After The Bubble Pops: A Year Later by alums Master Industrial Design
'After The Bubble Pops: A Year Later' is an exhibition by alums of the
Just like spiderlings, we were born into a world already woven: a socio-political web designed to attract, protect, produce, and capture. How do designers, like spiders,navigate the fine line between being the weaver and the entangled?
ARACHNE is a collective formed during our studies at the Industrial Design Master’s of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), to reflect on the nets we spin and inhabit. AFTER THE BUBBLE POPS, following our graduation, we dispersed into our own making, A YEAR LATER we are coming together to weave a network of design practice that spans generations of alumni.
The Master's, with its pre-proposed endpoint, immersed us in an encapsulated timespace. We discovered and researched, tested and trialled. In one sense there is always an endpoint: a deadline, or at least a vague goal held within a timeframe. But when the dust settles after graduation, you realise again that in the broader field of (industrial) design there is no 'true' endpoint. Keeping in flux is at the core of our collective practice. Physically and mentally you have to stay in motion, not always digging, but still searching. We are making this event to keep ourselves moving: to reflect, but mostly to extend. We see ourselves and our practice in relation. Whether it is a product, material or an exhibition: only in context of its contemporary counterparts does it attain its true perspective.
A YEAR LATER gathers the works, processes, struggles and successes of young professionals as unique perspectives in an interconnected network of design, one that stretches across social systems, material agencies, and interpersonal dynamics. This approach resists the established narratives and instead proposes new critical and speculative ways of attempting to navigate a design practice in the current socio-ecological polycrisis. These threads do not follow a fixed path: sometimes crisscrossing and weaving together and sometimes diverging and creating rips. Dive into this web as you will and follow the glimmers that catch your eye, notice overlaps, frictions, and unexpected harmonies. The exhibition is woven together with various generations of Industrial Design Master’s graduates, yet the question still hangs in every corner: with our own nets of work, what do we attract, protect, produce, and capture?
Participants:
Eline ten Busschen, Amber van Gastel, Mahtab Ghasemi, Fahime Zare, Lucy Vink, Moritz Plöns, Doğa Çakmakçı
