Sarah Bruford

KA PAI’s 2024 installation for the city of Brussels was a big, colourful celebration of flowers-in illustrated form. Taking a less literal approach to how outdoor floral events are designed, we were inspired by the vintage floral bedsheets of childhood. We believe we have enough materials and our job as designers is now to create a new way of using them. This spark resulted in a month of sourcing and sewing 120 metres of (vintage and dead stock) fabrics into giant tasselled banners. Street Party! was installed outside the Fashion & Lace Museum to complement it’s vintage exhibition.

​A beautiful collaboration with our client Brussels Major Events who believed in KA PAI’s vision of reducing the environmental impact of public art installations.

KA PAI studio concieved this project as part of its ongoing exploration of how to create floral events with a reduced environmental impact. Our client Brussels Major Events selected the theme of surealism for the 2023 addition of ‘Brussels in Bloom’ event. Our flower motif was taken from the cartoon wall art found throughout downtown Brussels. The studio chose to work primarily with recycled materials to create oversized visual representations of flowers as an alternative to masses of plastic flowers. ‘Flower Pop!’ project has since been donated to a local childrens charity AMK.

Project conception and installation for client Brussels Major Events. The annual ‘Brussels in Bloom’ event fills the city centre with flowers, for 2 weeks every August. KA PAI studio continued its exploration of how to maximise the WOW and lifespan of floral events by planting a living garden. We filled the iconic enclosure of the Manneken Pis statue with moss, plants, flowers and a fig tree. Over the weeks of the installation we watered the garden, fed children its figs and watched nature blossom as bees, insects and butterflies visited this otherwise concrete city corner. All plants were relocated to Grandma Francoise’s garden to live a happy second life, making this our first zero waste floral event.