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Ivan Hunga Garcia²⁰⁰⁰ is a design practitioner focused on (re)generative processes across speculative fashion and storytelling. Their research-led craftsmanship and critical practice follow two distinct methodologies: Haute Gardening¹ and the Wet Lab². These complementary signatures inform a role of cultivating specimens or xenobiologies rather than designing objects.

If fashion is a multiplier of identity, one also embodies multiple philosophies and states of being that reflect on both individual and collective behaviour. Design is a tool for reflecting on contemporary knowledge as much as for tinkering with the unknown. The latter is the concept of Protopia³, a progressive commitment to materialising, in real time, the change we want to witness in this realm.

See Garcia’s iterations of near-future realms through Bespoke Commissions, Exhibitions and Visual Essays or book an appointment to ideate a new project. — Inquire now

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1; Haute Gardening is about cultivating living cultures as wearable interfaces. This process also interrogates post-anthropocentric relationships through botany processes, positioning garments as symbiotic organisms rather than inert commodities.
This methodology activates into merging horticultural temporality with fashion production through site-specific installations, conceptual wearables and research-driven pieces exploring design futures hypothesis. Pointing to new ways in which we might live in and alongside our clothes as Bio-Couture.

2; Garcia's Wet Lab is where brewing reactions translate into Faux Skins: surfaces that breathe, eat, grow and die according to their relationship with the user and environment. Here, the fashion studio becomes a site of interspecies fabrication, where biological behaviour is the design variable. Each element of the Faux Skins segment is developed through the curing and ongoing research around SCOBYs — Bacterial membranes and bioactive compositions that resist the passivity of physical design objects.

3; Protopia is a concept coined by the futurist and technologist Kevin Kelly (c. 2011, in his writing on technological progress). It describes a state that is neither perfect —Utopic— nor catastrophic —Dystopic— , but one that is better today than yesterday: progress that is incremental, almost invisible, achieved through small improvements slightly outweighing the problems they create.

Biotic Goods, Services and Selected Works