edith — a group project

Front of house, Brussels, March 2025

Back home, Edith empties its living room. Declaring this a spare room, we convene to assemble the artefacts of each of our practices, arranging them in this space defamiliarized by the installation of pseudoarchitectural cardboard columns wedged between floor and ceiling:

Papier-mâché farm animals plus cat; magnets ringing in time on amplified guitar strings; a carved stone seal and the impression it makes; flowers in the forms of extension cords and crochet amulets; notebooks pressed open against the wall; angels drawn and stuffed; a whole other house seen though DS screens; a television blocking the passage to the rest of our house while showing what might be going on back there. All the while, the soup bubbles away in the chimney.

Xander Maclaren, Louise Dousset, Perle Venzal, Clara Nop, Léna Yumie Trullier, Tchoutchou Tophoven, Ward Lauwers, Mathieu Beaucarne, Nathan Raccah.

Edith editions, Fanzines festival, Brussels, December 2024

In a corner of the old brasserie, the printers from our dining room shelf — Kyocera laser, Epson large format dot-matrix — huddle with us around a circular table on castors covered in booklets, travelogues, sketches of imagined films, calendars, printed ephemera, secret pouches, and paper lamps — signed Edith, maison d’édition.

Louise Dousset, Perle Venzal, Nathan Raccah, Ward Lauwers, Xander Maclaren, Léna Yumie Trullier, Clara Nop, Mathieu Beaucarne.

Photo by Ward Lauwers

Angeli’s the light, residency at BASE, Milan design week, April 2024

Euroluce: notes, words heard and told during Salone del Mobile, Milan, April 2024 –>

An Italian hotel room, stripped of its comforts, fills up with strangers’ faces, trays of off-spec paperclips, hardware store back-aisle merchandise restlessly rearranged, and most of all stacks of printed paper — coloured by the odd tones of painted lightbulbs and patterned by the shadows of innumerable hanging bits of things. When we aren’t sitting working at our low table, we see Milan design week armed with the badges around our necks, advised by our mission statement:

Angeli’s the Light

Four years of attempts to find a good life in industrial Eindhoven, the city of light: the exotic in the ultralocal, the entanglement of house and factory, the intimate and the rational. Energy spent avoiding isolation.

After school we moved together to Brussels, in a house on avenue Montjoie owned by minor Flemish nobility. Across from a small park and down the street from a large one. Solidly built in the first half of the twentieth century without us in mind.

We adapt it to our purposes as we search and work, balancing between burn-out and bore-out, figuring out what to do in a world of infinite urgencies where individual happiness seems always to lean on the exhaustion of countless others.

We bring with us through the Brenner Pass fragments of stories of friendship, dinners, bricolage, 400 coups; from Eindhoven to Brussels and from Brussels to Milan. Temporary solutions that have become permanent and specific findings that could be useful elsewhere.

We’re equipped with enough to build, cook, and publish. We hope to reach the promised hotel room, soon to be nested, cluttered, made soft and porous to the industrial and domestic legacy of the town.

Melancholia, sprezzatura haunting the streets, vodka and bitterness after lunch, Mastroianni fixing a lamp, the 24/7 Carrefour midnight worker, isolated 1 euro cafes, banana boxes and flea markets, the city’s answer to the question of how to live a good life.

Nathan Raccah, Louise Dousset, Xander Maclaren, Perle Venzal.

Photo by Cartacarbone