2017 Tremplin Exhibition: The Winners

On September 15 the WCC•BF awarded a set of prizes to eight young graduates from the fields of Applied Arts and Design in Wallonia and Brussels art schools. At the institution’s gallery in Mons a jury of experts selected the works that “combined the handmade with industrial production, that seek to give value to that which does not have it, that seek to enrich the world.”

That jury was comprised of Susanna Campogrande, from MateriO Belgium, Laure Capitani from Wallonie-Bruxelles Design et Mode (WBDM), Jacky Legge from the Maison de la Culture Tournai, Hélène Martiat from the WCC•BF and Ruffin Mukenge from the Maison du Design de Mons, as well as our editor-in-chief Lise Coirier, who represented the new TLmag award.

The winner of both our TLmag Prize and the prize awarded by the Minister-President of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation was Songyi Han, who graduated from La Cambre (ENSAV) in book and paper design. The jury qualified Série 4, bowl n°18 (in our cover image), a piece of binding-lacquered ceramic, as “discreet and sober, but without being devoid of strength.” But we actually decided to duplicate our award, due to the high quality of the exhibited work: so another recipient of the TLmag Prize, as well as the Minister-President of the Wallonian Government’s Prize, was Elisa González, a Tapestry graduate at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Her Croisement sur rails combined heritage with a very innovative execution.

The Minister of Higher Education’s Award went to Anne-Sophie Muller, with a degree in Textile Design from the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The jury celebrated her “ingenuity and innovative techniques with textile, while proposing new aesthetic and practical solutions.”

Estelle Chatelin, who graduated in Textile Design from La Cambre (ENSAV), received the Minister of Labour and Vocational Training’s Award for Afitin, a piece that both preserved and developed techniques from African crafts.

La Cambre Textile Design graduate Mathilde Pecqueur received the National Lottery Prize for her Stretched Knit, which was in line with the award’s goal of promoting innovation in the field of mesh. Chalkós, a piece made of copper wires, cotton and lurex, won the Maison du Design’s Award. Its creator, Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts graduate Ariane Livadiotis, achieved “the perfect osmosis between the body and the textile.”

The MateriO Prize went to Stéphane Pennec, a graduate of the Creation and Restoration of Furniture program at the Institute Saint-Luc. His Fra’k living room dresser is “an original piece of furniture where the mix of wood is implemented with subtlety.”

Lore Fasquel, from the Knitting Design program at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, went on to win the WBDM Prize. The wool-mohair-cotton-nylon-elastic Snoof was a “work of mesh in coherence with the object, the colours, the materials and the shapes.”

The prizes themselves are conceived as tools to promote the work of the recent graduates and help them develop their future careers. Some of the awards, therefore, included a cash prize ranging from €2,500 to €2,000. Others, like the Maison du Design’s, provided accommodation in their incubator; the WBDM awarded a trip to Milan during Fashion Week; MateriO granted a one-year subscription to their database, and our TLmag Prize consists in a publication, which thereafter could lead to an exhibition of the creations at the Spazio Nobile Gallery in Brussels.