Martina Muzi

Young Matters: Expanding on Existing Foundations to Create Alternative Pedagogies

As part of the Woven Secrets program, the week-long Young Matters workshop brought together students from a wide array of disciplines, including engineering, architecture, medicine, and urban planning, to explore interdisciplinary approaches with the help of three tutors representing a diverse array of methodologies, perspectives, and practices. In this interview, Oana Simionescu, Director of the FABER cultural centre, and Martina Muzi, the program’s curator, discuss how Young Matters’ exploratory approach to pedagogy could help bridge the divide between academia and the cultural fabric of Timișoara, as well as the importance of fostering new perspectives among students through creative experimentation.

Martina Muzi

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Timișoara’s Textile History – the Pride of Dressing the West

An article by Raluca Moșescu-Bumbac and Laura-Maria Ilie explores the rise and collapse of Timișoara's socialist-era textile industry through over 20 interviews with former factory workers, including from the soon-to-be-demolished 1 IUNIE knitwear plant. Drawing on workers' testimonies, the piece portrays factory life as a source of pride, professional training, and community—daycare centers, union trips, medical care, and lifelong friendships—complicating the dominant narrative of socialist industry as purely alienating. It closes on the bittersweet image of emigrated former workers vowing to return "if you open it now," capturing both nostalgia for that era and the workforce exodus that followed the industry's collapse.

Woven Secrets – The Multifaceted Processes Behind the Clothing We Wear

Marina Oprea explores how the Woven Secrets exhibition at FABER makes visible the hidden layers of Timișoara's textile industry, moving viewers from familiar, tactile encounters with clothing—like Amalia Săftoiu's knitted cape and Dinu Bodiciu's *Balkan Baroque*—toward deeper questions of waste, labor, and recycling. Oprea traces this progression through works like *Unsolved Patterns* and Alesia Cîdă's *Caution! Rotating Blades*, which demystify factory processes and center the invisible labor of textile workers, alongside *What's Next*'s portraits of UTT mill employees and Lavinia Ghimbășan's wool revival project. The piece closes by framing the exhibition's blend of hard data, communist-era artifacts, and speculative student visions as a layered, comprehensive portrait bridging high fashion and mass production, history and future.

All is Here – The Ethics (Or Lack Thereof) Behind Modern Textile Supply Chains

An article by Philipp Hindahl explores the murky, fragmented afterlife and supply chains of garments, using the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse as a stark reminder of how textile production's interconnectedness is routinely obscured from consumers. Drawing on Vilém Flusser's writing on design ethics, Hindahl traces how moral accountability has become diffuse across globalized, multi-actor supply chains, even as individual consumers increasingly internalize guilt over consumption. The piece grounds these tensions in Timișoara's *Woven Secrets* exhibition, citing Alesia Cîdă's waste-sorting installation, Pleșa and Vișovan's *Unsolved Patterns*, and Lavinia Ghimbășan's wool research as examples of designers grappling with recycling's limits and the fragile promise of shorter, more resilient supply chains.

Woven Secrets: A Curatorial Essay

Martina Muzi presents Woven Secrets, the Design Signals program's exploration of Timișoara's textile legacy, framing design as a lens for examining how technology, labor, and community intersect across the industry's history and its uneasy present under fast fashion. She describes curatorial methods rooted in cross-generational engagement—workshops with former textile workers, oral histories, and collaborations with local factories—that connect the city's industrial past to its evolving identity. Muzi closes by presenting the accompanying book as a repository of this collective research, positioning Woven Secrets not as nostalgia but as a curatorial vision for reimagining a more sustainable textile future.

Young Matters: Exploring Timișoara and Designing its Future

Martina Muzi, Connor Cook, Domitille Debret, and Bianca Schick discuss the Young Matters workshop, part of the Woven Secrets program, where tutors guided Timișoara students through methodologies like city-scanning, letter-writing, and 3D modeling in Blender to reimagine their own civic design ideas. They describe grounding student utopias in real traces of the city—via Google Street View, photography, and site visits—before letting them scale and reconstruct these fragments into speculative proposals. UPT's Cristian Blidariu closes by reflecting on the workshop's lasting impact on curriculum and cross-year collaboration, framing the program as a slow-building but valuable exercise in fostering student curiosity and trust.

Standardised Waste: Designing Ways Forward For The Fashion Industry

An interview with Andreea Ana-Maria Pleșa and Anamaria Mihaela Vișovan explores their project Unsolved Patterns, which develops standardized cutting techniques—reducing textile waste by up to 90%—from leftover fabric scraps at the Cottontex factory. Pleșa and Vișovan detail three cycling jerseys built through progressively experimental methods, alongside a transparent polo shirt and AI-mapped sewing choreography that spotlight the labor and workers behind garment production. They close by framing the project as a foundation for further research, arguing that reducing overproduction and prioritizing quality over quantity remain central to a more sustainable fashion industry.

The Design Shepherd: Towards the Future for Wool

An interview with Lavinia Ghimbășan explores her project Back to Our Sheep, which investigates Romania's declining wool industry not through new products but through the cultural, ecological, and industrial networks surrounding the material. Ghimbășan describes her role as a mediator reconnecting farmers, artisans, and manufacturers across Transylvania, reviving practices like natural dyeing and wool-based fertilizer while confronting the reality of "wool cemeteries" where the material goes to waste. She closes by tying the project to her family history, including her shepherd grandfather, and envisions a future of wool festivals and washing facilities built through collective, bioregional effort.

Proceed With Caution: Recycling Is Not The Answer

An interview with Alesia Cîdă explores her installation Caution! Rotating Blades, which transforms the industrial process of textile shredding into an interactive children's playground built from recycled scraps sourced through collaborations with recyclers Eco Cinix and IMP. Cîdă traces her design practice back to a lifelong habit of collecting discarded materials, and describes weaving family into the project—from her mother helping construct the installation to an interview with her grandmother about pre-consumerist resourcefulness. She closes by arguing that recycling alone can't solve textile waste, insisting that reduced consumption and mindful reuse are the real path forward.