GRONDSTOF
The Language of Waste: How GRONDSTOF Reimagines Discarded Matter as Raw Material
The Belgian architectural studio Dertien12 approached me to create a tablecloth that would serve as the centrepoint for bringing strangers together over shared meals, while activating neglected spaces throughout Bruges, buildings that stand mostly empty or are closed to the public. Wasted spaces.
Their vision extended to the material language of these communal dinners: they wanted to work with abandoned objects, such as glasses and cutlery from stock that wasn’t sold in second-hand shops and would otherwise end up being disposed of. They spoke about the GRONDSTOF of our city, Dutch for “raw material”, the treasures right in front of us that we overlook in our search for something new.
"Hope" recurred throughout our exchange. The hope that emerges when you retrieve what has been abandoned. When you choose to see possibility in the discarded. It became a material investigation into creating quality purely from waste, each of us pushing the other's thinking further.
Their concept sparked an avalanche of ideas in my mind. As we talked about waste and abandonment and the raw materials of our immediate surroundings, I found myself thinking about the word for waste in my native language Danish, affald.
Before the Industrial Revolution, it described something simple and cyclical: leaves that had fallen from trees. But post-industrialization transformed its meaning entirely. What once signified something that contributed to the fundamental cycle of life became something perceived as useless.
Words matter. The way we describe the world shapes how we move and act within it. The dictionary itself became an instrument of alienation, encoding a breach between human production and natural cycles. We no longer participate in regeneration -we only consume.
And there it was: the connection between Dertien12's proposal and this linguistic history I'd been carrying. If affald once meant fallen leaves, and if we were working with the GRONDSTOF of our city, then I should use plant material, actual fallen leaves and garden waste from Bruges, to dye the tablecloth they'd commissioned. It felt like a perfect meeting of minds, their architectural thinking about place and abandonment converged with my existing commitment to working with natural materials. This is what becomes possible when different fields and perspectives come together and find common ground: ideas that neither party could have reached alone.
Belgian linen was the obvious choice, not only because Bruges, this UNESCO World Heritage city where we live and work, has deep historical roots in linen production, but because linen remains among the most durable and sustainable fabrics available.
Flax cultivation requires significantly less water than cotton, and linen has sustained European textile production for millennia. This is not nostalgia. This is recognition that durability is a moral category.
Instead of coloring the fabric with synthetic chemicals made in some distant factory, I used the green matter of this place, this soil, this season.
The plants that colored the cloth also determined its form and design. The nine-meter length of deadstock Belgian linen was shaped into an enormous leaf, letting the material itself suggest its final form. More than 25 kilograms of plant material, all local garden waste, and over 300 hours of dyeing and hand embroidery transformed the discarded into something deliberately beautiful. The experiment continued beyond the tablecloth itself. I reused the leaf shape for table decorations, crafting them from twigs left over from the dyeing process and from fabric scraps cut away to form the cloth. Nothing was discarded.
Foto by: De Republiek © Femke den Hollander
I'd like you to think about what conversations become possible when we sit together at a table that confesses its origin. When we drink from glasses that have already lived other lives. When the cloth beneath our hands smells of the soil we daily live on.
Perhaps then we might remember that we too are made of borrowed grondstof. That we too one day will fall. That disposal is a fiction we tell ourselves to avoid confronting our inevitable participation in the vast cycle of life.
This is not recycling.
This is resurrection as foundation.
This is where we begin again.
Foto by: De Republiek © Femke den Hollander
GRONDSTOF is initiated by Dertien12. For more information visit: www.dertien12.be/projecten/grondstof
Textile is the only material that accompany us from the day we are born until the day we pass away, yet most people know almost nothing about where it comes from, how it is made, what it's made from, who made it, or what impact it has on the natural world. Through this project, we removed some of these barriers, creating transparency between maker and material, between the eater and the table, between the city and its disregarded but valuable GRONDSTOF. This project began where industrial logic ends, in the soil beneath our feet. The grondstof of our lives lived in our city.
The first communal dinner took place in a church I can see from my atelier window, initiated by Dertien12, whose office I can reach in two minutes on foot. The twenty-four ceramic plates completing the setting, was handmade just outside Bruges by ceramists Atelier Arena. Local instead of global.