Life of Forms

Emerging design hub AlUla partners with Lafayette Anticipations to present Life of Forms exhibition at Paris Design Week – First event presented as part of AlUla’s Cultural Season in Paris

8 — 13 September 2026

Lafayette Anticipations, 9 rue du Plâtre, Paris 4

Press preview: Monday 7 September 2026 at 8.30 am

On the occasion of Paris Design Week 2026, Lafayette Anticipations, Arts AlUla, Design Space AlUla, the French Agency for AlUla Development (AFALULA) and Villa Hegra join forces to present Life of Forms, a major exhibition bringing together design pieces emerging from AlUla’s residency programmes alongside a selection of works from the Collection Lafayette Anticipations (Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin).

 

Featuring contributions from Altin Studio, Aseel Alamoudi, Bahraini Danish, Paul Ledron, Paul Emilieu Marchesseau, Ori Orisun Merhav, Raw Material and Studio ThusThat, in dialogue with works by Xavier Antin, Meriem Bennani, Camille Blatrix, Katinka Bock, Etienne Bossut, Eve Chabanon, Gaëlle Choisne, Raphaël Emine, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Mathieu Mercier, Lydia Ourahmane and Markus Schinwald, Life of Forms unfolds as both a manifesto and a landscape: a fertile zone where contemporary art and design converge in a shared attentiveness to the forms, materials and narratives that shape our ways of inhabiting the world.

 

The exhibition is conceived in partnership with Villa Hegra, the first Saudi-French cultural institution based in AlUla, that hosted Paul Emilieu Marchesseau in its dedicated design residency programme in 2025.

 

The exhibition is curated by Clément Delépine, Director of Lafayette Anticipations, Arnaud Morand, Head of Art and Creative Industries at AFALULA, with Ali Alghazzawi, Art Initiatives and Curatorial Manager at the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), and Emily Marant, Senior Design Advisor at AFALULA and Founder of Studio Marant, serving as associate curators.

 

Life of Forms takes its place within Lafayette Anticipations’ programme as a moment of activation, where forms are not merely presented, but inhabited, interpreted and continually reconfigured.

 

Hamad AlHomiedan, Director of Arts and Creative Industries at the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) said:

“For thousands of years, AlUla has stood as a crossroads of cultural exchange and creativity, and “The Life of Forms” is a powerful contemporary expression of that enduring legacy. Presented during Paris Design Week in partnership with Lafayette Anticipations, the exhibition reflects the growing reach and strength of AlUla as a design hub and the Arts AlUla ecosystem on the international stage, as well as the calibre of the artists and designers engaged in our programmes. Together, these works open a dialogue that speaks to the depth of Saudi-French collaboration and the transformative power of cross-cultural artistic expression.”

Clément Délépine, Director of Lafayette Anticipations and Arnaud Morand, Head of Arts and Creative Industries at the French Agency for AlUla Development (AFALULA), co-curators of the exhibition said:

“What emerges from the exhibition is not a collection of objects but a landscape of situations: spaces to inhabit, materials to handle, environments to perceive, and systems of production to traverse. This landscape will dialogue both with the original identity of Lafayette Anticipations as a place where making, thinking, and exhibiting are inseparable, and with the very distinctive and inspirational geography of AlUla. It echoes a broader reflection on how design can emerge from, and remain embedded within, such specific contexts.”

 

AlUla Cultural Season in Paris

This exhibition forms part of a wider AlUla Cultural Season in Paris placing AlUla at the forefront in Paris at a key moment for contemporary art, design and the creative industries. Conceived within the framework of Saudi-French cultural cooperation, Life of Forms marks the start of a season that will unfold across several major platforms in September and October: a presentation of AlUla’s design initiatives as part of the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) Design Prize; an installation by Saudi artist Ayman Zedani, presented by the AlUla Contemporary Art Museum during Art Basel Paris week; and the participation of Villa Hegra to Asia Now. Together, these initiatives affirm AlUla’s growing role as a cultural platform for dialogue, creation and international exchange.

 

An exhibition at the crossroads of art and design

Life of Forms approaches contemporary art and design as kindred disciplines, brought together by a shared attention to forms, materials, uses, narratives and the social realities they both reflect and transform.

 

Taking Louis Sullivan’s principle that “form follows function” as a point of departure, the exhibition moves beyond the opposition between function and autonomy to explore the feedback loop between imagination and lived reality. It examines how creation can invite life in — through living materials, ecological processes, craft transmission, social use and critical responses to industrial production.

 

Some works reconnect with living traditions, from palm weaving and mud-brick construction to perfumery, incense practices and stone-working. Others restore a central role to natural materials or divert industrial processes, opening them to alternative forms of use, imagination and shared experience.

 

A dialogue between AlUla and Lafayette Anticipations

The exhibition brings into conversation two places devoted to creation and production. At Lafayette Anticipations, art and design have been treated on equal footing since the institution’s inception, with production, research and exhibition embedded into the very structure of the building.

In parallel, AlUla offers an institutional ecosystem rather than a backdrop. Through its residency programmes, living craft school, Madrasat Addeera, its Arts District Aljadidah, its land art initiatives Wadi AlFann and Desert X AlUla, forthcoming AlUla Contemporary Art Museum, archaeological sites such as Hegra & Dadan and its cultural programming, the project is anchored in a living context of landscapes, vernacular knowledge, material ecologies, custodians, makers and contemporary practitioners.

In this dialogue, artists and designers rethink their working habits, their ways of inhabiting the world, and the forms through which life may become perceptible.

Objects as almost-living entitites

Drawing on Tim Ingold’s reflections on the maker’s engagement with materials and Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter”, The Life of Forms invites us to consider objects not as fixed appearances, but as entities shaped by processes, relations and conditions — historical, social, economic and environmental.

Borrowing also from Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the “infra-thin”, the exhibition opens onto the subtle possibilities contained within materials, gestures and objects. It suggests that forms may carry memories, compose tensions and harmonies, activate silences and allow different forms of life to emerge within the works themselves.

 

Designers in residences in AlUla

The exhibition gathers pieces developed within AlUla’s and Villa Hegra’s residency programmes, anchored in the AlJadidah Arts District and Madrasat Addeera, by:

• Altin Studio — design as the continuity of vernacular intelligence (palm ecosystems,

sa’af weaving, collective authorship)

• Aseel Alamoudi — design as civic and social infrastructure
• Bahraini Danish — design as spatial narrative and cultural translation
• Paul Ledron — design as atmosphere and interior ritual (Hejazi perfumery traditions,

bakhoor and ‘ūd)

• Paul-Émilieu Marchesseau — design as cultural mediation and applied infrastructure, with a selection of pieces coming from his residency at Villa Hegra.
• Ori Orisun Merhav — post-human and multispecies design
• Raw Material — design as material inquiry and ecological system
• Studio ThusThat — critical material practice

 

A dialogue with the Collection of the Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin

These propositions resonate with a selection of works from the Collection of the Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, with pieces by Xavier Antin, Meriem Bennani, Camille Blatrix, Katinka Bock, Etienne Bossut, Eve Chabanon, Gaëlle Choisne, Raphaël Emine, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Mathieu Mercier, Lydia Ourahmane, Markus Schinwald. From multispecies ecosystems to public infrastructures of play, from industrial residues to intimate sensory rituals, the exhibition articulates a plurality of relations to the world in which form remains contingent, evolving and relational.

Practical information

Life of Forms

8 — 13 September 2026

Lafayette Anticipations, 9 rue du Plâtre, Paris 4th Free admission

Download the press release