Three-dimensional tile
Ceramic
Golem Baukeramik, Germany
2023
A Body Holds A Body Holds A Body brings together the sixteen graduating Geo–Design theses from the 2026 cohort at Design Academy Eindhoven, exploring the entangled urgencies of ecological, political, and institutional systems under increasing pressure.
Moving across different scales, sites, and disciplines, the publication traces soil bacteria beneath a post-industrial city, bird dialects between Gibraltar and the Atlas Mountains, plants carrying histories of colonial displacement, rare earth minerals, radioactive isotopes drifting through ocean currents, genetically modified sunflowers, oysters shaped by aquaculture, tidal landscapes, ecological ruins, urban darkness, simulations, and gravitational waves.
What connects these diverse bodies of work is not a shared subject, but a shared question: What happens when complex living systems are abstracted into resources, units, or baselines? What becomes obscured in this process, and what other ways of understanding and relating to these systems might be possible?
Rather than presenting sixteen isolated projects, the publication creates connections between them through a shared interglossary, conversations, and traces that move across the different bodies of research. Concepts shift meaning as they pass from one project to another, revealing unexpected relationships between seemingly distant subjects.
Together, the sixteen theses propose design as a way of tracing relationships, questioning established frameworks, and making visible the often overlooked complexities of the systems we inhabit.