Fitting Stage

The FITTING STAGE is a DIY tailoring platform to support my personal project @materialchemy at the upcoming exhibition at the Tres Chimeneas de Sant Adria, Barcelona (19/06/2025).

What is Materialchemy

Materialchemy explores the potential of mycelium to decompose and recompose fast fashion waste into new, living materials. This project engages with the duality of fungi as both decomposers and creators — organisms capable of digesting synthetic textile waste and binding it into cohesive new forms. Centered around the idea of regenerative materiality, Materialchemy proposes an alternative narrative to the linear lifecycle of garments, where discarded fabrics are not disposed of but metabolized into future matter.

The work experiments with growing mycelium — primarily Ganoderma lucidum and Pleurotus ostreatus — on textile substrates sourced from post-consumer waste. Ganoderma is chosen for its structural strength and adaptability in forming biofabrics, while Pleurotus offers the ability to break down complex chemical structures due to its high metabolism. Together, they form a hybrid living system that challenges the boundaries between fashion, waste, and biology.

This project emerges in response to the global overproduction crisis of the fashion industry and the ecological urgency to rethink material systems. Instead of designing new products, Materialchemy seeks to design new processes. The result is not a fixed object but a series of transitions: waste to substrate, substrate to culture, culture to textile. The garments grown during the project are not purely symbolic — they embody a speculative yet tangible future where materials are cyclical, alive, and embedded with ecological intelligence.

Throughout the year, the project has involved hands-on experimentation in microbial cultivation, biofabrication, material testing, and the integration of textile knowledge into living systems. The garments and material samples become both artefacts and evidence — not of perfection, but of an evolving dialogue between decay and design. This process also becomes a form of resistance: to consumerism and its extractive industry, and to the idea of fast innovation.

Materialchemy invites us to rethink not just what we wear, but what our materials could become, and what it means to collaborate with other species in designing the future.

Exhibition proposal

On the 19.06.2025 the MDEFEST is taking part, the master exhibition at the end of the 1st academic year at the Master for Design of Emergent Futures at IAAC and Elisava, Barcelona. For this event I proposed to share with the public an open fitting room experience where guests are able to dress and play with the pieces and mycelium fabrics I have grown as a way to generate profesional content for applying to open calls and presenting my work in the future, and also to collect organic feedback on my project and process.

Microchallenge

During the week of the 19th of May 2025, we had the week of the microchallenge, a microchallenge is a digital fabrication focused week to develop prototypes in the context of the MDEF Master. This particular microchallenge was focused on the MDEFEST and it was intended to open a space for fabricating artifacts that we need to support our projects on the day of the exhibition.

Because of this I started sketching my idea of the fitting room.

What?

My idea was to have sort of a "personalized fittingroom" where a centre platform is surrounded by mirrors so that guests can have an experience that feels memorable and reminiscing luxury while trying on quite the opposite: decomposed waste textiles. For the mirrors I already was able to source them and for keeping them in place I also have the possibility to place them against walls in the exhibition space or using some modules that are already existing for the branding of the event:

The main thing missing for support of my presentation was the platform where people could try on the pieces, and where I could perform.

How?

Collegues from the class had found some days prior a 80x122cm pallet on the streets which they brought back to the class for someone to use. It was the perfect timing and so I kept it and decided that it would turn into my fitting stage.

My idea was to turn it into the center stage by making it look nice and be safe to carry around. But also, I wanted for it to serve as a way to communicate the process by which my garments come to life, for it to be able to show while trying on the pieces the step by step of the coming to be.

Because of this I decided to reclaim a box design we had used on one of the first iterations with mycelium during the master that we used to showcase samples. I imagined a series of this boxes in transparent acrylic where I could be growing different stages of the colonization process of the textiles so that I could make visible the process to people in an easy way.

Process

Firstly, I took the pallet to the wood workshop and sanded it throughly so that it was safe to carry around without getting splinters. I did this using an orbital sander on the flat big area of the top and a piece of sanding paper on a block for the support area.

Secondly, I realized that if I kept the bare wood every time someone will stand up the platform would get quite dirty, so I decided I wanted to cover the top with plastic so it would not be as dirty. Giving this opportunity I thought it would even look better if I could have a print on the base of the platform which then I could place the plastic on top of. For this I recovered the design I am using as part of my identity in the exhibition and I printed it in the dimensions of the pallet.

After sanding and printing the image I placed the print on top of the structure, on top of it I cut in the proper dimensions 2 pieces of 0.1mm plastic boards and stapled these two layers on top of it.

Thirdly, I needed to approach the making of the acrylic boxes. For that I exported on the proper dimensions: 15cm cube and 0.2cm thickness a closed box model from https://boxes.hackerspace-bamberg.de

I ran a test file first on the laser cutter and I did not leave a tolerance on that file so the indentations did not fit the holes.

After that test file and having bought my nieces of acrylic I didn't have much space for missing the laser cut files so with some help I did some tolerance tests and sent those to cut.

After cutting those we realized that those 2 hours of work learning to use Rhino for making the tolerance had been in vain as I should have just added 0.2/0.3mm extra of material thickness when downloading the file from boxes.py to solve it :)

Anyway, we did that, and laser cut the boxes and they looked and fitted perfectly in the end.

Conclusions

Here it is the final platform all together. We have the pallet covered by the print and plastic sheet and the acrylic boxes with the steps of the process inside of each of them. I am still missing to print some vinyl stickers to place on the top of each box with a title for each moment of the process. Also when put all together I realized that maybe its a lot of texture because of the print so I may sand the bottom part of the acrylic so to make it opaque and give a bit more of a whiteish background so that the insides of the box are more visible.