From Tuvalu to Puglia: regenerative design tackling the climate crisis and saving endangered environments and species

The opening image is that of a tropical island: Tuvalu, a Pacific archipelago that, despite contributing very little to global emissions, risks being submerged by the end of the 21st century. In 2021, at COP26, Minister Simon Kofe sounded the alarm while standing knee-deep in water; in 2022, at COP27, he announced that Tuvalu would become the first “digital nation”: even after its disappearance, the territory will continue to exist as a virtual reality. This full-screen image—an idyllic technological vision masking an ecological tragedy—introduces the exhibition "Memo. Souvenirs du futur", conceived by the curatorial duo d-o-t-s (Laura Drouet and Olivier Lacrouts), recently opened at CID/Grand-Hornu in Belgium. Co-produced with the Fondation d’entreprise Martell (Cognac, France), the exhibition presents a series of projects by designers and artists seeking to reconstruct or preserve traces of environments threatened by human activity. It is a form of regenerative design rooted in memory—not only conceptual, but also sensory. A way to confront the ever-worsening climate crisis, where the critical engagement of art and the inherent optimism of design converge.

The exhibition design, both minimal and striking, created by Olivier Vadrot, transforms the industrial space of Grand-Hornu into a territory suspended between laboratory, archive, and theatre. Through drawings, videos, and objects, visitors follow the thread of multiple projects, moving from one continent to another, accompanied by sounds and scents that evoke fleeting presences: sensory traces of worlds constantly on the brink—fragile, yet illuminated by an intense and unexpected beauty. As d-o-t-s describe it, these projects act as “acupuncture points”: preserving traditions, materials, gestures, and species, while proposing care as a form of resistance.

The regenerative interventions explored by designers unfold across multiple fronts: from the hectares of peatlands and heathlands devastated by fires between 2017 and 2022 in the Netherlands—prompting designer Liselot Cobelens to create a map-like carpet, burned with a blowtorch and composed of eight color combinations, capable of visualizing drought effects while preserving the physical memory of fire—to the destruction of olive trees in Puglia caused by Xylella fastidiosa, which led Roberta Di Cosmo to develop a “living archive” of performative gestures. In the community of Racale, these gestures are repeated as a collective ritual of mourning and awareness, but also as a symbolic act of resistance that keeps the region’s cultural identity alive. Further afield, in the Philippines, ecosystems devastated by large dam constructions are reconstructed by artist Cian Dayrit through tapestries woven with maps drawn by local inhabitants—relics of a fragmented and wounded collective memory.

In the 1960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini identified the disappearance of fireflies as an irreversible sign of the transformation of rural landscapes driven by industrialization and urbanization. Today, this phenomenon has become global: from Northern Europe to Puerto Rico, insect populations have declined by 80% over the past thirty years, threatened by intensive agriculture, pesticides, deforestation, pollution, and climate change. In response, artist Félix Blume created Los Grillos del Sueño, a sound installation developed with children from the Cecrea La Ligua program in Chile. It imagines a future without crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus), where their absence disrupts sleep and reveals the fragility of natural soundscapes.

Several projects in the exhibition respond to the extinction of plants and animals—such as the huia (Heteralocha acutirostris), a bird sacred to the Māori of New Zealand, whose voice is reconstructed by Sally Ann McIntyre, or the beaver, whose crucial role in aquatic ecosystems is highlighted by artist Suzanne Husky, who encourages a renewed understanding of its ability to build dams that foster biodiversity and reduce flood risks. These works resonate with earlier research by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, particularly Resurrecting the Sublime (Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature, 2019), where the scent of an extinct flower was recreated to evoke a lost sensory memory.

Where design moves beyond evocation and takes on a central role in reconstruction is in the recovery of materials and ancestral know-how—often marginalized or erased by monocultures, extractive logics, and pervasive industrialization. In Africa, for instance, barkcloth made from the Mutuba tree (Ficus natalensis), traditionally used in Ganda ceremonies, is brought back to life by Nigerian designer Bubu Ogisi. Meanwhile, rye (Secale cereale), a resilient cereal and traditional craft material in Europe, is transformed by French fashion designer Emma Bruschi into intricate woven and embroidered garments in her Almanach collection (2019).

In this direction, one of the most emblematic projects of design’s reparative role is Conflict Avocados by Fernando Laposse, a leading figure in regenerative design. As early as 2015, with Totomoxtle, the Mexican designer initiated a project based on transforming native corn husks into sustainable materials for objects and surfaces, working with farmers in Tonahuixtla in southern Mexico and contributing to the preservation of traditional varieties, biodiversity, and local craftsmanship. In the project presented at Grand-Hornu, the focus shifts to the avocado supply chain in Michoacán, Mexico, highlighting its environmental and social implications: deforestation, violence against farmers, and the destruction of ecosystems such as that of the monarch butterfly. The project thus becomes the starting point for an investigation built on local testimonies, opening up the possibility of reorganizing production on a territorial basis.

Laposse—and the exhibition as a whole—advocates for a vision of design that does not merely narrate the crisis but actively seeks points of intervention: a practice that does not retreat in the face of conflict, does not stop at diagnosing trauma and fractures, but instead strives to translate itself into concrete, positive, and forward-looking action.

Opening image: Snow, Insular Cotton, 2020. Photo Diogo Bento