Nowadays, the bombardment of social media content, the feeling of alive yet soulless AI chatbots, stresses in fast-paced daily life, and unrest and environmental collapse in the world make us consciously or unconsciously close our senses, to our bodies and the world. This year's graduates from Fabricademy Amsterdam, the annual international course for innovative textiles making, have shown us how textile practices help us listen differently, not just with our ears, to our intertwined body-mind-world. Their works were shown in the exhibition at Waag Futurelab on 11th April.
Fabricademy teaches modules at the intersection between textiles, digital fabrication and biology. While some participants innovate their already existing textile-based works through these courses, the 2024-2025 participants have used the skills and mindsets offered by Fabricademy to create entirely new textile artworks.
Safety Curtain/Cocoon
Artist Francis Hörters' works serve as self-portraits in and through textiles. She was diagnosed with autism and ADHD in her mid-50s, and she has learned to embrace her neurodivergence, which can be sensed in her works. Her works are an invitation for the audience to listen to autistic and other sensibilities through textile installations—textiles as cocoons, second skins, second brains.
The three hat-like works in the middle, Safety Curtain/Cocoon, use biobased materials such as botanical fur made from cattails (typha latifolia), as learnt during Fabricademy’s BioFabricating materials module. These hats create material and symbolic headspaces for people with autism to hide within, as all the sensorial stimulations of the world can be overwhelming for them. In another work entitled Tracing Wound, she uses bacterial nanocellulose (kombucha) leathers as skin prostheses to trace the wound of removed melanoma (cancerous moles) that used to grow on her back. Inside the kombucha prostheses, the embedded near-field communication tags can be activated to show media on the audience's phone. These come together in a dress that acts as the skin, indicating the location of the amputated birthmarks and the remaining ones, while a drip irrigation bag next to it with an adjustable flow of bacterial nanocellulose for her open wound nourished in the petri dish. For her, this continuous growth of bacterial nanocellulose leather through the drips was to feed the prostheses and to cure her phantom pain of the removed birthmark.
Keeping Time
Isobel Leonard’s project Keeping Time is an installation centred on three kinetic sculptures named after three Greek goddesses, reimagining our interaction with more-than-human temporalities. She implemented her learnings from Fabricademy such as soft robotics, textile as scaffold, and biomaterials in the making of her installation. In her work, she asks: How do you listen to the blooming cycle of plants in soil (in the piece called Daphne)? How do you listen to the migratory rhythms of birds in the sky (in the piece called Philomel)? How do you listen to the cycles of Life-Death-Life of whalefall in the deep sea (in the piece called Amphitrite)? How do we as human beings, interwoven with other beings, influence these temporalities? As an audience, if you stand in front of each of the three sculptures, each of them accelerates the tempo of its movement, mimicking the rapidly vanishing of balanced ecosystems.
It is not by coincidence that these three mythical female figures' names are used for these installations. All three goddesses or princesses transform or give birth to more-than-human under the masculine violences inflicted on them. We can think of the sea goddess Amphitrite, for instance. She was pursued by Poseidon against her will, and after marrying him, she bred sea monsters. For Isobel, this is allegorical to the violences forced upon the species and environments. For instance, in the kinetic sculpture Amphitrite, she invites us to sense how human activities have interrupted the life-giving cycles of whale fall, the dead whale falling to the sea bed.
“When a whale dies, its body sinks to the ocean floor becoming life matter for over 200 organisms for decades and sequestering significant carbon into the deep-sea environment at the same time. However, as the global whale population declines so does the frequency of whalefall, creating disruption to the biodiversity and ocean health”.
- Isobel Leonard
IN/ASENSE
Carolina Beirão’s project IN/ASENSE explored and expanded the sensorial dimension of textiles on the body. She dives into the five senses of people's memories of intense experiences to translate the sensorial imprints into garments, which transforms clothing into an interactive vessel for the human experience. By doing so, she tries to "expand our perception of fashion and make it a medium for deeper connection, empathy, conversations, and sharing", in her own words. Her works invite us to listen to our sensations with our body, through textiles that tell stories and revive memories.
She has created two sets of works, each based on a described memory by using Jinsop Lee’s "5 Senses Graph” and a detailed questionnaire that brought out all the sensorial specificities.
The first experience is about a 23-year-old person who submerged themselves in a river at a music festival. To imitate the isolating sensation of cool water with water plants, she has created a striped scarf with gelatine bio-silicone, which bears a resemblance to bubbly lake water. To render the crystal spikes' piercing sensation at that moment when this person jumped into the water, she made a bamboo jersey dress with needle-felted wool and a pair of crystallised tights with alum crystallisation. To capture the reflexive moment of this person standing at the edge of the platform, facing the lake, when they turned their perception inward, she created a wearable sculpture with 3D-printed PLA silk, which has the shape of a pair of self-hugging/clutching hands.
These three participants’ projects show the possibilities of textile practices that can sensitise people to ecological temporalities, neural diverse experiences, and sensorial memories, reactivating their ability to listen differently, with their empathetic and curious minds, and their sensing bodies.
Fabricademy: different from traditional schools
For these three participants, the experiences of studying and making at Fabricademy have inspired them to keep experimenting and making, with a maker mindset—learning by making, understanding by making, and knowing through making. Carolina expressed that Fabricademy is so different from traditional schools as the latter are so rigid and if she should go back there, she would repeat herself. Isobel shares that this journey made her want to continue making, as she has not only learned the skills and tools but also the mindset. Francis also wants to continue making more textile-based artwork afterwards.
The Fabricademy course starting in September 2025 has opened for application. A new group of upcoming pioneers will start experimenting with the future of textiles, technology and materiality. Would you like to join this community? Feel welcome! More information can be found on the website of Fabricademy.
