Weaving a Sustainable Future: Textile Art and Crafts for Planetary Health
Datum: 4 oktober 2024
Tid: 08:30-11:00
How can textile art and crafts help restore the health of our planet? What role do biodesign and innovative textile practices play in promoting sustainability? Can we move beyond the symbolic in art to design systems of real change while remaining within the realm of aesthetics? How can we rethink our relationship with discarded materials and environmental responsibility?
In this breakfast seminar, arranged by Konstnärernas Riksorganisation and Statens konstråd, we delved into the intersection of textile art, craft, and environmental science, featuring artists and researchers whose work demonstrates the potential of textile practices to contribute to planetary health.
Carole Collet, Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins UAL, discussed how creative inquiries in textile making can catalyze environmental regeneration. As the Director of Maison/0 and co-director of the Living Systems Lab, Collet's work is at the forefront of ecological design. She has pioneered the integration of bio-design and regenerative futures in design education, exemplifying how design can nurture biodiversity and cultural knowledge.
Artist Paola Torres Núñez del Prado presented her innovative "living textiles," symbiotic, interactive works that blur the lines between the natural and artificial. Her latest series, Sentient Weaves, incorporates lichen-based textiles, embodying the fusion of bio-art and environmental sustainability. Through her multi-sensory practice, she investigates the interplay of nature and technology, pushing the boundaries of what textiles can be.
Leif Holmstrand, a multi-disciplinary artist, musician, and writer, offered a provocative take on cultural and ecological implications of waste. His performance-based practice investigates the entanglement of garbage, queerness, and history, inviting us to rethink our relationship with discarded materials.
The seminar was organised by the Artists' Association of Sweden (Konstnärernas Riksorganisation) and the Public Art Agency Sweden (Statens konstråd) as part of Stockholm Craft Week.
Speakers
Rewilding Textiles: Design for Planetary Health
Professor Carole Collet, Central Saint Martins UAL
The lecture will discuss how creative-driven inquiries in textile making can lead to restoring our planetary health. Positioning the role of craft and design as a catalyst for change, I will present a range of design projects concerned with nurturing our biodiversity, climate and cultural know-how.
Bio:
Carole Collet is Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins UAL in London where she holds two catalyst roles. She is Director of Maison/0, a platform for regenerative luxury co-developed with the LVMH group to leverage creativity at the service of ecosystem regeneration. She is also founder and co-director of the Living Systems Lab, a research group dedicated to the exploration of living systems thinking as an inquiry into new ecological knowledge for the creative sector.
She is recognised for her leardership in ecological design centered on living systems thinking. She operates across fundamental and applied research, curation and education. She has pioneered the integration of ecological values in the design curriculum over twenty years by founding radical new courses such as MA Textile Futures (2001), MA Biodesign (2019), and MA Regenerative Design (2022). Her own design work has been featured in international exhibitions such as the ICA, the V&A and the Pompidou Centre. She regularly contributes to international conferences and publications on the subjects of living systems design, biodesign, and regenerative futures.
She was awarded a Design For Planet Fellowship at the Design Council UK in 2022.
https://www.arts.ac.uk/research/ual-staff-researchers/carole-collet
Living Textile Ecosystems
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
Can we move beyond the symbolic in art to design systems of real change, while remaining within the realm of aesthetics? I am exploring this question through the creation of living textiles—woven forms that are alive, sometimes interactive, and always symbiotic. These textiles do not represent nature; they are both natural and artificial, challenging the notion that nature and culture are separate.
In this talk, I will present my previous work with textiles and sound and offer an in-depth explanation of Sentient Weaves, a series that includes two lichen-based textiles currently featured in the Swedish pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale. I will also explore the broader implications of these pieces as examples of bio art.
Bio:
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who works across various media, including weaving and textile assemblages, embroidery, painting, sound, text, digital media, interactive and bio-art, HCI interfaces development, AI, and video, while exploring their intersections. Her work investigates the boundaries between haptics, visuals, and sound, focusing on the interplay between the human voice, nature, and synthetic elements like machine noises and digital glitches.
A pioneer in designing DIY textile controllers as sound interfaces, Paola has been demonstrating and performing with them since 2007. She has been a recipient of a Prix Ars Electronica award, the Artist + Machine Intelligence grant & residence, theStockholms stads kulturstipendium, and is represented by institutions such as Malmö Museum of Art and Statens konstråd. She is currently a doctoral researcher in the Stockholm University of the Arts.
Garbage Nymph Entanglement
Leif Holmstrand
I will talk about myself and what I do, about garbage and waste as readable cultural products, about informal writing of history, and what it means to contain, take care of, store, keep, and save. I will talk about how my performance practice relates to the production of art objects. I will show a lot of images and push a queer agenda.
Bio:
Leif Holmstrand (1972) is a writer, artist, musician, and member of The Royal Academy of Fine Arts. They work in a gender-dissolving, anti-straight tradition with slightly psychedelic ideas of the queer body and its perceptions. Holmstrand has cooperated with the Japanese artist collective OLTA on several occasions, the last time in April 2024, in a performance piece at Umewaka-Noh in Higashinakano, Tokyo. In 2024, the solo exhibition: "The Life of Termites: The End was shown at Malmö Konsthall, and in 2024, the book “Community” was published.