Design Academy Eindhoven x EU Policy Lab

Our sub-theme Slow Violence explores the long-term generational impacts of slow violence. Slow violence could be a form of social injustice or generational trauma that unfolds gradually, sometimes visible, often invisible, across time and space. This form of intergenerational (un)fairness we find in spaces (like a city, neighbourhood, borders, land, online spaces), ancestral narratives, digital ecosystems, bodies (the senses), or language.

The title of this theme is inspired by the publication “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” by Rob Nixon. While Nixon originally framed slow violence in relation to environmentalism, these student projects extend the concept beyond environmental harm to address a broader landscape of inherited injustice. In doing so, they also imagine alternative spaces of resistance, kinship and care.

We have invited students to explore how such slow violence plays out across generations. The works presented by the students investigate how intergenerational (un)fairness takes shape through the stubborn sprout of a weed, the quiet choreography of domestic care or the bureaucratic language of migration policy. Working across mediums including film, installation, participatory performance and poetic documentary, these works bring to light the often-invisible structures that shape our relationships with nature, with each other, with institutions and with borders. United by the concept of intergenerational fairness, they ask what is passed down (consciously or not) and how future worlds might be made more equitable by acknowledging, resisting or reimagining inherited systems.

The six groups responded to the lens of “intergenerational wealth” with a diverse range of future visions that redefine what should be valued across generations. From rethinking housing through cooperative ownership models to honoring the regenerative potential of human remains, each project questions dominant, extractive understandings of wealth by offering alternative realities grounded in social, cultural, and ecological responsibility. Some projects propose entirely new relational systems, such as land guardianship or AI interfaces that prioritize local knowledge and interpersonal connection. Others highlight the importance of heritage in food cultures well beyond nutritional survival, or celebrate instances of cultural misalignment as a source of social resilience. Collectively, the work demonstrates a clear shift from wealth as accumulation to wealth as stewardship, care, and relational continuity. They offer hopeful, new imaginations of what is truly valuable in the scope of intergenerational fairness.

The groups explored intergenerational fairness through a speculative lens, focusing on themes such as ecological collapse, care as resistance, survival techniques, and imagined gestures. Through individual and collaborative storytelling, they developed characters and systems that navigated future challenges and shifting societal structures. The process involved negotiating diverse visions and aesthetics, culminating in shared narratives that felt both urgent and strangely intimate. These were translated into experimental short films that visualized care, resilience, and transformation through performative and cinematic languages. Their writings and storyboards will form the collective publication "Futures Passed" currently in development, which brings together their visual worlds through storyboards and narrative processes into a layered, printed form.