Scale
The Galleries present WE WERE GIANTS, an outdoor exhibition by artists Valentine Gardiennet and Valentin Guillon. It places two works directly onto the street — a painted circuit that runs underfoot and a group of enormous, salvage-built figures made to be sat beside — with none of the plinths, ropes, or signs that normally keep art at arm's length. The project takes over Emma District in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2026, from 17 to 25 October. It invites passers-by to feel, briefly, like giants again, and in doing so to see a familiar street not as fixed but as something people made and could remake. Guillon's circuit draws you in simply by being walked, while Gardiennet's figures — built from the street's own discards — are set down in a slightly different place each morning, so the district never quite settles into the same arrangement twice.
Encounter
The exhibition places two works into the open, with nothing to hold a body at a distance. Valentin Guillon's runs underfoot and along its windows: a painted circuit that climbs the walls and crosses the ground, so that simply walking the street means you are already inside the work. Valentine Gardiennet's answers from the opposite direction - a group of enormous figures built to be sat beside, where up close you become the small thing, dwarfed by shapes assembled from the very materials most people step over without seeing.
Salvage
Gardiennet's giants are made largely from what the street discards - salvage, packaging, things pulled back from the bin - and then given back to it: brought out each morning to a slightly different spot, leaned on, lived alongside, and left to weather. Closer to graffiti than to monument, they are claimed rather than installed, and their wearing down is not a failure but the point. This is what a design week can do - hold an ordinary street up long enough to be seen as built, negotiable, and open to being arranged otherwise.
