With the excellence of Graduates’ work and design research at its heart, The Arena is Design Academy Eindhoven’s (DAE) in-house platform for debate and discussion. As a part of DAE’s annual Graduation Show, The Arena programme is designed to explore and contextualise aspects of the Graduates’ design practice that inform and surpass a final object or outcome.
The Arena live programme will host Panel Discussions and Graduate Talks at the Graduation Show.
→ Planetary Imaginations Panel Discussion Information regarding otherworldly concepts and identities are largely mediated by forces beyond our physical understanding. This panel looks into how 'othering' amongst our societies extends into stereotypes that we apply to minority identities, other species and extraterrestrial beings, and what role the role of imagination has in thinking about this.
Graduates: Noam Youngrak Son - BA Communication Filips Staņislavskis - BA Leisure / Studio Urgencies Hung Lu Chan - MA Social Design Michèle Boulogne - BA Leisure
→ The Body Matrix Panel Discussion By examining behaviours that extend beyond corporeal margins, and questioning imposed bodily norms, the panel seeks to exemplify how bodies are arbitrarily posed under limitations of various systems and the ways they can rapture them. Three graduates will activate the body as a multiplicitous site and show how it plays a key role in addressing legal reparation, capital and productivity, and national ideals.
Moderator: Roberto Pérez Gayo - Social Designer, Researcher and Pedagogue
Graduates: Ines Borovac - MA Social Design Viktória Kaslik - MA Critical Inquiry Lab Doi De Luise - MA Critical Inquiry Lab
Externals: Remi Kuforiji - Architectural Designer and Researcher
→ Marrying the Internet Graduate Talk The internet has a highly prevalent yet evasive presence in our lives. While our interactions with it are constant and devoted, its entirety is mostly lost on us. Three graduates spent the past year exploring this relationship, ending up with the conclusion that perhaps their relationship with the complex infrastructure of the internet resembles something akin to a marriage.
Moderator: Bianca Schick as The Internet - MA Contextual Design
Graduates: Ned Kaar - MA Contextual Design Beatriz Sousa - MA Information Design Jonas Hejduk - MA Contextual Design
→ "LA ESPINA DORSAL DEL PLANETA ES MI CORDILLERA" (The spinal cord of the planet is my mountain) Graduate Talk The planetary phenomena where raw materials are in the service of global systems, calls for an urgent restitution. During this conversation, Rosana and Carlos will trace two materials - Fique, the fibre behind coffee bags, and Copper, the conductive metal sustaining electronic devices - back to their sources in the mountain ranges of the South of the America. Through this conversation they will reveal the materials’ local relevance, and their connection to a global ecosystem.
Moderator: Simón Ballen Botero - Designer
Graduates: Rosana Escobar - BA Wellbeing Carlos Sfeir - MA Contextual Design
→ The Free Wheel Show Graduate Talk In their Show, Léa Cruard, Aurélie Defez and Pierre Allain present their methodo ad absurdum. They inaugurate the concept of the ‘Free Wheel’ and open it up to new members. The Free Wheel method and philosophy reassesses their role as designers. It encourages collective intelligence through randomness, playfulness and absurdity.
Graduates: Pierre Allain - BA Leisure Léa Cruard - BA Leisure Aurélie Defez - BA Leisure
→ The Good, the Bad and the Toxic Panel Discussion The word toxic is typically synonymous with harmful and insidious things that we should not engage with. Once applied to something, it dooms materials, objects and relationships into perpetually wasteful systems. By re-considering asbestos, human feces, and heteronormative family constructs, three graduates seek insight into what it takes to move beyond toxicity today.
Moderator: Tiiu Meiner - Curator, Writer & Arena Producer
Graduates: Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas - MA Critical Inquiry Lab Rebecca Schedler - MA Social Design Benedetta Pompili - MA Social Design
Externals: Luiza Prado de O. Martins - Artist, writer, and researcher Katrin Korfmann - Artist, Pedagogue, Researcher, Mother, Photographer
→ Legends Graduate Talk Legends have the ability to deal with the living unconscious of their people and time. This panel - consisting of three blokes in a bar - approaches the mechanisms of queer legends and decentralised narratives through the lenses of different examples brought by each speaker. The panel will deploy conversational patterns to thereby construct its own legends in the process of discussion. Those legends will be unfixed and open-ended.
Moderator: Robert Adolfsson - Tutor Queering Practices at DAE
Graduates: Leo Maher - BA Public Private Miles Worner - BA Leisure
→ The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design Panel Discussion Design is often so consumed by external demands (the market, trends, ideas of social good) that it neglects its source of intuition, nuance and inspiration—making sense of oneself vis-à-vis one’s material context. The auto-ethnographic turn in design takes us back to a form of design that starts at the self and one’s experiences before scaling up or moving outwards to engage with wider sets of concerns.
Moderator: Ceola Tunstall-Behrens - MA Contextual Design Alumni 2020, and Arena Programme Manager
Graduates: Bruno Baietto - MA Contextual Design Graduate 2021
Externals: Anna Aagaard Jensen - MA Contextual Design Alumni 2018, and current head of DesignLab at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Michael Kaethler - co-editor of The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design, design sociologist at KU Leuven Oli Stratford - Chief Editor, Disegno Hicham Khalidi - Director, Jan van Eyck Academy
→ Reimagining Womanhood Graduate Talk Ida Bank Blichfeld and Paula Gouablin Essou are Contextual design graduates. With a textile background, they approach video art as a way to re-tell their womanhood story. This Graduation talk deals with the misinterpretation of what it is like to be a woman. How they experienced moving images, in mainstream media and dominant language as a report of a singular point of view, they want to challenge it into a way of telling their own truth. Based on different working methods, they want to talk about how they felt empowered by their research and process during their graduation year.
→ Is Post-Truth All That's Left? Panel Discussion Understanding how truths form and gain their credibility as such, is an incredibly laborious yet crucial task that we face today. By questioning the reality of physical and digital artefacts, filtered experiences of news events, and behaviours of disinformation, this panel wonders how do we experience truth in a post-truth era?
Moderator: Ben Shai van der Wal - Philosopher
Graduates: Finn Mullan - MA Information Design Sofia Topi - MA Critical Inquiry Lab Fabio Salvadori - MA Information Design
Externals: Sara Bezovsek & Dorijan Šiško - Graphic Designers and multimedia artist duo
