Among the institutions presenting the work of their graduates during Milan Design Week at Base Milano (Via Bergognone 34, until today), there is also the Swedish School of Textiles.
Its graduates presented at Base an exciting exhibition with a series of artefacts centred on textile innovations. Each of them created their own textile vision and universe through colours, patterns and innovative shapes that challenge existing norms.
Leonie Burkhardt's "Woven Forms" project consists, for example, in a series of three-dimensional objects created from flat woven textiles.
Burkhardt created these fully-woven sculptural abstract pieces on a Jacquard loom, but injected in their DNA a peculiar transformative power using form-giving mechanisms, that is multi-layering techniques and heat-reactive shrinking yarn. Sewing was not needed to create these woven objects, while variations were added through colours, textures and scale.
Two years ago for her BA collection Felicia Hansen experimented with Kente cloth, integrating in it recycled plastic toys to explore the possibilities offered by traditions and sustainability (View this photo).
Hansen continued her experiments along the same lines in her new collection, but this time she looked at stuffed toys. Her "Teddy Vessels (Also Known As Our Former Best Friends, 2022)" are exactly what the title of the project states - vessels made from assemblages of discarded stuffed toys.
The colourful vases and scultural objects become the tangible proof that post-consumer waste can become a design material to create fun and unique pieces, and that, well, while we tend to discard stuffed animals when we grow up, they can still have a place in our homes if we give them a second chance and a second life.
Zuzanna Wójcik's "Touch the Textile" invites us to rediscover one of the senses we missed the most during the Covid-19 pandemic - touch. Her objects - almost a series of samples of weaving techniques designed for different types of interactions - are employed to invite viewers to consider the process of creating textures and building textile structures.
Also Christine Snedker considered the possibility of interacting with textiles: her "Balls Form Knit" project elevates the role of textiles within the interior context. Her transformable textile objects offer an alternative perspective, anatomical support and possibility to engage with the pieces.
But there's more to discover among this year's textile graduates: with Mirte Luijmes' "Fabricated Symbiosis", a hybridisation of knits and lichens in which the knits enhance the lichens' properties, creating unusual textures, surface effects and colour combinations.
Due to the slow growth of lichens, this hybrid material is not introduced as a proper design material, but as a tool or an expedient to activate the textiles: when the lichens such as the Cetraria Islandica integrated in the textiles change their properties from dry to wet, they transform indeed the textile, unfolding folds and elongating the samples.
The project aims at raising awareness about the existence of the lichens and appreciate them, prompting viewers in this way to reflect upon the relationship between humanity and nature.
Luijmes' project looks at the transformative power of textiles, a subject that fascinates also Sophie Jungkvist who tried to turn static textiles into something inherently changeable, creating colourful weaves and patterns that can shift between multiple expressions.
Jungkvist's weaves and motifs can be subtly adjusted to the wish of the user or they can ingeniously change with the shifting light of the day.
Sofie Sølvhøj Heinesen also researched along the same lines, but in her case the textiles mutate through movement. Her project, entitled "Performing Knits", explores the role of knitting in performance introducing changes through movements that reveal mutations in colours, patterns and forms.
In this case the performative potential of the collection is best explored in the context of contemporary dance. During the performance, the knits "perform themselves" through their changeable qualities and the textiles become co-performers with the human dancer.
After this display at Milan Design Week, let's hope we will see these experimental textile designers taking their researches further and developing sustainable pieces, textiles for a ballet or for health and scientific projects.
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