Tau Pibernat & Vera Castelijns

About the practice

Urban Fibers is a textile design Studio founded by Tau Pibernat and Vera Castelijns. Working at the intersection of art and design, mentoring and educational projects, they have dedicated the last 6 years to research innovative ways to make industrial upcycling a reality. Current industrial recycling systems for textiles are energy intensive and deteriorate the fiber quality. The team of Urban Fibers reimagined recycling and created a simplified design method to generate raw materials from locally rescued jersey cotton garments, preventing them from ending up landfilled, sent overseas, or burned. This circular method is locally adaptable, socially responsible and can be reproduced in local microfactories wherever textile waste is available. Bridging craft with digital techniques the materials are sliced and joined to generate cotton yarns that preserve original colours and fiber properties. During years of research, the Urban Fibers yarns have been optimised for industrial knitting, weaving and braiding machines and can fully replace virgin materials. The new upcycled textiles are suited for sophisticated interior and fashion items made to disrupt the linear fiber-to-landfill production narrative. The materials that we use are locally collected post-consumer cotton textiles; mainly discarded jersey cotton textiles. We use the materials in the colours they arrive, avoiding any further chemical dyes in the process. The source of these materials can vary, from local networks, to donation centers or second hand market waste, depending on the location of the project. Our methid involves cutting with manual, mechanical and digital tools, depending on the scale and further processing with several textile construction techniques ranging from digital and industrial weaving, digital and manual knitting, rope-making to braiding. We believe in grassroots movements as the basic structure for societies and in distributed networks of solidarity and knowledge sharing. For the last years, with the studio Urban Fibers, we helped to build a manufacture for t-shirt yarn and upcycling in Accra, Ghana, supported by the Or Foundation. We’d like to continue building manufactures and collaborating with communities to build livelihoods and create possibilities for upcycling and re-use wherever there is textile waste. We also run textile upcycling workshops with DIY rope making, clothing repair and are part of a network of creative activists that use the arts to bring people together to ideas of solidarity.