02/07/2026
Meet the graduating students and their projects.
Rerooting Forward: Designing for Death Beyond Fast Furniture by Riekje Paruschke
Rerooting Forward reimagines furniture as part of ecological cycles rather than as a static commodity. A flat-packed table arrives as a discrete object, its lively origins compressed into standardized materials. Behind this apparent simplicity lie monoculture forests, intensive extraction, global transportation, and synthetic binders. As climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss accelerate, the project asks how furniture might instead emerge through relationships with living systems.
The project presents fully biodegradable furniture grown from locally sourced forest residues and fungal mycelium. Leaves, branches, and wood chips collected in collaboration with municipal maintenance services and landscape companies in The Hague are grown with mushrooms as a binder into new material bodies, creating furniture that can return to the soil at the end of its life.What does decay mean within a culture shaped by industrial production, standardisation, and the pursuit of permanence and control? By working with living materials that continue to grow, change, and decompose, the project embraces transformation as an inherent part of furniture’s material lifecycle. It proposes furniture as a lens through which we might reroot our connection to more-than-human agencies and ecological cycles, where a table is understood not as a fixed commodity but as a temporary moment within ongoing processes of growth, extraction, decay, and regeneration.
This work will be part of collective exhibition What’s the matter? at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK)
Opening: 2 July, 17.00 – 21.00
Exhibition: 3 to 7 July, 12.00 – 20.00
Don’t forget to reserve your ticket online!
Do we see you there?
