Gleaning the city

Installation 

As a continuation of the project “Unravelling the city”, developped within the frame of the collaboration between the Textiel museum and Design Academy Eindhoven, the project “Gleaning the city” explores, both through theorical and embodied research, the potentialities of the transformation of a trivial material through craft.

Through that process, the practice of collecting objects and materials in the city becomes a new form of gleaning  and appropriating this city, exploring, ultimately, the tension between the functional aspect of copper and its preciosity when used for aesthetic reasons, focusing on its ubiquity in urban environments.

To see copper as the precious veins of the city also implies engaging with the different social narratives around it, from precarious sections of the population who survive by harvesting it in an urban environment, to its historical use in precious and tedious copper works that blur the line between common objects and artefacts.

Eventually,  it questions our right to the city, what makes the city possible; who modifies it and how to modify it; how do we evolve in it and make it evolve in both a symbolic and material way.

You can find the full essay on this page.

“To go on construction sites, in abandoned buildings, around abandoned buildings, destroyed buildings, was something I was quite well used to, usually to collect images, to film, to document what was about to not be there anymore.
I realized we could integrate this daily exercise into a wider practice. When looking at it, there was not much difference between us, living in the city,

collecting what, around us, had been abandoned, in order to find a new use for it, and what, in another timeframe, in another context, was called gleaning. “