top of page
the craft of being too queer and hybrid - performance - Photo 01.jpg

/ the craft of being too queer and hybrid.

Master’s Graduation Project – Design Academy Eindhoven

The Craft of Being Too Queer and Hybrid is a design and performance project that reimagines traditional Mexican, Cypriot, and Spanish crafts through a queer lens, transforming nostalgia and hybridity into playful, collective, and subversive acts of making.

performative artifacts

MIED5B~1.JPG

​The Craft of Being Too Queer and Hybrid explores Mijali Posada Polydorides’s identity as a Mexican-Cypriot-Spanish designer, maker and performer through a queering methodology that reorients the materiality, techniques and functions of traditional crafts. Emerging from childhood rituals, memories and fascinations, the project uses nostalgic narratives as tools for reflection and transformation, positioning making as a site of play, subversion and reimagining. It challenges heteronormative conventions embedded in three traditional crafts: Mexican cartonería and piñata-making, Cypriot quilting and embroidery, and Asturian wood carving used for castanets.

The artefacts produced help orient individuals towards a sense of home, identity or community — especially for those whose experiences of belonging are hybrid, displaced or non-normative. Designed to be communally touched, played with and activated by performers and non-performers alike, the artefacts embrace failure and amateurism, reclaiming craft as a queer, collective and embodied act.

/ typology: performance - installation - furniture.
/ design: Mijali Posada Polydorides.
/ mentors: Afaina de Jong, Marga Weimans, Gabriel Maher, Jorge Mañes Rubio.
/ exhibitions: Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show 2025 - Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven (2025).
/ materials and techniques: Carved Solid Ash and Poplar wood, Crêpe Paper, Embroidered Linen,
/ dimensions: 
_ artifact 02 (80 x 40 x 178 H cm)
_ artifact 03 (200 x 50 x 150 H cm)
/ status: production.
/ year of production: 2025.
/ production collaborators: New Order of Fashion.
/ production place: Eindhoven, Netherlands.
/ photography: Anwyn Howard, Femke Reijerman, Mijali Posada Polydorides.

mijali_dae_anwyn-howarth-0122.jpg
mijali_dae_anwyn-howarth-0160.jpg
the craft of being too queer and hybrid - performance - Photo 02.jpg
the craft of being too queer and hybrid - performance - Photo 04.jpg
mijali_dae_anwyn-howarth-0119.jpg
mijali_dae_anwyn-howarth-0113.jpg
mijali_dae_anwyn-howarth-0157.jpg
the craft of being too queer and hybrid - performance - Photo 06.jpg
the craft of being too queer and hybrid - performance - Photo 03.jpg
the craft of being too queer and hybrid - performance - Photo 05.jpg
DSC_0023_.jpg
mijali_dae_anwyn-howarth-0147.jpg
DSC_0021_.jpg
bottom of page