Design Map · Eindhoven
come live in the cracks left behind
Graduation project by Léontine Maniak at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
come live in the cracks left behind' uses chicory coffee to examine how rural identities are constructed, forgotten and reinvented. Once a marker of agricultural labour and regional culture in northern France, this naturally caffeine-free alternative has been rebranded as a fashionable commodity, simplifying its history while obscuring the colonial entanglements, industrial production and local identities embedded within it. By re-contextualising chicory coffee, the project reconnects these overlapping histories and challenges its contemporary gentrification. Through fieldwork, archival research and conversations with workers, archivists and residents, the installation assembles official records alongside oral histories to reveal the gaps and contradictions that shape collective memory. The piece invites visitors to walk across a brick landscape populated by textile artefacts, where a six-minute sound work gradually uncovers dispersed stories. By unsettling the familiar codes surrounding an everyday product, the project repositions rurality as a contested political space.