Designing with Organisms

In 2007, Stroom Den Haag published a special edition about the dutch artist Zeger Reyers from the eyes of five established writers: Nell Donkers, Roland Groenenboom, Vincent Honoré, Philip Peters, Arno van Roosmalen.

The publication handed up in my hands few weeks ago and it has stimulated me to explore the work of this artist, winner of a prestigious Dutch price called De Ouborg Prijs. As mentioned by Arno van Roosmalen, Zeger Reyers "despite his relatively young age already has built an impressive oeuvre. A work that is diverse in its manifestations and can not be sharply defined, but in his themes and subject matters has a strong correlation."

In 1997 Belgium fashion designer Martin Margiela produced his first solo exhibition, 9/4/1615 at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum of Rotterdam.
In collaboration with a microbiologist, Margiela treated his clothes with bacterias and moulds.
Caroline Evans in her book Fashion at the edge: spectacle, modernity and deathliness associate the traces of moulds in Margiela's work to the figure of the ragpicker who fascinated Baudelaire and Benjamin hundred years before. And even more, to the more actual concept of consumerism and consumption: "Ingrid Loschek has observed that, when he destroyed his clothes with mould and bacteria, Mergiela compared the natural cycle of creation and decay to the consumer cycle of buying and discarding."

Onder-tussen (In-between), 1996
Photo by Bob Goedewaagen
From the website of Witte de With - Center for Contemporary Art