journey
it starts in Gwangju in China and it
ends in gilded suite in Bavaria however
we’re not embarking on a holiday but
rather taking the road of peg stouts
about three years ago and I remember it
as if it were yesterday I was standing
and Hong Kong’s business district some
wine and glass box office in a 25th
floor talking to a session manager of an
environmental NGO about my ideas on
alternative textile production after all
she smiled with me pitifully and said
dream on girl well so I dreamt on my
vision is to reintegrate textile waste
into an existing textile chain so how is
this possible for me I’m highly
motivated and repurposing things things
that seem to be needlessly discarded and
so to speak finding ways and breathing
new lives and to existing objects for a
creative intervention there will always
be textile waste so I believe that we
will always need new ideas how to
integrate these so my aim was to enable
an existing company to recycle their own
textile waste and looking at this from a
different perspective for example with
food as for chef in order to create a
delicious dish it is a question or a
matter of choosing the graddic right
ingredients and for me as a designer
it’s similar because I also have to
source the right raw material and as a
dish should be tasteful and healthy and
I best even have an appealing
presentation textures too should be
appealing but at the same time always
have the aim of minimal ways like we
also should eat up our dinner or food
and not wait let’s throw it in then I
think in modern times as for designers
we are hardly limited by using the
materials however our raw materials are
becoming increasingly limited
and this is why I believe that we should
use waste material as a starting point
for any creative works so for my
creative work I use a material which is
made out of wool because it’s been a to
recycle ball and also regrowing so the
raw material I would like to introduce
to you today is called salvages salvages
I lose ribbons as you can see were
produced along the conventional weaving
process and so in order to reintegrate
those materials again into the textile
chain an alternative production method
is required so my exploration started
around two years ago in this rooftop
chamber doing my master thesis because I
was curious to find out the evolution
from a material as a raw state into
useful product in the end
so around two years ago I joined the
textile Research Institute which is
equipped with a machine that enabled me
to fuse Toulouse ribbons into a stable
surface and what sound easy was actually
quite hard because I needed a lot of
persuasive and persistence power because
not only that I have to enable or to
convince kind of so to speak the machine
to deal with this new material but also
that I have to persuade the
predominantly male technicians to accept
my idea and you might imagine what took
more persistence however I believed in
the idea and the visual result convinced
me because it was a transformation from
this loose ribbons into a complex fabric
and even the technicians in the end
accepted my ideas and they’re still
cooperating with us today so I think I
succeeded in this so the result was kind
of a wooden painting like an accrual of
a fabric and so instead of looking at
this lovely screen here let’s change
perspectives and look on the ground on
this floor you see the red round rock
which at every TED talk is the trademark
and also just a rock onstage most of you
guys have probably never thought about
these racks and maybe today you happen
to notice that this Rack is in
particularly round neither is really red
it’s more mixed shape of red tones
however it is unique and it’s handmade
and I think it’s important because it’s
telling its own story because it exists
when it shouldn’t it’s made out of
material that is usually disposed and by
lying here it gets the second chance to
show its beauty nowadays materials I
think a kind of an interface between us
individuals and our surroundings and
this is why they have a physically
emotionally and also socially impact
Iraq for instance is usually a symbol of
well-being of comfort unless you’re
think we should consider that even
though it might not interact with us as
much as clothing that it still can leads
an intimate relationship and as a
conclusion coming back to my beginning
with the comparison to food I wonder why
we are so concerned nowadays about the
products we put into our bodies food
wise organic food all these sorts of
things but we don’t pay too much
attention about how the materials that
touched us that surround us are made out
of for me this is a really important
question because I believe in a design
approach that integrates textile waste
and other materials into the production
chain so in this sense it can stimulate
creativity and also provide
possibilities for an alternative
consumption so what started for me as a
vision it has now become reality and I
think as a good small a good news a
small good news story can change the way
we see things I’m really hoping that
this little story about this rug can change the way you do see things