[forgotten] memories

Master Applied Context · 2025-2026

Elke De Dobbelaere

Antwerp, Belgium

About

Although I graduated as a graphic designer from Sint Lucas Antwerpen, I do not fully feel at home within the conventional idea of a designer. I see myself more as someone with a strongly developed sense of taste and aesthetics than as a traditional maker. My interests mainly lie in art curation, scenography, and the physical construction and deconstruction of exhibitions, in atmosphere, space, and everything that comes with it. I work with a minimalist approach and often explore how little is needed for something to function or to carry meaning.

In my practice, I am fascinated by transience and decay in all their forms: mould, forgotten memories, broken structures in the street, things that slowly disappear or fall apart. My work stems from a desire to find beauty in what is usually considered abject, useless, or lost.

Project

[forgotten] memories explores the fragile relationship between photography, memory, and identity through a collection of archived family photos in which neither the places, the people, the clothes, nor the objects make sense to me. Although the images depict familiar moments, the memories attached to them remain distant and uncertain. The project embraces absence, fragmentation, and the instability of memory, while questioning the human urge to preserve everything.