Maxime is one of our former master students and alumni IA – class of 2013 – that is currently preparing her contribution to the exposition “De invasie toont…” that will be opening on may 8th.
‘De Invasie toont.. ‘ is an exhibition that celebrates the 5 th birthday of this collective organization and shows the work of new talented Belgian designers and their sources of inspiration.
Evolving from her masterproject “Poetry of the homeless” Maxime is applied to the open call and was selected to continue this interesting process of research and design by making a scale 1:1 installation based on further spatial interpretations of the project.
The design process started from personal inquiries and registrations on the survival strategies of the homeless and their acted patterns of trying to inhabit and to create private spaces in public daily conditions.
Her observations learned that homeless people possess in their survival strategy the absolute notation of “not having spaces” and this generates an absolute freedom away from restricting conditions to create very specific private spaces.
Homeless people determine their fictitious territories inside and outside by flowing through spaces and simply by being slowly and temporarily present. They read forms in public space and buildings in a very introvert and subjective matter by which these are filled, used or occupied in different personal ways.
They wonder through and read the city as if constituted within a series of rooms, that they enter one by one, inspecting its possibilities for survival and hosting primary needs .
Maxime analysed through her research that homeless people use a specific survival strategy that can be approached in 5 basic leads : trajectory, dominance, territory, camouflage and subjective reading.
These basic physical findings were transferred or used as a core to create several design models that next to incorporating these basic survival strategies are confronted with related mental approaches dealing with memory, identity and imagination.
The design concept was taken further into a very interpretative and autonomous model disconnected from context and site. Spatial interventions and models are made extracted from her research and interpretations starting from a possible reconstruction of a former “memory” house in the city.
The exposition runs from may 7th till September 2015 @ design museum Gent