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hi!¶
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I’m a brazilian fashion designer just graduated from Londrina’s State University. I decided to study fashion design in order to think about preferable futures for the sector against the unsustainability of the current industry. This path ended up being present in all my design background.
BACKGROUNG¶
DeSIn research group¶
Right at the beginning of college, I joined the research group DeSIn – Design, Sustainability and Innovation, where I had the opportunity to be a CNPQ (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) and FA (Araucaria Foundation) scholarship during my graduation. For 3 years I researched the concepts of Distributed Economies, Systemic Design and Reverse Logistics to envision the application of a system (Textile Waste Bank) for gathering, treatment and final destination of post consumption textile waste with an Recycling Cooperative. This is because these materials are not provided for in the country's legislation and therefore end up being classified as rejects by recycling cooperatives and sent to landfills.
I was the researcher responsible for coordinating the prototyping of the “Textile Waste Bank” model at the Cooper Região Recycling Cooperative in 2019/2020. All textile waste that arrived in the space was sanitized, sorted by type of fiber (natural, mixed and synthetic) and removed from trim, then fragmented by a shredding machine. In the end, we made boards for thermal and acoustic insulation (aimed at civil construction) by pressing shredded textile waste into molds with starch or conventional glue.
awards¶
With this research I got first place nationally (Brazil) and second place internationally in the LeNS’In Student Design Competition (2018) with another colleague. The following year (2019), I was one of the 15 finalists in the Contest on Circular Economy by Leroy Merlin in partnership with Instituto Tomie-Ohtake-SP and I exhibited my results at the Institute in SP (October 2020).
fashion revolution¶
I've always believed that fashion and politics go hand in hand. So throughout my graduation I was involved with the Fashion Revolution and represented the movement as a 2019 Student Ambassador at the University.
nameless¶
Sustainability ended up being a pillar of several of my undergraduate projects. An example is NAMELESS, a fashion brand structured in a group work at the college so that the products were accessible (in cost and aesthetics), made with recovered fabrics and gave the consumer freedom of styles when dressing up.
oceanus¶
It was in my Course Completion Paper and last graduation project that I actually experienced Fab Labs. When seeking new systemic understandings about productive relationships for the transition to sustainability, I came across the disruptive and uncertain promises of the Apparel Industry 4.0 and the lack of these issues in the Education environment. So, I moved to the capital of my state (Curitiba-Paraná) inspired to explore the concepts of distributed production and digital manufacturing in practice, to try to understand “How Fab Labs can be mediating spaces between the teaching of Fashion Design for sustainability and the Industry 4.0 scenario?”.
The work resulted in a mini-collection inspired by Brazilian Coral Reefs, all produced in Fab Lab Liceu de Ofícios - Cajuru (Curitiba-PR). The products had the application of Laser Cutting and 3D Printing combined with sustainability requirements considering the Product Life Cycle, such as Zero Waste modeling, modular design and disassembly thinking. We did the editorial in the 'homemade' style, during the quarantine of the pandemic. I also got some parameters about the potential of fab lab environments for Teaching Fashion Design for Sustainability in Fashion Design graduation.
OCEANUS 2020 from Brunna Ramos on Vimeo.
Part of this project was also shown at 3D Fashion Week Latin America :)
WHAT BRINGS ME HERE?¶
I think of my creation as opening doors to constant experimentation mediated by my curiosity, an unknown that leads me to think: what could it be? I think a lot about what design could be, what fashion could be, what Brazil could be and so on. Here I flower my imagination in unimaginable places. At the same time, the complexity of projects for sustainability and my eagerness to change modes of production led me to places of hard demand, where the completion of work was a very difficult burden to carry. As Clarice Lispector once wrote, when narrating a story in the book A Bela e a Fera (Beauty and the Beast)... “the birth of an idea is preceded by a long gestation”.
To talk about what brings me here, I borrow a line from Chico Buarque in the documentary Chico: Brazilian Artist. “The more you know, the harder your craft becomes. [...] The more I know how to make a song, the more difficult it becomes to make. Because everything I know feels like it's already been done. I don't want to do what I already know. I want to do exactly what I don't know how to do. That goes for everything.” To which I add the speech of Ailton Krenak, indigenous leader and Brazilian environmentalist, in a recent debate in which he participated: “I don't know where this white mentality that suffering teaches something comes from. [...] I don't want to learn anything if I'm going to suffer”.
I believe in the potential of design and especially of fashion, my field of formation, as a place of effervescent creation, far from the shackles, deadlines of the market and impossible paths to make it cyclical and sustainable. An immersion that researches and blossoms paths to preferable futures through experimentation carried out in a light and pleasant way, without the very usual demands and competition in the anthropocene design act. But it requires recognizing that dealing with complex problems (the ones described by Buchanan) is also realizing that we haven't solved anything on our own. It also requires me to differentiate difficulty from suffering.
I place myself on this path because I believe in the power of the network, collaboration and open knowledge, in the gains of interdisciplinary exchange and in the potential of creating for the counter-context that respects, above all, the time of nature.
SolidWorks scholarship¶
I'm also having the opportunity to be here because of the scholarship provided to me by SolidWorks so that I could do Fabricademy, an event for which I will be eternally grateful.
INSPIRATION/REFERENCES¶
I cannot fail to mention the articles that I studied and that left a deep impression on me:
Among them...
BERGLUND, Eeva; KOHTALA, Cindy. Collaborative Confusion among DIY Makers. Science & Technology Studies, [S.L.], v. 33, n. 2, p. 102119, 14 maio 2020. Science and Technology Studies. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23987/sts.60812.
BROOKS, Andrew et al. Fashion, Sustainability, and the Anthropocene. Utopian Studies, Pensilvânia, v. 28, n. 03, p. 482504, 2018. Disponível em: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.28.3.0482. Acesso em: 21 jan. 2021
KOHTALA, Cindy. Addressing sustainability in research on distributed production: na integrated literature review. Journal Of Cleaner Production, [S.L.], v. 106, p. 654668, nov. 2015. Elsevier BV. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.09.039.
NIINIMÄKI, Kirsi et al. Author Correction: the environmental price of fast fashion. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, [S.L.], v. 1, n. 5, p. 278278, 23 abr. 2020. Springer Science and Business Media LLC. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s430170200054x.
The various publications by authors Manzini and Vezzoli have also inspired me a lot since the beginning of graduation. In addition to the work of Iris Van Herpen and Neri Oxman, which opens my eyes to disruption :)