This is a material-based project exploring how dams alter a river and its resources. At its centre are a series of cast clay fragments made from Nile sediment. Arranged in a row, they resemble folded, shell-like forms with a rough, earthy texture.
For centuries, the Nile’s annual floods distributed fertile silt along its banks, supporting agriculture and enabling local building practices. With the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, this cycle was interrupted. Today, sediment accumulates upstream in Lake Nasser, while downstream its absence is compensated through extraction elsewhere, turning a once freely accessible material into a controlled and displaced resource. The project engages this shift through a repeated yet only partially controlled casting process. Using slip-cast Nile clay, each fragment is shaped by material behaviours such as drying, shrinking and bending, allowing the material itself to influence the final form.
In doing so, the work raises the question of how freedom changes when access to natural resources is no longer embedded in the landscape but regulated through infrastructure.
Studio Eidola is a Zurich-based design practice founded in 2020 by industrial designer Denizay Apusoglu and architect Jonas Kissling. Their work operates between research and design, focusing on material flows, industrial residues, and alternative approaches to making.
This is a material-based project exploring how dams alter a river and its resources. At its centre are a series of cast clay fragments made from Nile sediment. Arranged in a row, they resemble folded, shell-like forms with a rough, earthy texture.
For centuries, the Nile’s annual floods distributed fertile silt along its banks, supporting agriculture and enabling local building practices. With the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, this cycle was interrupted. Today, sediment accumulates upstream in Lake Nasser, while downstream its absence is compensated through extraction elsewhere, turning a once freely accessible material into a controlled and displaced resource. The project engages this shift through a repeated yet only partially controlled casting process. Using slip-cast Nile clay, each fragment is shaped by material behaviours such as drying, shrinking and bending, allowing the material itself to influence the final form.
In doing so, the work raises the question of how freedom changes when access to natural resources is no longer embedded in the landscape but regulated through infrastructure.
Studio Eidola is a Zurich-based design practice founded in 2020 by industrial designer Denizay Apusoglu and architect Jonas Kissling. Their work operates between research and design, focusing on material flows, industrial residues, and alternative approaches to making.