A lived dialogue between textiles, plants, and people
“I fell in love with the forest, the silence, the smell of snow, the warming sun, the echo of the lake, the soft surfaces, the colours. I want to explore how to live in harmony with my environment, the seasons, insects and other than human animals.”
This research is a journey. It started in search for textile structures that adapt and respond to their environment, led to study the interactions between seedlings and textiles, based on the research programme ‘On Textile Farming’ and resulted in an autobiographical project of living in a prototype in the Swedish forest to explore spaces in between inside and outside.
This research aims to connect textiles, plants and people in order to rethink the spaces we live in and the materials that surround us. Furthermore it aims to rethink how we inhabit spaces and how we connect to their materiality.
The seed, or the plant, is one of the main characters in this project. How it adapts and maintains relationships serves as a role model and opens up alternative perspectives to textile and spacial design. As many of the principles in nature are already taken into account in permaculture design, it is a fundamental approach in this project and strengthens its ethical, systemic, multifunctional and holistic perspectives, which are based on the realisation that everything is interwoven and therefore cannot be considered separately.
This project suggests that habitats become research spaces; prototypes in which inhabitants explore forms of living and flows of nature through textile structures. They become gardeners of their buildings and interiors, which are ecosystems made of living (biotic, e.g. people, plants, bacterias, insects, animals) and nonliving (abiotic, e.g. soil, water, textiles) components, which interact with one another and the environment through cycling nutrients and flows of energy. Textiles consequently become mediators in between ecosystems and actors; inside and outside, plants and animals.
