The Dutch designer creates a gigantic textile laboratory, installed in the atrium of the foundation's building, where from small platforms, weavers intertwine weft yarns, as musiciens playing on a huge instrument.
Jongeriuslab displays to the public the research, experimentation, tools and materials that lie behind creating a fabric and turnined the four-storey space into a textile studio that is open to the public to view. Little by little, over the course of three months, the weavers the weft threads form spheres, volumes and patterns which going take shape within the tower’s vertical space.
Jongeriuslab displays to the public the research, experimentation, tools and materials that lie behind creating a fabric and turnined the four-storey space into a textile studio that is open to the public to view. Little by little, over the course of three months, the weavers the weft threads form spheres, volumes and patterns which going take shape within the tower’s vertical space.
Interlace, textile research is an evolutive exhibition showcasing live research and production on the theme of weaving. Throughout the three months of the exhibition, three looms—the Space Loom, the Seamless Loom, and the digital TC2 loom—are activated by a range of professional designers working at, or invited by Jongeriuslab.
The topic of weaving is treated not only as a craft with a long history, but also as a technical, thematic, and critical enquiry; a vehicle for cultural innovation. For three months, research and experiments in 3D and digital weaving are filling Lafayette Anticipations’ spaces both vertically and horizontally, turning them into a designer’s laboratory, all the while questioning our relationship to textile, tactility, labour, and the natural environment, and the limited vocabulary we have to describe these relationships.
The topic of weaving is treated not only as a craft with a long history, but also as a technical, thematic, and critical enquiry; a vehicle for cultural innovation. For three months, research and experiments in 3D and digital weaving are filling Lafayette Anticipations’ spaces both vertically and horizontally, turning them into a designer’s laboratory, all the while questioning our relationship to textile, tactility, labour, and the natural environment, and the limited vocabulary we have to describe these relationships.
Hella Jongerius
The originality of this loom lies not only in its monumentality but also in its design. Usually the warp yarns are regular and it is the weft yarns that create the patterns in the textile: here Hella Jongerius has reversed the ancestral hierarchy of the loom.
"The reason why the Space Loom is so large is because it responds to the question of scale and to how to inhabit the verticality of the building, and because the building's architecture is essentially a machine, it made sense to use it as a weaving machine, a loom."
Hella Jongerius
The loom forms part of an exhibition called Interlace, Textile Research that explores how we consider textiles in our daily lives, as well as the implications of its production and consumption.
"Textile" and "text" both relate to the latin verb tessere, which means "to weave". Thus Space Loom is a machine that weaves letters, offering the chance to literally develop a textile language in order to communicate about tactility and surfaces. The objects invite the viewer to "close reading" of the surface to define the notion of affective and aesthetic quality.
