Particularly, VG presents site-specific works that engage with the Plug-In-City (PIC) community and philosophy. The work developed in VG leave a trace within Plug-In-city. This trace can be physical outcomes, collaborations with the pluggers or immaterial value to add to Plug-In-City concept.

Tim Kouthoofd is project manager and founder of Bygg Architecture and initiator of Plug-in-City.

Plug-in-City

Plug-In-City is a creative community strongly based on the Dutch circular economy model, combining sustainable strategies with creative development. Situated in Strijp-S (between the Anton and Area 51 buildings) was a piece of land, a blank canvas ready for creativity and liveliness. Plug-In-City has developed rapidly over 2015 into a place of collaboration and creative diversity. It will continue to grow over the next coming years as a bottom-up creative community. The possibilities are endless, from studio to gallery, from temporary events to apavilion or unique hotel room.

Bygg Architecture

Bygg is a Swedish and Norwegian verb, meaning to build. As an architecture office, we build the world of tomorrow with principles from Scandinavian design: Esthetics and optimum functionality are in reach for the general public, by re-thinking sustainably available materials and the composition of those into a building. The power is in simplicity and in leaving out the unnecessary, starting from the needs of the user.

Circular building

Circular building is a philosophy, in which the flexibility to change, to renovate or to take a building apart over the years, is already taken into account during the design stage in order to prevent waste of materials and energy.

Redundant and removed materials will be reinserted into the material cycle. To pay for the use of a product, rather than possession of the materials of which it consists, is part of the philosophy. In order to work towards these goals, Bygg Architecture has formed coalitions with parties to research and implement the endless possibilities of circular building in daily practice.

Collaborative architecture and social design

Collaborative architecture seeks to design a building or a concept in collaboration with multiple parties in the chain. By involving designers, manufacturers and contractors in the early design stage, we allow designs that are more effective, produce less waste and have built-in flexibility.

During each project, Bygg Architecture assembles the most suitable team, but the process may also be implemented in reverse: Professionals can involve Bygg Architecture (e.g. as freelance) to strengthen their project team.In social design the architects involve both the client and their (prospect) end users. By inviting the end users to the design table, we create a collective design, which better suits the need of the end user. With that approach we generate a profound understanding of the consequences of design choices, which encourages healthy, safe and economic use of the building or the built environment. Bygg Architecture guides the stakeholders through all steps of social design.

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Vertical Talks #6 - DESIGNER AND/OR ENTREPRENEUR

Saturday 28 October 16:00-17:00 @ Plug-in-City

w/ Cristina Noguer (designer, SP) and Giuditta Vendrame (designer and researcher, IT). Check their bios in the pictures below!

Cristina Noguer (Girona, Spain, 1982). She holds an MFA in Interior Design from Parsons, The New School in New York as well as double degrees in Industrial Design Engineering and Product Development (B.Sc.) from Escola Politecnica Superior, Girona, Spain and Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland. She received the ICRAVE Thesis Award in 2014, full scholarship Angelo Donghia Foundation in 2012, and the COPCA Research Grant for Crafts Innovation & Development in 2010.

Her work is based on the research, documentation and implementation of (new) technologies and their materiality in a conceptual and pragmatic way. In my research I question the boundaries of matter, material and materiality. All projects begin as a critical study of social, economical or political constructs. They take form in publications and/or installations where cultural-natural preservation is a recurring theme and light a recurring media.

Giuditta Vendrame (IT) is a designer and researcher based in the Netherlands. She explores the intersections between design, art practice, and legal systems. To question the opaque nature of the latter, to make them debatable, she uses different media (film, performance, installations). She researched the notion of citizenship and its paradoxes and she is currently interested in exploring ways to open political spaces through playful and poetical interventions.

Together with Paolo Patelli she is part of La Jetée.

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Vertical Talks #5 - CRAFTED TECHNOLOGY

Thursday 26 October 16:00-17:00 @ Plug-in-City

Does technology serve, inspire or limit the creative process?

w/ Ben Pearce (designer/maker, NL) and Ivo Hulskamp (designer and artist, NL).

Ivo Hulskamp (1980) is a product designer and artist. He combines conceptual thinking with advanced productions skills developing conceptual lighting installations, design objects and industrial products.

He successfully finished a degree in mechanical engineering, a bachelor in Product Design at the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU) and a Master Public Space Design at the MAHKU. He now lives and works in Eindhoven from his own studio at Strijp-S.

He enrolled for a course in mechanical engineering in order to be “able to make anything” and after completion, he found a job as a machine builder. He quickly found that the industrial environment was conceptually not satisfying and wanted to make more autonomous work.

In his current work he loves to work with light and makes lamps or light installations. He uses physics and mathematics to solve design problems.

Ben Pearce creates things with delicate force, brute feeling and attention to detail and shape. The materials he works with may vary between; steel, copper, wood, leather, and even plastics.

Apart from making things, he gives regular workshops and master classes in various disciplines.

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Besides the Vertical Talks in the Vertical Gallery, we will host another project in our Horizontal Gallery during Dutch Design Week 2017: AL DENTE - Cooking for physical exercise is a project by Benjamin Decle, presented by Ecole Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Valenciennes.

Al Dente is a set of four machines which aims to compensate for the loss and lack of physical activities among seniors by using cooking as a pretext. The purpose of each machine is to emphasize, overstate and amplify the different gestural stages needed for cooking tagliatelle in order to preserve and maintain autonomy in our young seniors.

For more info, check the PDF at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8-vN6z-FWhTNGpxaDYwMlMwbTA/view?usp=sharing

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Vertical Talks #4 - ARCHI / TYPES

Tuesday 24 October 16:00-17:00 @ Plug-in-City and in streaming on Fictional Collective FB Page

Different types of architecture and architects are shaped by different visions on the archetypes of the discipline and the relationship between architecture and related fields (such as design and art). We will explore these Archi / Types through the practice and experience of two types of architects, our speakers for this Vertical Talk. Check their bios in the pictures below!

w/ Floor Frings (architect and designer, NL) and Jan Van Dick (architect, NL)

Floor Frings, founder and owner of Mato graduated cum laude from TU Eindhoven (MA Architecture) and received an Archiprix nomination for her graduation project Resensing Space. After her studies, she worked for several years at Open Architecture Office (OAO), became a member of Collaboration O and was a guest lecturer at both Design Academy Eindhoven and Hochschule Bochum.

In her work, Frings puts emphasis on the physical and the material aspects of a space. She perceives the architect as a maker – not just as a thinker – and is fascinated by the ways in which architecture is defined by its embodied experience. Materiality occupies an important role within her design process, for she believes materials determine the atmosphere, and is therefore often investigated on a scale of 1:1. Since the relationship to the body is so important within Frings’ design process, her oeuvre can be regarded a collection of physical events instead of mere designed spaces.

http://mato-architecten.nl/

Jan van Dijk

Graduated at the Academy of Architecture, Arnhem; final project: "child and space" 1975-1981

Career:

Architect Inbo 1981-1984. Architect Director Inbo Eindhoven 1984-1994. Architect-manager communication Inbo 1995-2009. Member of the board BNA (Royal Institute of Dutch Architects) 2005-2009. Initiating the debate about shrinking areas in the Netherlands and the role of designers. Chairman of the Brabant Academy 2009-2013. Ambassador Brabant Academy 2013-2014. Initiator "Stadskracht Eindhoven" 2014. Initiator CLEW, Citylab Eindhoven-Warsaw 2016-present. Advisor Attb (Atelier to the Bone) 2016-present. Mentor/advisor/coach young designers, 2016-present.

For his Vertical Talk, he was inspired by a text written by Pascal Gielen, professor cultural sociology at the University of Antwerp, under the title "the neo-architect”. In this text, he looks at the position of the architect from the beginning of the twentieth century and gives a clear picture of the latest developments. In two of the types Pascal describes, the artist-architect and the neo-architect, many architects will recognize themselves today.

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Vertical Talks #3 - DESIGN AT WORK

Monday 23 October 16:00-17:00 @ Plug-in-City and in streaming on Fictional Collective FB Page

What does the work of a designer consist of? What are the differences between having your own studio and working for a big studio? How the design practice is affected by designers’ daily working routines?

w/ Lucas Muñoz (designer and artist, SP) and Ollie Hutton (designer, NL). Check their bios in the pictures below!

Oliver Hutton (Industrial Designer, NL)

An Industrial Designer who works from 'A to B' within the design process, who focus' not only the details of design, but has the ability to look at the bigger picture. Bringing a strategic mind-set to the concept development process' allowing for unconventional methods, beauty and innovation. With a focus primarily on *Fit in a Bucket* type of products; but not limited to: Consumer Electronics, Child Seats, Structural Packaging and Soft goods.  Who has an affinity with high quality CMF bringing the design quality and design detailing needed to execute the project or experience to the required level. Apart from the physical, it's the interpretation of the psychology data. From understanding the wants and needs of consumers from interview sessions, gathering insights and consumers testing which can be applied to the storytelling element of the design process.

Lucas Muñoz (designer and artist, SP)

Lucas Muñoz Muñoz (1983) is a Spanish designer, artist and craft journeyman based between the Netherlands and Spain. His practice spins around the functionality and materiality of use-objects, working a field that intertwines the need for use of our daily-life artefacts with the capacity they have to carry and embody meaning from an artistic approach. Most of his work find home at museum and gallery exhibitions as well as private collectors, while some other remain thought exercises to become sensorial digressions about our social and civic man-made landscapes. A practice that most of times renders physical in his atelier or during local interventions abroad, being the latter ones mainly in collaboration with local creatives or cultural institutions.

http://www.lucasmunoz.com/

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Vertical Talks #2 - THE OUTCOME OF DESIGN

Sunday 22 October 16:00-17:00 @ Plug-in-City and in streaming on Fictional Collective FB Page

In a continuously changing landscape of products, services, practices, educations, systems and processes, what can we still define as outcomes of design? Do we still need to ask ourselves what is design and what is not? Or is it an irrelevant, reductive and outdated question?

w/ Tamar Shafrir (writer, researcher, and designer, USA) and Sander Wassink (designer, NL)

Tamar Shafrir is a Rotterdam-based writer, researcher, and designer. She works as a design researcher at Het Nieuwe Instituut and a thesis advisor and lecturer at Design Academy Eindhoven. Her writing has been published in Dirty Furniture, Disegno, PIN-UP, MacGuffin, Real Review, Domus, and Abitare, as well as in several books including Material Utopias, Symbolic Exchange, Printing Things, and Open-Source Architecture. In 2013, she co-founded the design research studio Space Caviar with Joseph Grima. Her work at the studio includes the exhibitions Archaeology of Rose Island, Neoasterisms, SQM: The Home Does Not Exist, and Sigma: Cartography of Learning.

http://www.tamarshafrir.com/

Sander Wassink is an artist and designer who encourages us to reconsider our ideas of beauty and aesthetic value. How can we reconsider what is important and what is desirable to include notions of history, memory and the preservation of a past which is slipping away. Amid new construction, new production, and constant proliferation of new forms and facades, Wassink turns his attention to the discarded, the abandoned, the left over and attempts to reimagine what can be done with the already partially formed. What new possibilities exist in the surfaces and materials that are half-built or half-destroyed. Whether his object is the partly demolished facade of an abandoned building, or the everyday detritus from our over productive culture, Wassink asks what new forms and new visions of beauty already exist to be discovered and appreciated.

http://www.sanderwassink.nl/

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Vertical Talks #1 - CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITIES Saturday 21 October 16:00-17:00 @ Plug-in-City and in streaming on Fictional Collective FB Page

Which is the architecture of community? What is the impact of a community on the local environment and urban design and viceversa?

w/ Raphael Coutin (designer, FR) and Martial MARQUET (architect, designer and teacher, FR).

Raphael Coutin (FR) Design / Research / Social Design / Spatial Design From the age of 15, Raphael Coutin left home in search of Northern skies, metropolitan density and debris, cul-de-sacs, overspill, and places where solutions are abundant, even when problems are not. First finding his footing in the urban environment of Paris, he applied himself to the study of materials used in building, modelling and sculpting. Through a succession of intermediate steps (passage through Belgium) he landed in the South of the Netherlands, in Eindhoven. There he learnt to see the bigger picture, covering the theory and research of social design, all for the benefit of making things work. In short, what the Dutch are proud of: making things better. And so the city became his oyster. His own backyard (the 12 arrondissement) had provided him with a good sense of all these unlikely riches. Places and spaces seemingly lost, consigned to an existence without purpose. In the continuum of dereliction, destruction and (re)building Raphael sees a design intervention as the new way forward. It is a reassembling of elements present, a readdressing of previous design solutions and a repurposing. Raphael Coutin approaches the chaos with a sense of wonder and subdues the alienated elements by imposing a new system. Raphael Coutin is co-founder of the Fictional Collective

Martial Marquet (FR) Martial Marquet is architect, designer and teacher, he lives and works in Pantin (FR). He's the co-founder on trans-disciplinary collective PZZL. Martial’s architecture does not cheat. It is enthusiastic, passionate and relates to the way it has been produced. Martial, in his fascination for matter, more specifically wood, uses its assemblage and construction means as creative vectors for his projects, whether the latter are situated in the scale of an object, a building, or even entire cities. Those projects are as generous as aggressive, which allow the reader not to remain in the indifference of boredom.

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Taboos; Anti-Social

In the second collaboration between ESAD Valenciennes and Fictional Collective in Plug-in-City, twelve students engaged in a performance workshop. The workshop looked into personal taboo(s); with several stages, the students engaged in the making of props, the use of their body and discursive presentations to trigger narratives out of their performance ideas.

Mathilde Bellegueulle Maeva Chapelle Remi Mahieux Aline Ledoux Clemence Mogabure Yasmeen Tizgui Marianne Barrier Audrey Alonso Eugenie Lempaszak Tarik Belkhir Wilhemine Vandekerchove

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Few thoughts about the residency

Making something abstract for a public exhibition is like wearing an avant-garde outfit, you have to emotionally prepare yourself for the few seconds of flash judgements you may endure throughout the day, prepare yourself to always face them bravely. But in those instances, I always felt that if you believed your fashion decision was good, the people passing by can sense your confidence in your creative choices, accept it, and slowly investigate it for themselves.

I love contemporary art and the abstract concepts that often are embodied in each piece. I love that sensation of looking at a work, feeling curious, and intrigued, read through the description, searching for the meaning that I think must be there. I find it in the text, but just slightly, then i look back at the work and it dawns on me. That moment of realization, and the subsequent imagination space that it thrusts me into is something that I live for.

My prototype for my project TerraEconomics, is super abstract. What got me there is a combination of things, limited time and accepting that not everything can be done right, working within the limits and embracing how fate has molded my project, is one big reason for its level of abstractness, I admit. But another is confidence in my imagination. I'm so sure that my story is good, that the weird ways that I visualize in my head are profound. In the end all you can do is make it and see.

Like the eccentric outfits, my work does garner a sense of disappointment among some onlookers, and I can see it. The work isn't so playful, and certainly not useful. It doesn't solve a problem, or add a piece to the puzzle,  all of which are satisfying for many, whether it's a pleasure seeker or an engineer head. But I know there are others, who will fill in the blanks, make my story theirs, and reappropriate it in unseen ways in their various creative endeavors, ways that I will never recognize or stumble across, but I know it will happen because I do it, and that's great, that's enough.

Maybe the next step will take me to a place that is more solidified, a film, or a series of objects, more complete and with a higher level of production, and the concept will be more obvious. Or maybe not. It's possible that inherent with my fictional story, my concept, is abstractness. By forcing onlookers to make that big thought leap, may be the only way to truly stretch their imagination and have them join me on the other side. Sometimes I think that the vacancies in the work are the treasures that give people a way to make it theirs, and also the opportunity to partake in the mini-epiphanies I have when alone in a museum, pondering contemporary art.

Monique Grimord

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During DDW, besides the Economia Residency in the Vertical Gallery, the horizontal one hosted Dream Factory (by Aram Lee, Anais Borie and Ottonie von Roeder), a performance in a small factory set up. The participant designers put themselves for 36 hours into the position of workers in a production line of souvenirs. While two of them are producing one is sleeping, every 6 hours they change their position. Their performance follows a set of rules that serve alone the production output. A hierarchy voice controls and maintains their efficiency and duty to obey. The goal is to produce the amount of 2160 souvenirs. This forces them to follow the cadence of one souvenir per 2.5 minutes. The performance transforms their factory into a big vending machine that sells our souvenirs. Through this act we question their own practice, the relationship between production and consumers and today’s mass production.

The live performance ended on Monday but the souvenir shop is open for all the duration of Dutch Design Week, check it out!

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On Saturday 22nd October at 17:00 the Vertical Gallery, together with Baltan Laboratories, opened Monique Grimord's work in progress exhibition with a series of lectures + performance in Plug In City Glass Pavilion (Leidingstraat 30, Eindhoven). Programme of the evening 17:00 - 17:15 Introduction of the topic / Baltan Economia Festival by Wiepko Oosterhuis, festival curator (tbc). 17:15 - 17:35 Bridging the paradigm: personal reflections of a physicist on the new economic order by Jord Van der Berg - Stordes (Physics Universiteit Utrecht Master, MBA University of Oxford) 17:35 - 18:00 Terra Economics and the Financial Speculator by Monique Grimord, interactive designer, maker and artist in residency in the Vertical Gallery The opening was followed by Dream Factory, a 36 hours performance starting on Sunday 23 6:00 AM till Monday 24 6:00 PM in the horizontal gallery: Dream Factory Performance . Dream Factory (by Aram Lee, Anais Borie and Ottonie von Roeder) is a performance in a small factory set up. The participant designers put themselves for 36 hours into the position of workers in a production line of souvenirs. While two of them are producing one is sleeping, every 6 hours they change their position. Their performance follows a set of rules that serve alone the production output. A hierarchy voice controls and maintains their efficiency and duty to obey. The goal is to produce the amount of 2160 souvenirs. This forces them to follow the cadence of one souvenir per 2.5 minutes. The performance transforms their factory into a big vending machine that sells our souvenirs. Through this act we question their own practice, the relationship between production and consumers and today’s mass production.

Live performance: Sun. 23/10/16, 6.00 – Mon. 24/10/16, 18.00 The Dream Factory souvenir shop is open during the Dutch Design Week, 22/10/16 – 30/10/16.

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Here at PIC a group of students from Esad Valenciennes were pushed and pulled by three members of the Fictional collective. Since PIC isn’t a regular city environment, by its condition of working place, students had to question the locality to be experimental on their proposals.

During this week of immersion and intensive group work in Eindhoven, togetherness, thinking and making it differently, sharing, giving and receiving brought the students to embody the contrast of the context. Squaring up their restrictions four different projects and an exhibition sprout, using PIC and the pluggers as starting point and context to create their implanted devices.

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7 - 14 November

- FB EVENT -

+ OPENING / VERNISSAGE + Monday 9th November at 8:00 PM at Het Glaspaviljoen, in Plug-In-City. Come and have a drink with us!

Fictional Collective and Protocoolers are proud to present a light objects selection from the last collection of the designer Lucas Muñoz, Industrial Monolith.

A collection made from building components which reflects on the material sources we work with: as construction material is the most available stock in our built environment. Taking from the geologic Anthropocene theory, these objects are constructed from processed pieces ready in the market for an industrial and structural purpose, but when introducing them in a domestic environment their shape and surface becomes suddenly relevant.

Lucas Muñoz (Madrid, 1983), works from Eindhoven, The Netherlands. There and abroad creates function oriented objects by translating observations into stuff and viceversa, hence making a variety of objects that range from boats, speakers and ventilation systems to chairs and lamps. Within these material activities, also curates and coordinates part of the European Design Labs Master department in Madrid and writes articles for art and thought magazines in Spain. His first book will be released on 2016 under his homemade Zolo editorial.

Lucas Muñoz http://www.lucasmunoz.com/

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A shot taken during our Plug-In-City opening party of DDW 2015.

Drawings: Raphael Coutin Live Visuals: Corradino Garofalo

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