All the small things

Designregion Kortrijk's Designers in Residence programme is celebrating its tenth edition this year. Every year since 2014, Designers in Residence Kortrijk receives three recently graduated designers from all over the world and from different creative disciplines for a residency programme in Kortrijk. 
For three months, the selected designers get the unique opportunity to develop an experimental concept through confrontation between citizens, society, entrepreneurs and education.

This year, the theme of the programme is "All the Small Things", in collaboration with Design Museum Gent. During the residency period, designers will be inspired by the community in Kortrijk and Ghent and challenged to experiment, research, knowledge exchange and imagination.

"All the Small Things" aims to focus on the role of small details in creating a sustainable future. It explores the possible relationships and synergies between low-tech and high-tech design to find sustainable design solutions for the future.

Eszter Nagy 

The installation offers an alternative guide to the actual palaces of The Hague, home of the Dutch royal family, including those that cater to the many, instead of the royal few. Focusing on fifteen shops, restaurants and stores in The Hague that are called palaces, attention is brought to the extraordinariness of everyday life, with its subtle yet intriguing importance. These everyday palaces provide space for ordinary yet fundamental activities such as eating, getting a haircut, and creating community and belonging for customers. They are more substantial in the city than any royal palace.

A series of engraved mirrors honour fifteen of these businesses, uplifting the importance of the ordinary and creating a monument for the small entrepreneurs that shape the city for its people. 

Men's Hair Palace. Polyetherpaleis. Golden Palace. Athene's Palace. Platinum Palace. Roti Palace. Kaa Lun Palace. Haringpaleis. Café Palace. Rick's Vispaleis. Peter Vis and Snackpaleis. Jasmine Palace. Scheveningen Vispaleis. Suezkanaal Vispaleis. Hair Palace.

Yufei Gao  
Julie Merlino  

For the first month of their residency at Designregio Kortrijk, Yufei Gao and Julie Merlino dived into the history and status quo of the linen industry in the region.  

In the past, linen production relied on the rhythms of the seasons. Families in Kortrijk would spin yarn in the winter. Now, not only has the spinning process disappeared from Belgium, but also the seasonal way of living has been disrupted by industrialization and capitalism. We witness a profound disconnection with the environment, society, and even our own psychological states. The project isn’t aiming at revolutionising the textile industry, but by offering a smaller-scale, symbolic, and practical intervention—a way to bring back harmony through a collective, slow, and reflective process.

In the project, they built their open-source spinning machines and transformed the Patria into an open atelier, where everyone is welcome to watch and join us in collective spinning and reflection.