Riekje Marie Paruschke

Furniture today often appears detached from the landscapes and bodies that bring it into being. A flat-packed table arrives as a discrete object in a box, its lively origins compressed into the smooth surfaces of standardised materials. Behind this apparent simplicity lie monoculture forests, intensive extraction, global transportation networks, and synthetic binders that affect both human and non-human ‘critters’. As the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion accelerate, I became interested in how furniture as a static commodity might be rethought as something vital that grows within ecological relationships. 

Rerooting Forward is a series of fully biodegradable furniture pieces grown from locally sourced forest residues and fungal mycelium. Developed from leaves, branches, and wood chips collected in collaboration with municipal maintenance services and landscape companies in The Hague, the furniture is born from materials typically regarded as ‘waste’. The slow agency of fungal life grows through their fibres, rooting them into new material bodies that can return to the soil at the end of their life. Each carries traces of the landscape they emerged from and the conditions under which they materialised; no two grow in exactly the same way. While many contemporary furnishings are destined for short lives and easy replacement, the synthetic adhesives that bind them together deny them a proper burial. Unable to return to the soil or participate in ongoing ecological cycles, they remain as lingering residues rather than becoming part of new forms of life. This project instead understands decay differently: as a continuation of the furniture’s material lifecycle, allowing them to re-enter the environments from which they emerged. 

The installation situates furniture prototypes as if emerging directly from the ground within a forest-like landscape that resists stable reading, oscillating between signs of life and decay. Mimicking the geometry of fast-furniture objects, it stages perception as a process of recognition and destabilisation, where familiar forms are first encountered as legible objects before shifting into relations between organism, material, and landscape. These forms interrupt assumptions about what furniture could be made from. 

The project proposes furniture as a lens through which we might reroot our connection to more-than-human agencies, embedding ourselves more consciously within ecological cycles in times of climate catastrophe. A table is not simply a finite commodity, but a temporary moment of stabilisation within long chains of growth, extraction, decay, and transformation. 

This approach shifts making from extraction toward care. It requires sustained attention to humidity, temperature, decomposition, and the agency of living matter. Rather than imposing control over materials, the project works with their inherent tendencies and transformations. Design becomes an ongoing negotiation with ecological processes, challenging supposed separations between nature, culture, and technology, and positioning furniture within shared material ecologies rather than outside of them. 

Conversations with municipal forest management in The Hague and tree specialists further grounded this work in local ecological infrastructures and maintenance practices. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s notions of response-ability, composting and making kin, the project approaches sustainability not as a singular solution but as an ongoing practice of care within more-than-human worlds. It engages storytelling as a method of situated learning, where furniture allows ecological relations to be experienced directly rather than reduced to abstract measurement. In the longer term, I am interested in how such processes could open up shared making practices, where local actors engage with material streams through situated, collective forms of care and attention.