Care Amid Crisis
V&A x LDF
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The V&A in South Kensington returns in 2025 as a major hub for London Design Festival – this year, showing a range of projects by artists and designers attempting to come to terms with different forms of crisis – from environmental degradation to geopolitical conflict to the rapid spread of AI.
At the heart of the building, embedded in the fountain of the John Madejski Garden, is a work by Alicja Patanowska that highlights the impact of resource extraction on the planet with a focus on her native Poland, where mining is one of the main economic activities. The Ripple Effect is a ceramic seating installation covered in 2,000 handcrafted tiles created from mining waste from Zelazny Most – one of the biggest mining waste reservoirs in Europe. It’s a comment on how extractive human activities often interrupt the circulation of natural resources and how waste could be reimagined and reused. ‘Only eight of these tiles are covered in copper, signifying the actual ratio of recovered materials to waste,’ says Carrie Chan, the V&A South Kensington's Contemporary Programme Curator.
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Artist Roo Dhissou’s installation Heal, Home, Hmmm also uses reclaimed materials: clay excavated from the site of HS2, the upcoming high-speed UK rail network, and locally sourced wood. Set at one end of the museum’s Sculpture court, and created with excavated clay from Ealing, an area that has been significantly affected by HS2 development, it is an illustration of what could happen if communities could take materials, time and space back into their own hands. Its use of traditional South Asian mud-building techniques contrasts with the forms that are normally celebrated in such contexts – an act of cultural and spatial resistance.
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Meanwhile, Jumana Emil Abboud has created the Water Diviners trail, which allows us to see eleven objects shaped by water in a new light. Her practice focuses on an exploration of people and place, and the stories that connect us despite dispossession, drawing on her Palestinian background. Nestled among the V&A displays, the work is a prompt to reflect on your own stories and memories within a shared watery legacy that runs just beneath the surface of everyday life.
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‘Even among those projects where crisis is not immediately obvious, the concept informs these designers’ wider practice, latent in their background or the historical context these projects are presented through,’ says Kristian Volsing, Senior Curator in the Contemporary Programme team. These range from a wish for peace from a designer that grew up in Hiroshima, the use of posters to bring colour to a ravaged cityscape, and a reflection on how even AI can be slow, ethical and tactile.
‘Seen together, the projects instil a sense that creativity can help us understand, relate to and possibly resolve such crises – design providing an opportunity to foster care, restoration and resilience in challenging times.’
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