Lecture by Kim Cordes

Kim Cordes is a Master’s student in Textile Design at BURG. He told us about his Bachelor’s project from the last semester. The project is called ReFib and deals with the recycling of silk waste and old silk garments. The starting point for the project is the previous residency in the BioLab “Living Layers”, supervised by Prof Bettina Göttke-Krogmann and Prof Mareike Gast. This centred on material systems with embedded living organisms. The aim of the residency was to find products and applications for these material systems. 
As part of the residency, Kim worked on dissolving and recycling recycled silk. The results of Kim’s work were published under the project title “Silcularity” and led him to further research questions rather than finalised results, so Kim decided to continue working on the recycling of silk in his bachelor’s thesis. In his presentation, he showed us, among other things, a huge flowchart that broke down the structure and planning for his bachelor’s thesis. He based his work on countless of his own experiments and, of course, on selected research publications. His bachelor’s thesis resulted in the refinement of wool textiles with the dissolved recycled silk, giving them a more pleasant feel and also the colour of the old clothes. This allows him to valorise local sheep’s wool, which is currently not being used. 
From his point of view, the designer’s task is also to find other forms of visualisation and communication instead of relying solely on innovation.