2019

ULRIK MARTIN LARSEN “DRESSING/WEARING”

With a background in fashion design, Ulrik Martin Larsen works at the intersection of fields including choreography, film, photography, and, most of all, research through practice. 
As a part of his PhD thesis entitled “Dressing/Wearing" (2016), he carried out a series of experimental sessions where a body, a piece of cloth (or a garment) and a space are three basic protagonists. Space is actually a rehearsal room, empty but not entirely neutral, and this gives a specific accent to brief black-and-white films that seem to be somewhere between a documentary and an artistic video. 
This space is a “stage” for a set of minimal actions that involve draping, enveloping, or covering the body; actions that allude to the process of making a garment depart from what is the very base, the fundament: the body and the cloth. 
As in a series of slapstick scenes, body and cloth get entangled, twisted, involved with one another so much that they become a shape in the movement, a shape that becomes a space: a sort of “body-space”. 
It is an empirical approach to analysing and studying the potential of the entire living body's movement in the dress-design process. In the background of this experiment lies Ulrik Martin Larsen’s interest in what garments would look like, how they would be constructed, and what would happen if the departure point were to change, no longer a static, standardised bust but a body in movement. 
It is a preparatory and propaedeutic work, which questions the very basis of how and for whom garments are made, and how clothes should follow the body instead of framing and constraining it. Therefore, implicitly, it is also an investigation of what fashion could be or become if foundational, fundamental points of its conceiving and making were to change. 

Ulrik Martin Larsen is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Fashion Design at The Swedish School of Textiles. Since earning his MA in Fashion Design from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Design in 2008, Ulrik has worked across many fields related to fashion and art. Collaborations are central to Ulrik's artistic practice, and this cross-disciplinary and collaborative approach also influenced his PhD thesis "Dressing/Wearing," which was published in 2016. Ulrik is also part of the Swiss/Danish artist duo PUTPUT and has exhibited extensively with both individual and collaborative works.