The Urban Palimpsest

Danbi Kim

Summary
Final work

Danbi Kim is a textile practitioner from Korea, currently based in London and graduating from the MA Textile Design course at Chelsea College of Arts.

Her practice explores the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. She investigates how textiles can function as soft architecture by evoking sensory experiences and preserving collective memory in urban spaces through material, texture, and spatial composition.

This exploration began with an interest in the body and movement within a fashion context, drawing on her background in BA Fashion Industry, and has since expanded to a broader spatial scale.

Danbi Kim is a textile practitioner from Korea, currently based in London and graduating from the...

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CollegeChelsea College of Arts
CourseMA Textile Design
Graduation year2025

This project explores how textiles can act as soft architecture to preserve collective memory. With an interest in the connection between people and the spaces they live in, especially how personal and collective memories are held within urban environments.

By looking at both Seoul and London, the work reflects on how redevelopment in Seoul has removed local identity and erased layers of memory. It often feels like living on top of someone else’s compressed and lost memories.

The research asks whether textiles can offer a practical and emotional way to keep these memories alive. Using light, layering, and sensory materials, the work aims to create textile-based structures that connect past and present, evoking memory through sensory and spatial experience. These structures hold layered traces of memory, life, and time embedded in everyday spaces, like a palimpsest.