Leonie Bramberger
The Cotton Cocoons are a product of strolls around the Riviera Resort area and a tour to a local handloom manufacturer. During the strolls we came across some mystical already hatched cocoons and started wondering what metamorphosis took place in there. Speculation for me always has to do with a haptic understanding of what’s happening, so I decided to harvest some cotton from the bushes around and make my own cocoon.
The process involved getting to know the material, spinning yarn and trying out different cocoon shapes with crochet.
Speculative thoughts coming up throughout the process circled around making a human sized cocoon for myself and others, and the necessities involved in such a lifeform. Imagining water pipe systems and air flow tunnels integrated in the cocoons skin, but also questions of comfort like “What are the acoustics like in a cocoon?” and in contrast to beehive structures like sleeping capsules, thinking of expandable, stretchy cocoon walls, that adjust to any size of group, who wants to share a space.
The idea of building a shell out of saliva or sticky webs your body can produce as waste also combined really well with the plastic-bottle-3D-printing-project, since it’s sticking together waste we produce into new shapes.
I also found it to be very interesting to think about the stages of human life, in which we would move into such a cocoon to allow ourselves to change form. Thinking of transitions as a very conscious process, that take time and a specific space.