Centre Pompidou: La Fabrique du vivant “MUTATIONS/CREATIONS 3”

From 20 February to 15 April 2019, in Gallery 4 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, La Fabrique du vivant “MUTATIONS/CREATIONS 3” (The Fabric of the living) retraces an archaeology of the living and of artificial life. Curated by Marie-Ange Brayer and Olivier Zeitoun, the exhibition offers a prospective presentation of the recent work of some fifty designers, in addition to research from scientific laboratories.

In the group exhibition, Faber Futures presents a Project Coelicolor research project titled Scale, Void, Assemblage 001. Project Coelicolor is an ongoing project that was established by Natsai Audrey Chieza in 2011 through a collaboration with Professor John Ward of University College London’s Department of Biochemical Engineering.

Created as part of the Ginkgo Bioworks x Faber Futures Residency, Scale, 2017, a 5-meter long textile piece is permanently dyed over 7 days by billions of colonies of pigment-producing microorganisms with just 400ml of water and without the use of any harmful chemicals. This textile artefact (currently the largest works of its kind) embodies ongoing studies on the global parametrics of biodesign, and the resultant aesthetic narratives originating from interspecies intervention spanning the molecular to the architectural scale. Six years following Professor Carole Collet’s exhibition En Vie/ Alive at Espace Fondation EDF, Paris, where we exhibited, for the first time, our early research into biopigments by way of a textile piece ten centimetres in diameter, we are thrilled to contribute to an evolved body of practice, once again in Paris, where new scales of biofabrication reveal emerging expressions of biological constraints and economies of production.

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Project Credits:

Natsai Audrey Chieza (Designer), Ginkgo Bioworks (Biotechnology Collaborator), Simon Sawyer (Fabricator), Charlie Pender (Research Assistant), Magdalena Obmalko (Research Assistant).