NEST, Design Fest Gent

— 2022

NEST is an installation for IDROPS, a community that engenders social change with creativity as a motor. Together with a wide range of actors, from individuals to disadvantaged groups or governments, they tackle social issues in order to translate them into sustainable, positive solutions and into policy. NEST is one of their CARE track 2SPACES, a project that aims to support the psychosocial well-being of young adults with cancer or chronic illness through art and technology.

NEST creates a place that shelters dialogue. With its directness it embraces every form of encounter and exchange, where there is spoken or sometimes not: testimonials, conversations, workshops, lectures, creation, reading sessions, films, meditation, sleep, ...

NEST promotes CARE. As an inviting tent structure, it reaches out to the deeply human meaning of security and protection. NEST makes room for connection, understanding and empathy. Bigger than a bed, but smaller than a house, it creates nearness and intimacy.

NEST is a collaboration between students and alumni Textiles of LUCA School of Arts and the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture Campus Sint-Lucas Ghent and IDROPS. Coordination by Marie Mees and Caroline Voet.

A lightweight minimal wooden structure with an approximative diameter of five meters is assembled through demountable frames. The frames are prepared in the workshops of Jan Verwerft, supervised by Mattias Deboutte, and for the first time mounted in the Design Museum.

Constructed from durable material that reflects what the two departments stand for, NEST explores a new perspective for the residential, construction and social context where textiles are becoming important in architecture. This research-oriented collaboration promotes the crossover between architecture and textiles, and may become a permanent fixture for the two departments in the future.

1. NEST is nomadic and in constant transformation: the textile cover and the fine wooden frame can be easily folded into a traveling package that wants to spread its wings again and again: in hospitals, museums, ... , projects at home and abroad.