Dasha Tsapenko

Subject of presentation

Could there be any parallels in a kitchen and a dressing room? In the process of getting (un)dressed and cooking? In the ritual of having a meal and the sensation of wearing a garment? Between gardening and ironing? Fur_tilize is an ongoing attempt and a case study in merging together two, normally very segregated rituals of our everyday life, shaped around food and dress. Starting from the question “How can we humans coexist with our garments if they are living beings?” the presentations follow the designer’s journey and various collaborations with plants and fungi on creating a cyclical food-dress system, as well as speculates on a potential future home that is able to accommodate such coexistence and new rituals around it. 

Concise resume

Tsapenko is a social designer, who works closely with elements of fashion. She investigates alternative production processes and (re)designs daily routines around the body and it’s dress by creating spatial installations, performances, and garments that work as props for activation or communication tools. In search of alternatives, she derives inspiration from natural cycles and symbiotic relationships, as well as borrows tools and methods from other disciplines, such as architecture, agriculture, mycology, and microbiology. During the past 3 years, she learned from and collaborated with various non-human species like fungus and (edible) plants to co-create living “fur” textiles. These collaborations resulted in new speculative rituals for the future, while the outcomes, “fur”-alike wearable fields, served as manifestos of value above profit, circularity above linearity, and interconnectivity above anthropocentricity. After winning the Bio Art and Design (BAD) Award in 2020 together with Prof. Han Wosten, she started to work in the microbiology lab of Utrecht University, investigating symbiotic relationships between fungus and edible crops, aiming to translate the results into circular garments that produce food.