Dutch Design Week: Great Taste for Waste

Inspiration for a design exhibition can come from the most unlikely of places.

Even the rubbish your dog picks up and brings home.

Kasper van ‘t Hoff’s black lab Gus likes to pick up rubbish and bring it home.

Rather than throw it away, Kaspar keeps the rubbish and photographs it.

Kasper van ‘t Hoff is a photographer. So it’s not weird.

If he wasn’t it would be.

One day Kasper told ceramic artist Marina Relou about Gus and both agreed that he should be honoured for his contribution to helping keep Eindhoven litter free.

Rather than a monument the project “Great Taste for Waste” was born in which Kasper van ‘t Hoff, Marina Relou and a couple of colleagues approached the subject of making the worthless valuable. Creating value from waste.

Gus obviously finds a value in rubbish. Why can’t we ?

For us the stand out object was Marina Relou’s ceramic “plastic bottles” – wonderfully delicate and realistic pieces of work based on squashed plastic bottle.

In addition Marina also turned left over porcelain into crockery – on which chef  Bruno van Vaerenbergh presented light snacks crafted from those bits of food that would normally otherwise be thrown away.

Elsewhere in the Klokgebouw, Bovil DDB presented ceramic balls of paper, fashion designer Ellen Willink created a range of accessories and Kasper van ‘t Hoff himself presented an exhibition of his photos.

There was also a sustainable doghouse on display. But we sadly couldn’t find it.

As an exhibition Great Taste for Waste appealed to us immensely, and it was certainly one of the more instantly accessible and distracting exhibitions we saw in Eindhoven.

Full details can be found at www.greattasteforwaste.com