EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART

2019

DOBRILA DENEGRI: “TRANSFASHIONAL” IS A SEMANTIC OPERATION CONVEYED THROUGH THE EXHIBITION'S FORMAT

How can fashion and art reflect current environmental, social, cultural and economic issues, helping to outline new paradigmatic models? The answer to this question is “Transfashional”, a research project conceived and curated by Dobrila Denegri, which has reached its end with an exhibition in the Modern Wing of the Rimini City Museum, open until January 2020.
The project was developed in collaboration with the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the University of London - London College of Fashion, the University of Borås - Swedish School of Textiles, the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the Faculty of Design and the University of Bologna, Department of Quality of Life Sciences, international master's degree course in Fashion Studies - has travelled across Europe and involved numerous international designers and theorists. In addition to being a diverse research platform, “Transfashional” is a fascinating journey to discover the middle ground between Art and Fashion, made up of research that subverts the rules and offers a cross-cutting interpretation of the present, never banal and always proactively projected into the future.

Pia Lauro: “Transfashional” involved many international institutions and designers, and saw the creation of five exhibitions in London, Warsaw, Vienna, Kalmar and Rimini, where the University of Bologna Campus is located. How did the idea come about?

Dobrila Denegri: After five years at the helm of a complex museum-type institution, Centre of Contemporary Art, located in Torun and in a country undergoing great cultural ferment, as Poland was a few years ago, in 2016, I was invited to collaborate with the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and their cultural cooperation programme.
“Transfashional” began as a research platform focused on developing exhibitions and workshops and on investigating the semantic resonances that experimental fashion can take on when presented in the context of contemporary art institutions.
In practice, we involved big names such as Hussein Chalayan and curators such as José Teunissen and Susanne Neuburger. Still, above all, I focused on a group of emerging young creatives working on the cusp between fashion and other disciplines, such as art, design, architecture, graphic design and performance.

PL: What does the term “Transfashional” mean?

DD: “Transfashional” is a term I invented that seemed ideal for framing a research process that would involve various creative people and could go in any direction.
“Transfashional” could mean anything.
It is what Claude Lévi-Strauss called a floating signifier, i.e. a term with no fixed meaning and therefore suitable for being loaded with any meaning.
Our “mission” was to articulate this meaning. Initially, “Transfashional” referred to the contamination between languages; then I became intrigued by the lack of categories and linguistic tools. Consequently, the goal became to discuss these creative practices appropriately, which convey a great deal of engaging content and express strong criticism of the fashion system, its principles of excess, the acceleration of production and consumption rhythms, and the related lack of consideration for the environmental impact this industry causes.

PL: Some of the works on display refer to clothes or jewellery that are impossible to wear. What is the underlying reflection on the body and its role in the present day?

DD: In the video “Guardaroba Impossibile” (Impossible Wardrobe), Lara Torres confronts us with a process of actual dissolution of clothing, which occurs in an almost alchemical manner. Upon contact with water, the dress begins to disappear, leaving the body still “dressed” in traces, namely the seams that remain as remnants of the garment.
While on the one hand this brought to mind the art of the 1960s, from Gustav Metzger to Lucy Lippard and her famous essay on the dematerialisation of art, on the other hand it also made me reflect on the fact that this is not just about disappearance, but also about the creation of something unique and irreproducible, as the result of a random process beyond the author's control.
In an age of easy, accelerated (re)production of almost everything, revisiting the theme of uniqueness seemed particularly interesting to me: it invites reflection on values. Even the “accessories” made of ice or the mappings of the negative space between the body parts of Naomi Filmer or Kate Langrish Smith lead us to reflect on values, asking: to what do we attribute value today?

PL: The exhibition also features research on fabrics, precious materials that draw on nature as their main point of reference. How do the artists in the exhibition address the themes of nature and eco-sustainability?

DD: Aliki van der Kruijs emerged a few years ago with a very poetic project called “Made by Rain”. She literally “prints” rain on fabrics, “capturing” the drops that dissolve the colour as they fall, creating patterns. We are faced with something that involves randomness, uniqueness, and a series of interesting implications, ranging from art history to today's considerations of the climate emergency.
Randomness has a long tradition in modern art, and in many works, causality and the authors' deliberate lack of control play an important role.
Christina Dörfler Raab treats her fabrics with materials found in every kitchen (water, flour, salt, bleach, etc.) and creates colour effects that are impossible to replicate. “Transfashional”, through fabrics, materials and clothes, has sought to capture a wide variety of metaphors to reflect on contemporary life and its urgencies, ranging from climate to technocracy. At the same time, it has sought to address these complex issues in a way that bypasses the proverbial hermetic nature of contemporary art languages.
It was interesting to see how a large young audience approached these exhibitions and the works on display. From a communication point of view, fashion has great potential and a great responsibility.

PL: Completing “Transfahional”'s research landscape, there are works that investigate the role of technology and mechanics, both analogue and digital. How do these works fit into the exhibition project?

DD: Many, almost all of the project participants, trained as stylists, fashion or accessory designers, but then their creative streak prevailed, and their research took this hybrid path, which is still seeking its own platform and context.
But their references are very clear and include art, art theory and design theory.
Positions such as those anticipated by Victor J. Papanek and Richard Buckminster Fuller, who contributed to the formation of “social design”, are crucial here, as are those of younger designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, authors of “Speculative Everything”, or Robert Stadler, co-author of “Things as Ideas”.
This whole strand, which originated in product design, is now entering the realm of fashion. On display, the strange “useless machines” created by product design professors Robert Pludra, Wojciech Małolepszy and their students play precisely on the centrality of the human figure, the centrality of the individual, the centrality of the body.

PL: Accompanying the Rimini stage of the project is the rich publication “Transfashional - Post/Inter/Disciplinary Lexicon”, which includes the section “Tentative Lexicon”.
Many terms are explored in depth, including the concept of “co-creation”.
Why is this term so central to research such as that conducted by “Transfahional”?

DD: For me, the term “co-creation” is very important.
This entire project is a form of “co-creation” in which we have all tried to create something from nothing. It is a semantic operation conveyed through the exhibition's format. It should be remembered that the term ‘co-creation’ has its own specific history in Scandinavian design in the 1960s and 1970s, and, together with the term ‘co-design’, it is increasingly used today across various fields. In this specific context of “Transfashional”, we linked up with another prominent figure, Lucy Orta, who studied fashion before becoming an internationally acclaimed artist and working in partnership with her partner, Jorge. Lucy's first project in the early 1990s was entitled “Co-creation” and anticipated everything that is now mainstream in the fashion system: recycling, sustainability, inclusion and ethics.