Design Map · Eindhoven
Alpine Fabulations—a Tale Assembled in Wooden Beams
Graduation project by Cassandre Tornay at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘Alpine Fabulations’ examines how landscapes are shaped and understood as much by symbols and infrastructure as by geography. A mountain, often treated as timeless and natural, is a carrier of a pastoral imaginary: a constructed image of a harmonious, amicable and steady landscape. However, the Alps are a place where the terrain is engineered and where its narratives are designed to sustain a bucolic ideal. By reconfiguring symbols associated with the territory, such as regional alpine heraldry, the work explores how familiar visual languages define access and territorial imaginaries across mountain terrain.
The installation consists of engraved tubular wooden structures assembled from locally sourced timber, accompanied by an immersive soundscape recorded across Alpine infrastructure. Its modular elements can be rearranged, producing new relationships between symbols, stories and territory where dreams, anxieties and political fantasies overlap, inviting shifting interpretations of the Alps rather than presenting the region as a fixed landscape.