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Heterotopia is understood as an integrated world that acts as a mirror as well as a distorted image of what is outside. In certain sense, such worlds are the materialization of utopia, or at least any non-existing imaginary world. This project was an abstract environment where several different layers coexisted together to create a heterotopic world and later reflect it back in our world in form of futuristic Haute couture objects. Heterotopia is a concept developed by the XX century French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe the nature of certain cultural or institutional spaces that, in some way, can be described as incompatible or contradictory. The word heterotopia follows the same pattern as the concepts of utopia and dystopia. The prefix hetero- comes from the classical Greek ἕτερος (héteros: “other, different”), combined with the Greek morpheme τόπος (topos: “place”), thus meaning “another place”, in the sense of place that is understood as belonging to alterity. A “utopia”, on the other hand, is an idea or image that is not real but represents an improved version of society, such as Thomas More’s work of the same name or Le Corbusier’s illustrations. In the words of Russell Mead, “utopia is a place where everything is good; a dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different - that is, a set of members that have no or few intelligible connections with each other”. The heterotopia project aimed to obtain maximum benefit from the industrially polluted soils by transforming plant biomass, the end product of soil purification, into a flexible, resilient biomaterial, which I used for designing new dresses. In this project, I explored biofabrication in Haute Couture and elaborated on combining different ancient techniques, with high-tech technologies such as 3D design and laser cutting.
PROJ Including innovative biomanufacturing systems, such as cosmetics and textile printing. To be used as a canvas or as a printing system using it as inks and thus free ourselves from microplastics as much as possible.
