Dutch Design Week: Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Guy Königstein presented a project where family members are represented as spools of thread in Eindhoven last week. 

The first movie, called Moving Family, charts the geographical movements of Königstein’s own family over four generations.

The second, called Home Feeling, represents the relationships between family members and their home over the past five years.

Threads move together and apart, become knotted together or drift away.

The project will also be presented as part of the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam at the end of this week.

See all our stories about Dutch Design Week in our special category.

Here’s some more information from Königstein:

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“Family Stories” is presented during the DDW in the graduation galleries of the Design Academy Eindhoven and will also be screened at the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam on the 30 and 31st of October 2009.

“Family Stories” is two stop motion films about family history and family relationships, in which the family members are represented by colourful thread spools. The spools roll through their lives, changing direction when they move away or back home, crossing life lines of others, joining them for a while and sometimes separating from each other again.

The first film “Moving Family” investigates the history of movements of the own Jewish family over the last four generations – starting in central Europe at the end of the 19th century, over the Holocaust, the first years in Palestine and Israel’s foundation and ending nowadays with the six children of the family scattered again all over the globe.

In the second film “Home Feeling” an emotional component is added. The relationships between the members of the family and their emotions toward each other and toward their home are being visualised by knots. The personal thread-lines undulate and become knotted during family conflicts, entwine when reconciliation is sought, and spin a colourful and complex web around the parental home. The film “zooms-in’ on the last five years of the family and shows the way they handle with the complex question of the future of their home.

The project won the “Melkweg Prize” for the most original and personal graduation project of the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2009