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Stéphanie Baechler

Awarded

Stéphanie Baechler

Textile design collection 'Poetry of the hardware'
(diploma work)

Textile Design

Jury report

Cables with Cachet
Stéphanie Baech­ler has won a Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Grant with her de­gree piece 'The Po­etry of Hard­ware'. As the title of her work sug­gests, she cap­i­tal­izes on the fric­tion be­tween two very dif­fer­ent worlds. Hav­ing learned from ex­pe­ri­ence, while study­ing at the Lucerne Uni­ver­sity of Ap­plied Sci­ences and Arts, that even such a pro­foundly sen­sual field as tex­tile de­sign can no longer do with­out com­put­ers and other tech­no­log­i­cal gad­getry, she de­cided to ex­ploit the po­ten­tial of the sup­posed con­tra­dic­tion.Her use of hard­ware com­po­nents ex­plic­itly high­lights the dif­fer­ence be­tween sen­su­al­ity and 'non­sen­su­al­ity'. But what does that mean? In the course of her re­search, it quickly be­came clear to Baech­ler that she did not want to de­velop 'in­tel­li­gent' and tech­ni­cally func­tional cloth­ing or tex­tiles. In­stead, as she ex­plains, she seeks to in­te­grate the dig­i­tal world into her fab­rics by trans­lat­ing it into el­e­ments tinged with ro­man­ti­cism and nos­tal­gia. Some­times she ma­nip­u­lates im­ages so that, on look­ing at the fab­ric, it is not im­me­di­ately ob­vi­ous that what we see are diodes, cir­cuit boards, rib­bon ca­bles and other tech­ni­cal para­pher­na­lia. By minia­tur­is­ing var­i­ous elec­tronic com­po­nents such as iodes, re­sis­tors and ca­pac­i­ta­tors, and ar­rang­ing them in new and un­ex­pected jux­ta­po­si­tions, she tricks the eye in as­ton­ish­ing ways. Using burnt-out em­broi­dery, she cre­ates ef­fects which, at first glance, re­sem­ble the mo­tifs pop­u­larly used in the tra­di­tional Swiss folk art of the 'Scheren­schnitt' (paper cutouts). But this is no rus­tic scene of gar­landed an­i­mals being herded to alpine pas­tures: these are USB sticks, con­nec­tors, head­phones and charg­ers. What ex­actly do we see here? The world that opens up be­fore our eyes is rich and sen­sual, and it is fed by the tech­noid world of the com­puter. Their seem­ing in­com­pat­i­bil­ity is ban­ished with re­mark­able ease. The re­sult is a range of tex­tiles with­out peer.
Pa­trizia Criv­elli

Biography

Stéphanie Baechler
Born in
1983
Education
Fashion Designer

Web

www.stephaniebaechler.com

also in

2011

2014

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