Everything But School School
‘Everything But School School’ is a self-organised institution questioning the political and social impact of education and how these realities can be designed otherwise. Building on the designer’s experience of the French public school system and its reproduction of social inequalities, it approaches school as a place where people learn not only knowledge, but who they are allowed to become. Classes are created with and taught by students, allowing conversations and experiences to continually reshape the school.
From love-letter writing to collective classroom building, the curriculum uses humour, care, movement and curiosity to challenge what education considers valuable. The project is presented through an installation which brings the developing school into a wooden structure which references an archetypal building and includes cushions and a magazine documenting the project’s development. Madelon Lordereau proposes school-making as an ongoing collective practice, reclaiming education as a democratic space that can be continually remade by those within it.
Text by Josh Plough
Exhibited at the Dutch Design Week 2026
- Everything but School School, structure and publication, photography by Femke Reijerman
- AM Tuning for Pirates To Be, Everything But School School class, photography by Luca Weste
- Everything But School School, a call for joyful learning, publication, graphic design by Luca Weste
Some(bodies) thinking School
Some(bodies) thinking School, a call for joyful learning is Madelon Lordereau’s Social Design Masters thesis posing the state of Western Education systems as obsolete and reproducing an undemocratic society. The text explores notions of joy, curiosity, political relevance of education, western reject of the body and calls for a reappropriation of the question of education as powerful political act.
To get a PDF or physical copy contact : lordereaumadelon@gmail.com
- Some(bodies) thinking School, publication
- Illustration from the thesis, Madelon Lordereau
Through Water
Madelon Lordereau’s Through Water proposed a dating agency centred around bodies of water, referencing the role of water in romantic tropes found in popular media.
- “Participants Feedback Questionnaires” collected after each date
- Video , Making Of the Dating Agency: Through Water
- Photography of one of the dates location took by an anonymous participant
In Family
The project explores the complexity and opacity that is kept with the ones we supposedly know the most: our family. It starts a conversation on all that we do not question anymore within our family’s relationship. In Family invites partcipants to write, in one gesture, a thread of thought answering the following question : what is something you whish you could tell your family?
- Video showing different participants of the In Family project
The Shadow Has No Rule
The Shadow Has No Rule is a textile and sound installation imagined by Julian Allgöwer and Madelon Lordereau. Inspired by the movie Suspiria (1977), the installation is meant to invite the public of the party to dance anonymously concealed by the fabric but projected through shadow and therefore invited to play. The installation is accompanied by a composition by Julian Allgöwer to slowly build up movement up to a ego-less dancing space.
- The Shadow Has No Rule, Bacchanalia, photography by Leidy Karina Gomez Montoya
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