
Zaventem Ateliers at Villa Empain
Topic:
Exhibition
Year:
12 December 2024
A prototype of reality
For ten days, 32 designers and artists from Zaventem Ateliers transform the iconic Art Deco house into a living environment of contemporary collectible design and art. This is not a traditional exhibition. It is a house in use. A house that breathes. We restore the original function of the villa: to be lived in. We cook, we work, we host, we move through the rooms. The objects are not staged, they are activated. They are touched, used, repositioned. They exist in real time. This project challenges the static format of fairs and museums. It proposes another rhythm, more intimate, more embodied, more human. The visitor does not observe from a distance, but enters a world that is already alive. Collectible design here is not decorative. It is functional, radical, and social. The value of a table is not the object itself, but what happens around it. The value of a chair is not its form, but the presence it holds. Villa Empain becomes a prototype. A model of how design and art can exist in the real, not behind glass, but within life.
A family
We live in a time of acceleration, digital saturation, and constant image production. In this context, contemporary collectible design and art take on a different weight. Every piece presented at Villa Empain is handmade. Material, gesture, time, and process remain visible. These works carry the trace of the human hand. They are not anonymous. They are not mass produced. They are intentional. Collectible design is often reduced to luxury. For us, it is something else. It is research. It is experimentation. It is a field where material intelligence meets cultural reflection. At Zaventem Ateliers, designers work across disciplines, architecture, sculpture, furniture, installation. The boundaries blur. What emerges are pieces that question how we live, how we gather, how we inhabit space. By placing these works inside a real domestic environment, we also ask a crucial question: how do we live with art? How does design function beyond the pedestal?
Sources:
Other PROJECTS
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