Volmaakt — identity, website, scenography — 2020
I developed a new visual identity for Volmaakt, a Ghent-based design label that facilitates collaborations between designers and sheltered workshops.
Photography by Aaron Lapeirre and Design Museum Gent
Photography by Aaron Lapeirre and Design Museum Gent
Paradise Series — performance, scenography, printed archive — 2019
Paradise Series is an installation with movable, easy to set up elements and specifically designed tools, activated during a performance. In becoming the director of a collective fantasy, I enable myself to escape my mundane daily life.
The dream of a life better than the one we know is an essential part of human nature. Paradise is an omnipresent timeless figure expressing a yearning for that which is absent or desired. Today, in our modern western society, Paradise has become a commodity on the tourist market, a highly controlled construction that responds to the needs of Western tourists to transcend the limits of daily life. Escapism is produced and sold in an easy accessible form: a getaway to an exotic remote island. However, it is an artificial construction that ignores the local reality of these destinations and the imagined experience can never be reached, because it doesn't exist outside the imagination.
Photography by Baptiste Coulon and Raphaelle Mueller
The dream of a life better than the one we know is an essential part of human nature. Paradise is an omnipresent timeless figure expressing a yearning for that which is absent or desired. Today, in our modern western society, Paradise has become a commodity on the tourist market, a highly controlled construction that responds to the needs of Western tourists to transcend the limits of daily life. Escapism is produced and sold in an easy accessible form: a getaway to an exotic remote island. However, it is an artificial construction that ignores the local reality of these destinations and the imagined experience can never be reached, because it doesn't exist outside the imagination.
Photography by Baptiste Coulon and Raphaelle Mueller
Signs from quarantine — performance, flag, collages — 2020
While in quarantine for covid-19 in Lausanne, I sent motivating signs to the outside. At a time when we are all connected throught the world wide web, I did my research on pretechnological ways to send signs over long distances. I made an interpretation of the semaphore telegraph by Claude Chappe, the quarantine signal flag, the semaphor alphabet and messagses in a bottle.
Created during an online workshop with Atelier Téméraire, organised by Le Signe, Centre National du Graphisme in Chaumont
Hugo d'Alesi's Maréorama — book, research — 2020
For the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, the French graphic designer Hugo d’Alesi staged a voyage on a steamship that crossed the Mediterranean Sea from the French port of Villefranche to Constantinople, the capital of the Orient. By both recapturing the voyage as an active passenger aboard the Maréorama and deconstructing the Maréorama in relation to its historical and socio-economical context, this research aims to analyse Hugo d’Alesi’s immersive multi-sensorial spectacle, which combined commercial mass culture with the political agenda of the Third French Republic. It demonstrates how the voyage on the Maréorama was strongly embedded in the stereotypical Western constructed representations of the Mediterranean region at that time. These representations exposed the imbalance of power between the Western and Eastern poles of the Mediterranean basin and the authentic and sensual Orient as the supposed contrasting pole of the industrialised West.
Andrea Adberhalden — publication — 2019
Two publications for the Swiss fashion designer Andrea Abderhalden, documenting her diploma project.