Over the past year, filmmaker Joseph Doran had been collaborating with Espace Aygo, documenting life within their project — a creative initiative founded by Sijmen Vellekoop, Line Murken, Jaime Le Bleu, and Salome Sperling, four design graduates from the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Salome Sperling and Sijmen Vellekoop joined us at Grymsdyke Farm together with students from ADS6 at the Royal College of Art, for a day of workshops and lectures exploring the intersections between design, making, and collaboration. The session was led by Kate Darby, Marco Campardo, and Guan Lee, as part of the RCA programme Adaptation: Reading through Making.

During the 2025/26 academic year, ADS6 explored how acts of making could serve not only as methods for prototyping and developing an architectural language, but also as ways of reading, questioning, and transforming place.

In this context, students were invited to work alongside Espace Aygo to reinterpret the meaning of a funeral creating an object, performance, or piece of furniture that reflected their personal experiences, emotions, and interpretations of loss and renewal.

One group: Ruben, Sofia, and Ben, revisited the macabre Victorian practice of attaching bells to coffins, in case the buried were not truly dead. Their project, Dead Ringer, resulted in two sculptural bells, delicate yet unsettling, symbols of both fear and reassurance.

Keir, Ollie, and George chose to explore memory through the act of casting. Pressing their faces and hands into sharp sand, they created plaster impressions that froze a fleeting moment in time — a quiet reflection on presence and absence.

Seth and Rianna approached the theme as a ritual of transformation. Drawing from Viking funerals, Chinese purification practices, and the myth of the Phoenix, they built a figure with open arms and a serene expression — a gesture of acceptance and renewal, shaped through collaborative metalwork and casting.

Finally, Dimina, Will, Andreas, and Stephen reimagined the funerary throne of Ancient Egypt as a contemporary artefact. Starting from a broken plastic garden chair, they reconstructed it into a curvaceous, minimal form, bound with black tape and ceremonially broken to complete its symbolic rebirth.

Through this collective act of making, students and tutors alike reflected on the ways in which material, gesture, and collaboration can give form to some of the most profound human experiences — from loss to transformation, and from the end to what might begin again.