Panta Rhei - Memento Festival in the KIOSK
An installation by Janneke Vanneste and Axelle Delboo for Memento Festival Kortrijk in collaboration with Glascentrale Wevelgem.
Memento is an annual word art festival in Kortrijk and immerses its visitors in a real language bath. Through performances, debates, workshops, author encounters, exhibitions, installations and reading sessions, the word arts show themselves in all their forms. Next edition will take place from 14 to 16 March 2025. In the run-up to the festival, discover the installation Panta Rhei by designers Janneke Vanneste and Axelle Delboo in collaboration with Glascentrale Wevelgem at KIOSK.
Myriem El-Kaddouri is Letterzetter or City Poet of Kortrijk and curator of the festival. Drawing on her legal background, she chose this year's theme of causality, or cause and effect. How is everything connected? What impact can we have on our world? Is our language the first ripple in the water?
Designregio Kortrijk invited designers Axelle Delboo and Janneke Vanneste to develop an installation in the KIOSK on the Graanmarkt around the festival's theme. They drew inspiration from the philosopher Heraclitus: ‘What is today is not tomorrow. What we do today makes tomorrow different. What others do today makes the water flow differently tomorrow.’
With their installation Panta Rhei or ‘Everything Flows’, they aim to depict this infinite movement of change. You see a glass installation that suggests an infinite stream of water like a surreal staircase. Circulating down and up like a cascade of different states of aggregation linked together in an infinity. We with our words cause ripples in the water, these are interpreted, distorted, lead to actions, in short they lead a life of their own. Just like water in all its forms; it flows, freezes and evaporates.
For us, causality is a flowing cycle of constant change. Like the continuous flow of time, in which nothing stands still and everything keeps transforming.
The installation is a collaboration with Glascentrale Wevelgem, who provided the designers with expert advice and materials. Glascentrale has over 50 years of experience in the production and processing of all kinds of glazing and were the perfect partner for this installation.
Janneke and Axelle met while studying Industrial Product Design at Howest in Kortrijk. They are now also both following the advanced course in furniture design (banaba VOMO) at Thomas More Hogeschool in Mechelen. They both already exhibited at the WONDER Creativity Festival and the expo WE ARE THE NEXT GENERATION in Kortrijk.
Program highlights
Friday 14 March – Opening Memento Festival 2025: the ambassadors have their say
This Memento edition opens with a dazzling show full of music, poetry and inspiring stories. An evening featuring Kortrijk's Letterzetter, Myriem El-Kaddouri, as well as the three festival ambassadors, Saskia De Coster, Johannes Genard and Esohe Weyden, in the spotlight. They are joined by some more impressive names from the literary and music worlds.
Tickets are available here.
14 to 30 March – UNEARTHING (CRUMBLED, LIT AND OVERFLOWN), Broeltoren Noord
In collaboration with the Memento Word Arts Festival, ELDERS presents Dutch artist Lennart Lahuis (1986, NL) with several existing and new installations spread across the three floors of the Broeltoren Noord.
Lahuis reveals visual information about natural processes, such as erosion, burning and evaporation. He combines these processes with technological and scientific elements, confronting the precision of science and technology with the volatility of nature.
The exhibition is enriched by a collaboration with word artist Loeke Vanhoutteghem (1996, BE), who has written a poem for Lahuis's installation.
14 to 30 March – Kunstenparcours Levenslopen, 4n20
What could be more causal than a life story? Each story is unique, peculiar to one person, with all its particularities. The ‘Levenslopen’ project brings seniors together with collage artists and writers to bring their stories to life in an equally unique art installation.
Five elderly people from Kortrijk share the story of their lives with a duo of an artist from COUPEE collage collective and a writer from the Letterzetter collective. How do they themselves look back on their lives? Which choices proved decisive afterwards? On reflection, would they have taken different paths? Under the guidance of writer Aya Sabi the artist-writer duo process the answers to those questions into a fascinating installation.
You can admire the results from 14 to 30 March at 4n20.
Lisa Declercq
Lisa is responsible for the offline and online visibility and communication of Designregio Kortrijk. She is always looking for the next big thing in young design talent and builds up the creative community of the organisation.
