Studio Makkink&Bey / Jurgen Bey

WaterSchool is chosen to be part of the core program at the Porto Design Biennale, initiated by ESAD—idea, the Research and Development (R&D) unit of ESAD – School of Arts and Design. This year’s theme is ‘Being water: how we flow together and shape each other’, curated by Fernando Brízio. The exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and publications that are the programmatic structure of the Porto Design Biennale aim to leave a continuous ballast of discussion and thought on design as a discipline of imminent protagonism and responsibility in collective life and environmental survival.

CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

WaterSchool transformed two rooms of the Biodiversity Gallery into a Cabinet of Curiosities, exhibiting a wide variety of works by invited artists, architects, and designers. Precursors of modern-day museums, these cabinets of curiosities arose from collectors gathering objects and artefacts from many strands of artistic, scientific, and intellectual endeavour in order to display them side by side, ignorant of any categorisation or classification. Interactive and hands-on in nature, these collections actively invited exploration and curiosity, whilst simultaneously serving to tell a particular story about the world and its history as imagined by their collector.

Continuing this tradition, The WaterSchool Classroom exhibition presents a wide variety of works by invited artists, architects, and designers united within the speculative framework of the WaterSchool. Within the exhibition, these serve as conversation starters, in order to instigate discussions on how dwelling, livin,g and working could be rethought and even redesigned bearing water and its impact in mind.