The technical minimalism of artist Boris Acket and the maximalism of fake fashion house Maison the Faux come together in the installation Everything Moist Seems Alive at MU Hybrid Art House during Dutch Design Week.
The multidisciplinary creatives worked with MU to devise the large-scale installation, which fills a dark, cavernous room with kinetic water structures connected by clear pipes and running on a continuous cycle of containment and deluge.
They are overlooked by towering video installations of glistening, oozing humanoid figures called the “leaky saints”.
These are surrounded by marshy candlelit altars and wishing wells, and, several times a day, brought to life by ritualistic choral performances from the Dutch National Opera and Ballet.
Everything Moist Seems Alive was the product of two years of discussion between the creatives on the topic of water, during which they were particularly drawn to cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis’ concept of “hydrofeminism”.
In her 2012 essay Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, Neimanis considered the philosophical, ecological and sociological implications of conceptualising one’s human body primarily as water.
“In this hydrofeminist approach in the sense, we are all bodies of water,” said MU director Angelique Spaninks. “The world is made out of water, and so are we, for at least 60 per cent of our body.”
“Water is like: we need it. We tend to hide it. We want to control it. We use it as something that we need instead of thinking that we are part of it,” she continued. “And all these ideas have culminated into this total installation.”
The leaky saints serve as the most overt visual embodiment of Neimanis’ theory, dripping with shimmering fluid from their eyes, pores and other orifices.
“We lactate. We sweat. We have blood,” Spaninks summarises.
Greek myths and their powerful rivers also influenced the design of Everything Moist Seems Alive, which is broken up into five water structures.
Dubbed “water bodies” by the creatives, they each represent a different form of or interaction with water. There’s The Well, The Womb, The Whirl, The Wake and The Waterfall.
The Womb is a large circular tub in the centre of the space, and represents how everything “gets born in water, some way or another”, said Spaninks – an image that is evocatively conjured in the performance.
The Well is a series of three pumps that draws water from the tub and guides it into the rest of the system, in preparation for a climax that sees the usually dripping Waterfall, representing a dam, turn into a torrent.
The Whirl holds a white cloth that spins and dances with the movement of water, and the Wake slowly drips water onto a hot plate, emitting bursts of steam.
The pipes connecting the structures nod to the sanitation systems that underlie our daily interactions with water, while the gothic 3D-printed metallic ornaments on the pipes were inspired by Paris’ gargoyles, traditionally used to redirect rainwater flow away from buildings.
“We are big believers of ornamentation and the beauty of ‘a lot’ to give some sort of a reaction to mundane bareness,” Maison the Faux co-founder Joris Suk told Dezeen.
“What I like [in Everything Moist Feels Alive] is that it's a collision of aesthetics. Studio Boris Acket is well known for its quite technical and stylish and minimalistic visual approach to things. We are very maximalist. So just bringing those two worlds together has created a lot of the aesthetics that you see here.”
Acket is best known for his mechanical fabric canopy Einder, which featured on the world tour of music producer Fred Again.
The Everything Moist Seems Alive installation is accompanied by a water bar at the entrance, where visitors can gather and sample three types of water – or choose to feed it to the installation.
The darkened water bar also features a suspended mixed-material sculpture by the artist Roni(a) Johansson that resembles abstracted flesh, with dozens of moist “egg sacs” setting the tone for the installation.
Maison the Faux was founded in 2012 by Suk and Tessa de Boer, both fashion design graduates who have gone on to build a cross-disciplinary practice involving performance art, fashion and costume design and set and interior design.
The conceit at the heart of their practice is that they are “a creative studio posing as a grand couture fashion house”, playing with the aesthetics of fashion and the boundaries between the real and the fake.
This Dutch Design Week also saw students protest against overcrowded facilities at Design Academy Eindhoven. Ahead of the week, we rounded up ten things to have on your radar during Dutch Design Week.
Dutch Design Week 2026 takes place from 17 to 25 October 2026 at various locations across Eindhoven, the Netherlands. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.
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