Camille Brabant is a designer living and working in France. She works mainly with hemp and other plant-based resources to create her sustainable materials and objects. The interests for a social, cultural and scientific approach to design keep on influencing her artistic practice with plants.
What was the inspiration for your Steinbeisser pieces?
I wanted to work on the basics of food, which are also bearers of strong meanings and powerful rituals: bread and water. Bread is like flesh, it embodies the farmer and the bakers’ strength, gestures and sweat, and nourishes others in return. Water is the element that makes it take shape and come to life. The rye weavings came out very naturally as we had sown some at home as a green manure.
Describe your work in 3 words!
Animist. Patient. Autonomous.
What kind of materials do you use and where do you get them from?
The rye came from my garden in the Pyrenees. I also love working with wild resources for my research around vegetal fibers. Otherwise, I usually grow the fibers I use for sampling, and I buy the hemp fibers I use for production from a local cooperative working on rebuilding a hemp textile industry in the southwest of France.
Which conscious lifestyle choices are you making and are you considering any new ones?
I decided to live in a village in a very rural place, I have hens and a garden full of veggies. I am completing my food supply doing my groceries at the market where only local producers sell stuff. I use a desert fridge which I made myself, it is a low tech fridge made out of terra cotta pots and sand. I haven’t taken a plane for years. I cycle and walk whenever I can to avoid the car. So maybe a new choice that would be a bit more sustainable for my inner ecology would be to let go of things and to be more light and spontaneous.
What have you rebelled against in the past and what are you rebelling against now?
Generally speaking, I have difficulty to understand the tendency we humans have to think ourselves superior to all other beings, and to want to have everything at our disposal. I think that’s a real tragedy, and that it is urgent to break out of this way of thinking, and learn to relate to everything around us. That’s why I’m committed to working exclusively with natural materials, and hemp in particular.