Design Map · Eindhoven
States of Disrepair
Graduation project by Janelle Cruz at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
Eating with one’s hands was once customary in the Philippines, until colonial rule gradually displaced the practice, elevating the knife and fork as markers of civility. Yet conversations around eating disorders tend to privilege individual experience over the colonial and cultural histories that continue to shape bodies and rituals. ‘States of Disrepair’ is a sculptural installation that reimagines the body as a shapeshifter caught between states of transformation. Made from distorted and manipulated steel, severed and reassembled fragments of the body expose the violence embedded in everyday eating practices. Inspired by the Manananggal, a Filipino mythological figure whose transformations require the body to be split apart, the project reframes bodily disorder as adaptation rather than failure. It asks how colonial disciplines persist not only through institutions and customs, but through posture, gesture and appetite.