Design Map · Eindhoven
(M)other Water
Graduation project by Emanuele Borriello at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘(M)other Water’ creates a new mythology for queer belonging in Napoli, connecting Parthenope — the mermaid whose body gave birth to the city — with the femminelle napoletane, a gender-diverse community historically embedded in Neapolitan culture yet absent from dominant narratives and archives. Inspired by La Figliata, a traditional birth ritual conceived by the femminelle, the work reimagines motherhood as the creation and nurturing of genders beyond the binary, while rooted in the designer’s queer experience and research with younger generations of femminelle.
A film narrated in Neapolitan follows a wearable womb left ashore by Parthenope and carried through Napoli. In the installation, this womb rests on black volcanic sand beneath moving reflections of water, proposing mythology as a mutable space for queer belonging and arguing that queer representation is not simply a question of being made visible, but of having agency over how that visibility takes form.