- zoe bilgeri
- is an artist, circular architect and material researcher. Her altered spatial artefacts craft speculative future atmospheres.
- Contact
- @zoe_bilgeri
- zoe@bilgeri.xyz
- design and development by 00ffice
- Work
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we gather dust
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Unfolds within Kantamanto Market in Accra, one of the world’s largest hubs for second-hand textiles. Discarded fabrics were dipped into plaster, one of the few locally available building materials, turning their softness into brittle shells. A material language emerged at the threshold between fragile artefact and ruin in formation. Like geological strata, fabric mimics sediment, preserving the embedded histories of discarded clothing. Draped and set, appearing as white textile fossils against the colourful surrounding, their fragmentary presence both mimicked and unsettled the formal presence of existing market stalls.
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how to arrive in pieces
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extends the work of We Gather Dust into embodied presence. In collaboration with Ghanaian artist Edwin Boye, plaster-treated textile waste was transformed into sculptural costumes. In their passage through the market, these wearables acted as mobile architectures. Fabrics that once circulated through countless hands recasted in another material language. In direct dialogue with people and matter a choreography emerged: ghostly doubles of trader staging discarded matter as a living archiv merging memory, ecology, and material transformation.
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the fish collection
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presents a body of sculptural works shaped from hybridized textile waste. Fabrics treated with organic and mineral binders and pigmented with self-made natural dyes
solidify into richly textured membranes. The collection stretches the limits of what fabric can become in their afterlife. Each work holds material memory while simultaneously reconfigures the very identity of textile matter. What emerges is a hybrid material language, where fabric no longer functions only as elastic mesh but as an architectural element layered with histories. Their skin-like quality inviting sensory immersion and embodied engagement capable of reimagining the relationship between body, material, and built space.
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skin of the ground
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reimagines textile remnants as a utopian topography shaped by the interplay of structure and surface. By reworking textile remnants with bone glue pigmented with self-made natural dyes, and sealed with tung oil waste is elevated into formative elements in space. Stiffened and joined into structures that stand between softness and solidity these topographies expand the role of textiles from clothing and commodity into agents of ecological and spatial imagination. Integrating itself into existing topographies it offers a momentary skin that reveals connection while preserving mystery.
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Konrad Wachsmann and my grandmother
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traces how architecture oscillates between the dream of universality and the grounding of situated practice. the juxtaposition of two contradictory figures—my grandmother’s acts of preserving and repurposing, and konrad wachsmann’s modular systems—opens a dialogue between universalism and hyper-locality, between the heroic narrative of progress and the quieter story of care, adaptability, and the unfinished.
from this tension emerged both an essay and a series of textile sculptures made from coloured and stiffened factory offcuts in germany. fragile architectures, which explore fragmentary joints and provisional connections. rather than striving for absoluteness, they embody cycles of dissolution and reinvention, echoing my grandmother’s gestures of reuse and point towards wachsmann’s structural experiments.
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I feel
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Unfolds a series of cartographies where earth-based pigments trace emotional sediments. Fragile accumulations of lived experience, layered into soft topographies.
These cartographies emphasise that emotions, like sediments, deposit themselves across individual and collective bodies, leaving traces that shape how we inhabit space and memory.
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fragile arms
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presents itself as a textile installation on the exterior of an old factory building in Leipzig. The work is approached as a medium of relation, where a dialogue between textile materiality and architectural remnants takes form through extending textile arms. These arms stretch outward, connecting with the building in gestures that are at once tender and insistent, questioning how structures depend on one another. As connecting agents, they seek resonance with their surroundings. Their gestures negotiate dependency: both connector and intruder, they gently disrupt while never fully belonging nor entirely alien. By staging acts of attachment and release, of holding and letting go, the work reframes architecture as an organism of relations.
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digital diary
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By re-casting physical fragments into digital counterparts - through scanning, layering, and hybrid texturing - I echo the precariousness of the material world while generating new imaginaries. These fragile and incomplete translations allow me to approach the digital not as mere representation, but as an epistemic terrain in its own right. Within the porous continuum of our increasingly blurred digital landscape, the work traces topographies of dissolution, where form unravels into pixel-based realms and new spatial imaginaries emerge.
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we gather dust
- Research
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MATERIAL RECONFIGURATION
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Within my ongoing material research, I investigate the structural and aesthetic potentials of discarded textiles through hybridisation with organic and mineral binders. I develop composite materials that challenge conventional boundaries between soft and structural matter. These processes reactivate overlooked materials into new spatial and sensory forms, creating new atmospheric and ecological possibilities. Operating at the intersection with material science, I examine how these mattermorphosis generate distinct material qualities. In this exploration, I develop my own natural pigments and experiment with wax and oil coatings, extending the surface language of these composites into sensorial and protective dimensions.
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TO HOLD A SHAPE
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Is a tectonic study exploring how stiffened textiles are pulled into temporary bodies. By applying controlled tension through a rope system, the material is drawn into volumetric configurations. These experiments articulate a constructive language which investigates how form and expression emerge from the balance between flexibility and resistance.
The resulting formations remain a fragile equilibrium that reveals the inherent negotiations embedded in every act of holding.
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THE FOLD REMEMBERS
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explores folding as both a structural and cultural operation. Each folding marks a point where movement becomes form and time is momentarily held. Rather than fixing geometry, folding articulates space through relation and memory: every twist and overlap records a sequence of performed structure. In this sense, the fold is both element and event, an imprint that organises matter and orientation at once. By embracing change rather than resisting it, the work proposes a constructive language grounded in adaptability.
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MATERIAL RECONFIGURATION