Manon came into contact with a group of illegal refugees who's asylum is rejected. They lived together in a big abandoned house and –in order to inform people on their situation– they handed out leaflets and invited people inside. But nobody came. Logical. Who wants to sit on bare mattresses?

Van Hoeckel came up with the idea to invent a neutral place where immigrants and residents can meet. A whitewashed gypsy wagon: In Limbo Embassy. Who represents these people? Not the media, not our government and certainly not any other government. Now there is In Limbo Embassy that does not represent a country but a group. Refugees without papers, without identity and rights, are the ambassadors.

Bio - Manon van Hoeckel (1990) is an Amsterdam based critical/social designer. Aside from self-initiated collaborative projects she does commissioned work for several clients. She studied at the Design Academy in Eindhoven and graduated Cum Laude in 2014 She has had exhibitions in WOW in Amsterdam (2015), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2015) and at the Salone del Mobile in Milan (2015). She won the Connector Award 2014.

Students react to Manon van Hoeckel' lecture with an artwork presented at the entrance hall of the academy

This installation revers to the thought behind the images of the movie 'fitzcarraldo' and is there to feed our vision. Werner Herzog said that in our time, because of television and movies, there is a lack of images. In the movie they created a block-and-tackle system which sticked in our mind. As you see the sculpture exists out of 2 parts connected through a beam. – by Leonie Schneider en Trijntje Noske