Xylinum Mask

A Speculative Compostable Mask Grown of Bacterial Cellulose

Hosted by Sum Studio

This project is now archived and was part of DDW21

Event type

Exhibition

Location

Strijp T+R

BioArt Laboratories

Oirschotsedijk 14-10

5651 GC

Xylinum Mask by Sum Studio

Xylinum Mask was created during a worldwide PPE shortage. As individuals fashioned makeshift masks from t shirts, entire companies transformed assembly lines to produce them from their own stock fabrics. Sum Studio wondered if we could instead grow our masks.

Xylinum Mask Asks for Biomanufacturing to Become the Norm

Existing melt blown fabric masks like N95s and Surgicals are produced by a relatively small number of fragile machines. Expensive and time consuming to build and start up, this small number of available machines contributed to a bottleneck in the PPE material stream, and consequently in a shortage that could not keep up with demand. What role did this reliance on a heat/beat/treat fossil fuel manufacturing stream play in our own risk to biological threats like COVID-19? By producing a Xylinum Mask in a home kitchen during the COVID lockdown, Sum Studio speculated on whether this bottleneck would have occurred at all had biomanufacturing been invested in and scaled years earlier.

Xylinum Mask by Sum Studio

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Hosted by

Sum Studio
info@sum.design
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About Sum Studio

Sum Studio is a research and design collective that is working toward a world where materials have a pulse, where waste is a vestige, and where equity is a cultivated reiterative practice. Our projects investigate what our buildings, materials, and systems will look like in this new era.