Year of production: 2014

 

Growing textile is an installation about 4 cities where I have spend time. Riga LV and Marseille FR, Aizpute LV, city where is SERDE residency and Montmeyrant FR the city where I was born.

Riga and Marseille was both European Capital of Culture (2014 and 2013), They have aproximatly the same amound of population and the same size, but whene you look at the satelite view of these two cities you can easly notice how diferent are the spaces dedicate to the vegetation. Marseille have an high density of buildings and you can notice that the most of green spaces are some small private gardens hide from the street by a fence or a wall. There are also some small public parks. In Riga you can find some wastelands with will plants and they are open on the street, some large public parks, and also some grasse's space betwene the road and the pavement.

If you compare Aizpute to Montmeyrant you can easly notice that the way of agriculture is very diferent. Around Montmeyrant you find some very geometricale fields separate by few trees, and almost no forest. Near Aizpute fields have a more organic shape, they are also some small forests and lakes all over.

 

From these observations I created a four parts installation where each one is an allegory of a city. On one side there is an handcraft weaving textile with also some other objects insert in (branchs, grasse, leaves, plastic bags and also other object associated to these cities). In plus there is some seeds introduce into weavings. The weaving associated to "Riga" have been weaved by Riga's citizen themself during an open workshop.

The second side of each part is made with some obects that remenber my these cities: local brand advertising, postcards, toy cars giants flowers, piece of wood and all kind of objects found around. I put some seeds everywhere into the installation that grown thanks to an automatic watering systeme. The wartering systeme build with some randome plastic bottles, second hand pipes... it runs five minutes every hours and transforme the installations in a funny fountain. Durring 2 months plants grown, bloom and died through textiles and objects, changing slowly the installation.