Design Map · Eindhoven
Cultchless
Graduation project by Meret Behnke at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
In its natural environment, an oyster larva drifts until it finds a hard surface, and then cements itself there for life: movement gives way to permanence, and the animal becomes part of a reef. ‘Cultchless’ is a moving-image installation named after the cultivation method that prevents oysters from attaching to a surface. The narrative centres on this pivotal moment in the oyster’s life cycle, when commercial farming disrupts this attachment, keeping it mobile and harvestable. From this interruption emerges a larger question of value. The oyster appears, in turn, as a luxury food, an invasive species and an ecological engineer, revealing that its worth is never fixed but shaped by the systems through which it’s encountered. The project asks what becomes obscured when living beings are understood primarily through what they can provide, and what it might mean to attend instead to the relationships that make them what they are.