Studio Catinca Tilea

HOW TO HOPE TO BE

Social experiment & artwork

An exploration in biobased building together with the community

Developed in collaboration with: BioArt Laboratories & some of the visitors of Dutch Design Week 2023

For a longer period of time, as part of her HOW artistic research, Catinca Tilea has been exploring what it would be like if everybody could build with household organic waste. In 2023, during Dutch Design Week, Tilea invited exhibition visitors to partake into building such a biobased canopy, on the spot. This meant that visitors could put together a bio-brick, mixing fermented household organic waste with the spores of a fungus into 3D printed moulds. The blocks were left to develop a mycelium network on this substrate and grow into a compact material, in an incubator.

The blocks that people assembled during the 10 day exhibition are mounted as a collaborative structure. This is entirely biodegradable and is placed outdoors in the forest, on the site of BioArt Laboratories in Eindhoven. Furthermore, the structure is left uncoated and untreated which means that it slowly becomes one with the surroundings, as nature takes its course.

This social experiment looks at how biotechnology can help create more sustainable communities. It also curiously explores different ways in which humans can adapt to the life cycles of biomaterials instead of forging such materials into current industrial systems.

Tilea invites to reflect upon a biobased canopy built with the help of people as it is slowly being taken over by nature. She questions what temporary mean to us, and how our social customs may melt around it.