RESIDENCIES
RESIDENCY #5
GRAFTED LEGACY
Designers:
TERESA FERNÁNDEZ-PELLO
KIM MUPANGILAÏ
TERESA FERNÁNDEZ-PELLO
Teresa Fernández-Pello (Spain, 1992) is a designer from Spain, based in the Netherlands, working at the intersection of Design, Art, and Technology. Combining digital fabrication, electronic technologies, and creative coding with sculptural aesthetics and installation, she investigates the relationship between technological progress and the evolution of spiritual narratives in contemporary society.
teresafernandezpello.com
KIM MUPANGILAÏ
Kim Mupangilaï (Belgium, 1989) is a Belgian-Congolese, New York-based Interior Architect, Designer, and Professor at Parsons School of Design. Her work explores the intersections of identity, culture, and history, crafting narratives that challenge conventions and inspire cross-cultural dialogue. By merging her dual heritage with contemporary design practices, Kim creates designs that resonate globally, bridging untold stories and cultural preservation through innovative approaches.
@pangilai
RESIDENCY #
GRAFTED LEGACY
TURIN, ITALY
DUPARC CONTEMPORARY SUITES
2025
A year-long project starting with a residency in Turin, Italy, and culminating in the production of a collection of works and the publication of a monograph book on each designer.
GRAFTED LEGACY
“We will not stop exploring.
And at the end of all our going we will return to the starting point
to know it for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot
“The traces that come to us from the past are not inert, petrified relics or mere objects to be museified. Rather, they must be read as sparks capable of lighting the fuse of explosive material reposed in the already state. Sparks capable of building constellations rich in the future in which the past can meet the present.”
W. Benjamin
Legacy: what is transmitted over time. A tradition or value rooted in a past context that continues to exist as part of the established heritage of the present.
Graft: the act of joining two different entities to create something new, indicating a fusion capable of integrating the foreign element to derive something unexpected and potentially new.
The expression Grafted Legacy evokes an attempt at dialogue and possible, mutual influence between two seemingly distinct concepts. This conceptual combination conjures a field of inspiration in which the memories of the past are not simply preserved in their original state, but are open to being reworked, reinterpreted, recontextualized.
From this perspective, “grafting” is understood not as a mere addition but as an articulated process of transformation that generates hybridizations and contaminations. Looking at what is inherited and thinking it may be partly or entirely modified by something else that is grafted in, allows for reflecting on its identity features and its ability to retain a meaningful narrative attitude, despite the necessary changes to which it will be exposed.
The residency program starts with a stay in Turin: a series of visits and meetings give the designers the opportunity to get in touch with the city, proposing some useful clues for interpreting the theme through both theoretical reflections and tangible outcomes, in which design action can go so far as to concern the cultural memories of a community in order to generate “non-neutral” material outcomes that take on the role of highly symbolic artifacts.
In their best form, these presences – balanced between past and future, between the time that forged and settled the rituals and myths of tradition and the time that fuels the ideas and processes of technological innovation – are narrative objects, material entities with a strong expressive inclination: what kind of aesthetic connotations can they assume? What stories can they tell? What cultural message can they formulate and convey? What reflections can they stimulate or suggest?