On Textile Farming : Living Indoors

Sammanfattning: Horticultural practices are increasingly entering the private realm due to the popularity of urban gardening, indoor gardening systems, and architectural propositions to join living spaces for people and vegetable cultivation in order to promote more resilient and sustainable ways of living. While new research into symbiotic processes between living organisms and their ability to sense and reason triggers new works of art, culture, design, and architecture, the organisation of indoor plants remains mainly unaffected. This is due to the fact that many of the examples that aim to bring together people and plants in an architectural context are characterised by rigid materials and technical systems that separate people and plants from each other and feature relatively unnatural environments, compositions, and expressions. In proposing an alternative perspective on this, On Textile Farming explores textiles as flexible systems for integrating plant growth in textile materials. The collaboration with AB Ludvig Svensson, a developer and producer of textiles for interiors and greenhouses, involved a joint approach to the two distinct areas of climate screens and interior textiles. Through experimental methods, interactions between plants and textiles were explored using double-weave structures to integrate seeds and substrate. A methodological framework is proposed wherein the processes and materials of textile and spatial design open up for environmental parameters, e.g. changes in time, climate, and material behaviour. The design concepts ‘textile permeability’, ‘seasonal textiles’, and ‘textile climate’ describe the interactions between plants, textiles, and space, and can be seen as first steps towards an interior textile ecosystem in which spaces are composed of relationships between biotic and abiotic components, causing the natural and the artificial to intersect. ‘Spatial permeability’, ‘seasonal interiors’ and ‘spatial climates’ expand the three textile concepts towards space and describe interactions between different spatial qualities that were explored through autobiographical research; for this, an experimental house was built in a rural region of Sweden and lived in. In this context, textiles be-came flexible interfaces between the inside and the outside, guiding growth and melting into seasonal expressions that blurred nature and artifice.