How do chairs lead to extinction?
(2025)
author(s): Sonya Levchynska
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025
BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design
Summary (8968)
Nurturing as an active Stance of Care and Resistance
(2025)
author(s): Asrafun Nahar Ruhin
published in: Research Catalogue, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
- Research document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025
- Master Artistic Research
This research begins with memories of monsoon rains in my hometown, stray dogs disappearing after municipal “relocations,” and the recurring ache of loss. These personal moments ground a broader inquiry into nurturing as an active form of care and resistance. Positioned within artistic practice, nurturing emerges not as passive sentiment but as embodied engagement with both human and more-than-human worlds.
Structured through three interconnected acts—re-assembling, re-cognition, and refusal—the work examines how care often collapses under human-centered hegemony yet persists as a regenerative force in creative practice. Reflecting on feminist theorists such as María Puig de la Bellacasa and Gloria Anzaldúa, the study critiques the violence of anthropocentric agencies, where more-than-human beings are used as utility or resources. Through case studies of Dominique White’s shipwreck forms, Maksud Ali Mondal’s installations, and my own ritual work with termite mounds, this research explores how material practices can restore hidden labor, amplify muted voices, and resist extractive narratives.
This research embraces diverse complexity, uncertainty, and situated approaches above linear solutions. It focuses on practices like Bengali women’s ephemeral crafts and collective practices like the Gram Art Project to center marginalized ways of knowing. In doing so, it reimagines art as an ethico-political negotiation. It is an act of attunement to grief, land, and layered histories.
Rather than offering closure, this research stays with the trouble. Nurturing becomes a subtle, subversive, and ongoing dialogue within existing dominant hegemony. It allows working with exploited things, collective grief, and discluded concerns. In an era of clichéd ecological concern, nurturing is not a static ethic, but a resistance lies within contentious mundane rituals that fertilize a ruined soil.
How do chairs lead to extinction?
(2025)
author(s): If applicable
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025.
BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design
Summary (8968 words)
my Mothers
(2025)
author(s): Timour Bonin
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This thesis explores the interwoven relationships between women, the textile arts, and its heritage, through a personal familial lens. Beginning with the question of the importance textile-making has held in our lives, I investigate whether engaging in crafting practices can reconnect us with tradition and allow us to re-root ourselves in the lives of our ancestors.
Drawing from both historical context and intimate family stories, I trace the lineage of textile practices among the women in my family - my Mothers. These include my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, whose experiences with sewing, knitting, crocheting, and weaving shaped their identities and daily lives.
For many of them, textile-making was an act born of necessity, a survival skill often dismissed as “women’s work” within a patriarchal framework. For me, it is a conscious act and a choice - an exploration, a reclamation, and a form of personal and cultural healing.
Through self-taught practice and reflection, I came to realise how textile traditions carry knowledge, strength, and connection across generations. My research, grounded in both historical analysis and storytelling, shows how making can become a language of remembrance and resistance, a way to bridge fragmented identity and reclaim belonging.
In honouring the textile legacies of the women who came before me, I have tied myself into their story, not by romanticising their struggles, but to acknowledge their creativity and resilience. With each thread, I reconnect to a maternal lineage that continues to live through my hands.
A glimpse of the past (my Mothers' appendix)
(2025)
author(s): Timour Bonin
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This appendix is comprised of a small collection of photos that can be examined alongside the thesis 'my Mothers'.
Design for Feeling Understood
(2025)
author(s): Amber Gastel
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This thesis explores how late-diagnosed autistic individuals and their close circle can redesign their relationship after their diagnosis through communication that aligns with autistic ways of being. Grounded in the neurodiversity paradigm, the social model of disability, and the double empathy problem, the research combines interviews, co-creation sessions, and visual storytelling to uncover emotional and relational dynamics during post-diagnosis identity shifts. Through a neurodivergent lens—rooted in sensory awareness, pattern recognition, and visual thinking—this work challenges deficit-based narratives and proposes a compassionate, co-created communication framework. The goal is not assimilation but mutual understanding: enabling autistic individuals to embrace their authentic selves while guiding loved ones to meet them with compassion and openness. Ultimately, the project reimagines design as a tool for creating connection, not correction—honouring difference, restoring balance, and building inclusive systems where all ways of being are valid, visible, and valued.
