From Matter to Form Working on Sensorial Qualities of Textile Surfaces

This paper runs a route concerning material and sensorial aspects of textile surfaces.It gathers the results of progressive experimentations on textile surfaces exposed during the New York Textile Month, in September 2016. NYTM was an initiative by Lidewij Edelkoort in collaboration with Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Parsons School of design. The work belongs to a wider research which investigates the know-how of Mediterranean heritage, intersecting innovation with tradition, so to built and save our cultural identity in the contemporary globalized world. The aim of the study on textile is to define a contemporary expression of the traditional material process of our region, Apulia, in order to achieve a transcultural comparison. The projects of the textile surfaces arose from manipulation and contamination of materials so to magnify the sensorial tattle an visual values of surfaces.