An installation influenced by Virginia Woolf's iconic essay "A Room of One's Own" is among the standout projects featured in the latest showcase from HEAD Geneva School of Art and Design. The exhibition also includes innovative projects investigating uses of mycelium and installations exploring queer identities, representing the diverse and interdisciplinary approach of the school's Master Space and Communication: Design Installation program.
The Master Space and Communication: Design Installation course is an interdisciplinary program that investigates new practices for design through inquiry-driven approaches. Students explore the intersections of objects, film, performance, media, and space to generate narrative and immersive installations. The full-time, two-year graduate program is structured across multiple studio projects, workshops, and external commissions that traverse a range of design disciplines and contexts.
This expanded approach to design and the diverse methods and processes the course teaches drives projects that engage with contemporary issues including social, political, and environmental concerns. By creating original projects and methodologies, students develop distinct forms of practice and produce new design languages. Working with space as a means for experimental investigations and critical explorations, students are able to produce ambitious design installations for their graduation projects.
Among the featured works is "A Desk of One's Own" by Aurora Mesot, an evolving installation that reclaims space for women to think, create, and write history from their own perspective. The work draws its name from Virginia Woolf's iconic essay "A Room of One's Own" yet reinterprets her call: not just to write as a woman, but to take space as a woman. This desk is not just a functional object; it is a site of resistance, learning, and shared memory.
"Voyager" by Gabriella Luchetta Dos Santos constructs a sonic and visual mythology centered around the moon, tethered to the concept of queer temporality—a framework developed by scholars to explore how queer lives often unfold outside normative expectations. For someone undergoing a gender transition, the experience can bring a profound redefinition of self, and it is precisely within this misalignment that possibilities open up to imagine futures and societies that defy the norm.
Lou Revel's "Toutes Les Bestioles Façonnent Une Chair Commune" explores a design practice in collaboration with mycelium, the living, underground network of fungi. Neither a resource to exploit nor a simple metaphor, mycelium is approached here as a living partner, with its own rhythms, logics, and needs. This project is rooted in a logic of reciprocity, with the aim not to 'use' the living, but to compose with it, respecting its dynamics.
Other notable projects include "Ngog Lituba: The Mountain Who Fell From The Sky" by Mac-Arthur Sohna, which reinterprets the myth of a sacred Cameroonian mountain as a living extraterrestrial archive to counter colonial imposition and reactivate cosmic knowledge systems of African traditions. Marta Córdoba Ruiz's "My Grandfather's Living Room: A Confined Universe" recreates her grandfather's real living room as an immersive installation that serves as both intimate memory and social critique.
The program is led by project directors Rosario Hurtado and Arno Mathies, with tutors Rita Hajj, Alexandra Midal, Emma Pflieger, Dominic Robson, and Noam Toran, plus assistants Eloïse Vo and Martin Zambaz. The course is dedicated to nurturing personal approaches and perspectives for interacting with the world through design, promoting social exchange, collaboration, and interactivity as the basis for practice-led research.
Graduates of the program go on to work for commercial companies, institutions, and in education, as well as setting up their own design collectives such as Collectif Kimera, Trojans Collective, Studio Abricot, Studio Tech, and Studio PfliegerFoegle, or dedicate themselves to individual practice in design and art. The program successfully prepares its graduates for futures working in design and media, scenography, exhibitions, design installations, and public or retail environments.
