In many ancestral cosmologies, the boundary between body, dwelling, clothing, and environment is porous. Survival is not an individual achievement but a system of reciprocal relations between land, community, and the beings that sustain them. Animal fur, shelter, ritual, and daily use form a single continuum—an embodied knowledge shaped by presence and responsibility. Materials exist not as commodities but as extensions of life itself.

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In contrast, contemporary material culture, especially through the fashion industry, moves at the speed of circulation and disposal. Clothing becomes image, novelty, and waste, severed from the ecological, social, and emotional networks that once grounded it. We inhabit a world where extraction is constant, where value is detached from origin, and where the materials closest to our skin travel through systems we rarely see.

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Lint becomes an unexpected site where these worlds brush against each other. Collected from a local laundromat, it gathers fragments of countless lives—fibers, hair, habits, routines—quiet evidence of how individuals coexist inside shared infrastructures. It carries the residue of the fashion industry and the intimacy of domestic life at once. Something discarded is repurposed, becoming a map of a neighborhood, a record of the textures people live in, a sediment of contemporary existence.

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Gelatin introduces another layer—one that is both visceral and distant. Made from the remains of animal bodies—skin, bone, connective tissue—it is a substance historically tied to survival, nourishment, and reciprocity. In ancestral contexts, nothing was wasted; each part carried meaning and responsibility. This lineage resurfaces during the making process, when the mixture is heated long enough for the smell to emerge—unmistakable and persistent, a sensory insistence that something once alive underlies this material. Over time, as the membrane dries, the smell gradually dissipates. What was overwhelming becomes faint, then forgotten, leaving behind a surface that appears almost detached from its origin. The animal becomes a presence that briefly asserts itself before receding again, leaving the material hovering between the corporeal and the unreachable—yet when the membrane settles, it returns with an echo of skin. Its final form resembles something once alive, as if the material were circling back toward its former identity, unsure of what it has become.  

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In Contemporary Cosmologies, lint is bound into a continuous surface using a hand-crafted bio-membrane made from only gelatin, glycerin, and water. This membrane—mixed, heated, poured, and applied manually—brings together extremes that rarely meet: the biological and the chemical, the industrial residue of contemporary life and the slow, tactile presence of artisanal making. Every step of the process exists in negotiation between systems that define our present: hyper-mechanized production and the intimate intelligence of the hand. The material is shaped slowly, layer by layer, insisting on attention.

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Bringing lint and gelatin into contact is not an attempt to merge their histories but to expose the tension between them. One material arises from communal residue; the other from a lineage of survival transformed into industrial byproduct. Their meeting reveals the friction between ways of living rooted in reciprocity and those shaped by extraction and acceleration. Through this encounter, the materials begin to question each other: What does it mean to carry a trace of community? What does it mean to belong to an industry? What forms of life are remembered, and which are forgotten?

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The resulting surface—neither clothing nor artifact, neither skin nor waste—becomes a site of negotiation. It resists easy categorization and instead asks how meaning emerges in the space between systems. Rather than offering solutions, it holds contradictions in place, allowing the viewer to sense the distance between what materials once signified and what they symbolize today.

Contemporary Cosmologies reflect on how we inhabit the materials that also inhabit us. It invites a reconsideration of care, presence, and responsibility: how the most ordinary residues and the most hidden byproducts might open pathways to reimagining our relationship with each other, with the systems we depend on, and with the matter that quietly gathers the stories of our lived worlds.