AL DENTE TEXTILES – Arcintex ’16 Boras
May 9, 2016 |

During 11-15 of April 2016 I was in Boras (Sweden) for Arcintex network’s spring workshops and conference. In the first three days I took part in “Interactive Textiles” workshop lead by Delia Dumitrescu and Hanna Landin.

Together with Svenja Keune, Berit Greike, Sarah Walker and Juste Peciulyte I worked in a project we called “AL DENTE”. The project was inspired by the research project of Svenja Keune. As a PhD student within the ArcInTexETN she is working on adaptive and responsive structures for interior, focusing on creating awareness for nature by biomaterials and processes. We decided to work with her materials such as knitted tubes filled with different seeds, corn, beans, coffee beans and pasta. We organized a cycle of production starting from “hunters and collectors”, “fillers”, “masterweaver” to “documenter” and “activator”.

Through applying energy in form of water and heat and different devices such as hotgun, steamer, microwave, we looked for changes in shape, color, size, thickness, elasticity. One of our finding was the potential of constant change in appearance and quality over time without loosing value or application.

The corn process also pushed us to consider the possibility of having “eatable” textiles. If the tubes we used were to be realized from some sort of edible materials, then we can imagine that threads and fabrics can conserve food and can be used as carrier of nutritional substances.

For more details on the results of our work, take a look on Flickr.