Design Map · Eindhoven
This Book of Ours
Graduation project by Emma Job at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
Victorian reformers once rebuilt the Middle Ages in their own image. They naturalised patriarchal values as history by borrowing on misogynistic chivalry. This resurfaces today as ‘medievalcore’ performed by young women on TikTok as an escape from modern self-representation. That departure, though, leads back into the old Victorian trope. ‘This Book of Ours’ responds with a vanity, a piece of furniture which becomes a tool for world-building. Its shape follows Christine de Pizan’s ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’, a proto-feminist text that reimagined women as bricks laying a new city foundation. Emma Job selects one figure from the book, a self-portraitist. In an accompanying video the character’s body gestures are performed on the vanity, mirroring nowadays’ medievalcore trend. As we observe them, the gestures are caught in a gaze that has always understood femininity as something staged.