RESIDUAL

What Never Stays

Group Exhibition
London Design Festival 2026
19–21 September 2026 · London
Presented by LILIS LAB

RESIDUAL: What Never Stays was a group exhibition presented by LILIS LAB as part of the London Design Festival 2026 Partner Programme.

Bringing together 17 artists working across sculpture, photography, moving image, installation, sound and mixed media, the exhibition asked what remains when materials, bodies, memories and environments undergo change.

Across the works, traces appeared through transformation, disappearance, preservation, absence and incompletion. Some were physical and visible; others persisted through memory, bodily experience, cultural knowledge or imagined histories. Here, the residual was not treated as a static leftover, but as an active presence that continued to shift, gather meaning and shape the present.

▎ 01 / ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

RESIDUAL:
WHAT NEVER STAYS

RESIDUAL: What Never Stays was presented by LILIS LAB during London Design Festival 2026.

OFFICIAL PARTNER · LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2026

▎ 02 / media coverage

LONDON DESIGN
FESTIVAL 2026

JUSTART COLLECTIVE ↗

LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL ↗

ARTRABBIT ↗

FLUX MAGAZINE ↗

In 3D printing, supports are temporary by design. They hold difficult geometries in place, making forms possible that could not otherwise be printed. LILIS LAB encountered this logic repeatedly in its own production practice, not only through supports, but through prototypes, failed prints and temporary solutions that disappear once the final object is complete. Once their role is fulfilled, what was once necessary becomes excess.

That contradiction became the starting point for Residual, leading to a broader question: can a finished object ever really be separated from everything that made it possible?

Donna Haraway’s idea of sympoiesis, or “making-with”, became one way of thinking through this question. Things do not emerge independently. They take shape through relationships between materials, technologies, bodies and environments.

From there, Residual moved beyond fabrication. Rather than treating residue simply as waste, the exhibition turned attention towards the traces, conditions and relationships that continue after an original role, state or moment has passed.