One Week at Lottozero to explore textiles
The Borderline(s) Investigation #10, seminar week by ETH Zürich with Prof. Alexandre Theriot took place at Lottozero in October 2023.
The workshops were held in collaboration with Belgian textile designers Chevalier Masson (Anne Masson & Eric Chevalier), and were hosted in the spaces of Lottozero.
Students explored the versatile, soft, flexible, light and humble aspects of textiles at the Lottozero Textile Laboratories and through various visits in the textile district of Prato.
Following Chevalier Masson modus operandi of constantly questioning textiles in different contexts and through a wide range of processes and techniques. Practical experiments were conducted in form of models and various experimentations.
Team:
Arnaud Bostelmann, Philippe Buchs, Adrien Comte, Blanka Major, Eva Ruof, ETH Zürich, D-ARCH
EXPLORING THE DISTRICT
During the seminar week students explored together how to build a flexible space, using waste from a nearby weaving mill and fabrics from local stock giving shape to «Palazzo Stracci» (rags palace).
With its highly specific textile industry, Prato was the appropriate place to raise students’ awareness of historical and contemporary issues; complex phenomena have been shaping the city’s evolution since several centuries.
The workshop participants discovered Prato to be a hub of textile globalisation in Europe, where high-quality fabrics are still produced and where textile waste flows from all over the world are handled.
Activating the space
The installation built during the seminar week remained in the Lottozero workspace for the whole month of November 2023.
For four weeks the team and the residents at Lottozero worked and lived in “Palazzo Stracci” experiencing its spatial qualities.
Every Tuesday the Lottozero team took part in different activities under it, to inhabit the construction and experience it in a variety of scenarios like yoga sessions, a craft night, a dance and choreography workshop and a moody office dinner.
FOCUS WORK: Mesh To POINTS
The structure built at Lottozero during the seminar week, was used as the raw material for the film MESH TO POINTS by Antoine Liechti and
Sofia Weidner
The film experiments with the medium of point clouds and their meaning for textiles.
The point cloud model, which usually serves as a means of documentation, emerges as something new, thus referring back to the circular process of the textile industry in Prato.
The film explores the parallels and interdependencies of the textile production, the manual process of the textile installation and the point cloud technology, emphasizing their rhythms and repetitions.
