De fil en aiguille
group exhibition within
an educational context
In a world worn thin by the exhaustion of its resources, and still caught in the demand to keep producing, always faster and always newer, repair has become a necessity at once material and social. For its end of year exhibition, ESA Saint-Luc Liège took repair as the pedagogical theme of the year and invited its students to think and make from what has been worn or broken. Rather than recovering a supposed original state or masking the traces of time, the work gathered here composes with fragility and instability, imagining other ways to care for what we hold in common, human and more than human.
The exhibition does not impose a frame so much as compose with the research and the concerns already at work among the students, making visible the steps that usually stay hidden inside a practice. Set within a wider circulation of practices in Saint-Luc, it takes the form of a living workshop: one that keeps the gestures and experiments of repair in view rather than resolving them into fixed and finished works.
Holding the school's many programmes together is a single image, the thread. Literally it sews and it structures; figuratively it is the thread of a narrative or a path through the school, drawing tenuous but continuous relations between practices that might otherwise stay dispersed. The exhibition unfolds from there as a series of points borrowed from the vocabulary of sewing. The suture closes a wound without hiding it. The darning stitch returns to a worn place to reinforce it from within. The backstitch reaches back into the past without restoring it. From these, other points appear: the tender point that asks for care rather than force, the median point that lets more than one ending live inside a word, the anchor point that holds us to what we inherit and to what we choose to pass on. A final binding gathers the books and archives that accompany the show, giving the scattered traces a place to keep circulating.
Across these sections, repair takes concrete and often modest form. Broken plates are stapled back together along the line of their own fracture and laid out as a banquet. A photographed scar is enlarged across a clinical steel table until what is usually kept from view insists on being seen. Abandoned reels of Super 8 are cut and spliced through a handmade viewer until forgotten images flicker again. None of these gestures pretends to make things whole again. They propose something more honest: to stay with what is broken and to work from there, discovering that the thread that runs between disciplines and people, between a school and the world it opens onto, is itself a form of repair.
ESA Saint-Luc, Liège, 2026