PRÄRIE
PRÄRIE is a collective dedicated to curatorial practice and self-initiated projects. Our work often engages with the themes of what is left behind or remains unseen. To date, we have organized multiple exhibitions: both in Leipzig and in Eindhoven.
'A SECOND FOR A SECOND'A Second for a Second focuses on the graduation projects at Design Academy Eindhoven that remain outside the spotlight. Every student develops two projects, yet only one is selected for Dutch Design Week, creating a quiet divide between what is shown and what is set aside.
In collaboration with Residency for the People, the exhibition brought these second projects together through a publication, dia slides, and projected material. It explored how ideas continue to exist once the institutional frame falls away—how they shift, wait, or take on new forms in storage and beyond selection—and became both an alternative graduation show and a reflection on the unseen work that shapes a student’s time at the academy.
'LOST DARLINGS'Lost Darlings looks at the early ideas that shape a project but rarely survive the pressure of institutional expectations. Through an open call to students at Design Academy Eindhoven, the exhibition brings together fragments that were left behind: sentences, sketches, experiments, and starting points that once carried potential.
Organized with Residency for the People, the exhibition highlights these overlooked materials as valuable parts of the design process. Lost Darlings invites viewers to revisit where projects begin and to consider what is lost when work is refined into polished outcomes
'AUCH BEI SCHLECHTEM WETTER'Auch bei schlechtem Wetter reflects on seasonality, temporary pleasures, and what happens to a space when its purpose pauses for winter. The exhibition features work by designer Alice Moretto, who studies iconic ice-cream forms, and artist Cosima Wider, who brings her grandmother’s 1940s gelato recipe into the present. Their contributions share the room with something unusual for January: real ice cream for sale.
While production peaks in summer and falls silent in winter, preservation takes over. The exhibition traces how these pauses shape cultural habits, and how even short-lived indulgences leave a lasting mark on the places that host them.
'GOLDHORN TRANSIT'Goldhorn Transit explores how cultural spaces continue to matter even after they disappear. Taking the former Goldhorn bar as its starting point, the exhibition looks at bars and cafés as social institutions that build community and shape memory beyond their economic role.
Through objects, fragments, and archival traces, it reflects on what remains when a space like Goldhorn is gone and highlights how fragile the infrastructure of communal care can be within a changing urban landscape.
The exhibition asks how a place can retain presence without a physical form and what it means to treat everyday meeting points as institutions with lasting significance.
'PRESERVATION OF CARE'Preservation of Care explores how cities choose what to maintain, what to overlook, and what to let disappear. It focuses on the quiet forms of care that shape the urban landscape, as well as the gaps that open when once important structures fall out of use.
Restoration nets show how protection often happens temporarily and without visibility, holding decay back for a moment of transition. Public telephone booths illustrate the opposite condition, objects that have slipped out of daily life, carrying the traces of a social function that is no longer needed.
The exhibition asks how these choices define the identity of a city, and what they reveal about the values we carry forward.