IDW is the annual International Design Workshop for master’s students of the Faculty of Design Sciences at the University of Antwerp (architecture, interior architecture, product development, heritage studies, urbanism and spatial planning), as well as for master’s students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at AP University of Applied Sciences and Arts Antwerp.
This year’s theme, be+longing, invites us to explore the complex relationship between being and longing, to ask not only where we belong, but what we long for. To belong is to feel seen, rooted, and included. But it also requires us to reckon with systems of exclusion, histories of displacement, and the deep human desire for connection.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han observes that distance, and therefore longing, disappear in favour of distancelessness, which renders everything available. We therefore propose the question in our workshop: What if we were to imagine a place that honours distance rather than erasing it? Longing for distance that acknowledges separation not as loss, but as the very condition through which relation becomes possible.
Our workshop moves between two marked sites in the city of Antwerp, navigating the tension between separation and connection. It operates through the dual metaphors of kintsugi and riveting. Riveting, an old technique of repairing porcelain or clay with metal staples, does not conceal the fracture. On the contrary, the join remains visible, sometimes even more pronounced than the break itself. The repair demands a second incision: holes must be drilled, the surface pierced, before the fragments can be held together. Healing requires a renewed wound. (The English verb to rivet also means to captivate, to hold spellbound.)
We intervene between two points to recover their relation. To rediscover where and how we belong may require such an intervention, a second wound, a deliberate incision that reinstates distance where immediacy has flattened experience. Belonging is not a static condition but a relation, a ritual, a rite de passage. Passage does not pre-exist; it emerges through the act itself. The threshold is constituted by crossing. How do you mark the distance that allows belonging to take place?
w/ Michel Melenhorst
