What: Textile Heritage Inspiring Creatives – Createx | European project

Where: Santo Tirso Municipality (PT), Nordiska Textilakademin (SE), and Strzemiński Academy Of Fine Arts Łódź (PL)
When: 2018 - 2019

Embodiment Garment is a project that brings out the medical prosthesis as a wearable and individualized organ of the body itself. A body that integrates, at the same time, the mechanical and the organic, the culture and the nature, the simulacrum and the original, the fiction and the life. A body open to inaccuracies, asymmetries and differences and recognizing in them their totality.

As Createx is a program that aims to strengthen European textile culture as a source of reference, the pattern of technical warp knit made by the Portuguese company LMA was the starting point for the materiality of this collection.

In addition to a beehive pattern, this warpwise knitted fabric, when viewed through a magnifying lens, reveals its primary, secondary and tertiary ribs, as the anatomical structure of a leaf. This interpretation, in a certain way, raised my gaze to the leaves concept, by reading the book "The Life of Plants", by Emanuele Coccia...

and was consecrated with the creative residence in Sweden, where we were led to meet the Trädgårdsföreningen, the palm house from 1878 that shelters exotic plants in a Mediterranean greenhouse.

This synchronicity gave conception and value to the initial foundations of the project, engendering meaning with what was once just a leaf: gaining dimension, its stem materializing in an upper limb shape, and its ribs branching out like a wearable piece.

This is piece number 1, a kind of mantle, all printed by Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology, which integrates a transradial passive right upper limb prosthesis into its wearable construction.

Gold and copper leaves are applied to the printed structure in a flexible filament called Thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) while elucidating the transience of the material's state of leaves, which changes its colour, fractions, wrinkles, creases and shrinks, breaks, preserves and sacralize the member in question.

wearable number 1

And in this same perspective, wearable number 2, printed in translucent polyacid lactic (PLA), is distinguished by revering, through copper leaf and gold dust, the dissonance of a hand with asymmetrical fingers.

Wearable number 3, is a passive hand amputation prosthesis. Also printed in translucent PLA, its coppery limb gradually detaches until it takes the form of the interior of the plant, all white, with pearls, sequins and crystals.

Embodiment Garment makes it clear that just as leaves have edges, bounders, contours, and margins of limbs are beyond the threshold: they are the being in its completeness itself. A whole that is robust in form, whether asymmetrical or not. But it is also fragile, like the organicity of corporeal life.

To look at the garments as a singular organ of the body is to make these edges wings that lift the individual into the air without the need to contract a single muscle, as Emanuele says: just like the leaves.

This research was funded by the project Createx - Textile Heritage Inspiring Creatives - with the reference nº 595936-CREA-1-2018-1-IT-CULT-COOP3, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and had as partners: Prato Textile Museum Foundation, lead partner (Italy); Santo Tirso Municipality (Portugal); Nordiska Textilakademin (Sweden); Strzemiński Academy Of Fine Arts Łódź (Poland) and The City Council Of Gironella (Spain).

You can download the Createx exhibition catalogue :)