///HIPHONEST PRESENTS:

#Exhibition: Beauty can save our world.
#Project: Decay. Embedding traces of use in textile 2008
#Designer: Marie-Ilse Bourlanges

Decay’s project started as a free experiment on textiles, with the aim of producing innovative materials that would either sublimate or anticipate decay in an abstract manner. The resulting collection of eight knitted sweaters reveal the complex and intimate relationships between notions of Time, Body, Skin and Clothes, and intend to express the broad semantic of decay.

The patterns of the carefully crafted pieces were determined by deep research into the natural motions of the body. With the use of an outer carbon paper suit, working as a registration device, traces of use and body movements (such as pressing, bending, rubbing, scratching, and stretching) were transferred on an inner white blouse. These traces testify of repeated daily action the body apply on clothes and the skin, that would eventually result in wear out or damage; they are used as an anticipation of decay.

The transferred imprint on the blouse was then translated into a pattern, resulting in intricate collections of lines that ebb across the textile. The final pieces bear an ambiguous forensic feeling: even though they are newly made, the traces they carry express a past enigma that can’t absolutely be solved.

The project Decay provides an example of Slowness as a process of designing, as well as a conceptual guideline. By anticipating potential expressions of the body and linking those to the eventual decay of textile, it challenges perceptions of material existence, revealing some of the most intimate and
ephemeral movements of daily life.