12th - 16th of May 2015
17th annual conference of IFFTI - International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutes
“MOMENTING THE MEMENTO”
Polimoda, Florence 

At the end of Linda Loppa's tenure as director, Polimoda organised an international conference that, according to Linda’s vision, became a vibrant and multifaceted event: an academic conference, a set of exhibitive and performative events, a moment of collective brainstorming and generally, a statement about how fashion education can be rethought and redesigned. 

I collaborated with Linda on the talk sessions “In Conversation With” that took place in the Odeon Cinema, as well as on other curatorial aspects, which led to the realisation of the entire event. 

It all began much earlier. In 2012, there was a gathering called “SALON” organised by Linda, which I attended alongside Barbara Vinken, Filep Motwary, Stefan Siegel, Danilo Venturi, Alberto Salvadori, and several other panellists. 
Then, between 2014 and 2015, we began to meet more often with Linda, to envision how an academic conference could become a way to re-evoke the Florentine Fashion Biennial organised by Germano Celant, Ingrid Sischy, Franca Sozzani, and Luigi Settembrini in 1996/97. The twentieth anniversary of that great event, a real milestone for the history of fashion curating, would be a year later, in 2016, and we were totally aware of that. 
Danilo Venturi wrote an essay titled “Momenting the Memento”, which provided a conceptual spark and also served as the title for the entire event.
Linda formed a small group, inviting Francesca Tacconi from Pitti Immagine, Alberto Salvadori from Marino Marini Museum, me, and a few more collaborators to serve as a jury and review the applications. We were gathering in a small room behind Linda’s office that gradually became our “dream” space. Walls were covered with images, prints from portfolios, various visual references, and keywords BODY | SPACE | DRESS | IMAGERY | CALLIGRAPHY | CRAFT that were pivotal to the curatorial and conceptual framework Linda had in mind.

This collaboration with Linda inspired a concept for a research and workshop-driven didactic methodology that I termed “transfashional”. We did not manage to develop it within Polimoda, but one year later, I initiated a project with the same title, which led me to explore deeper fashion-related art forms that I had always found inspiring and captivating.

2015

EDUCATIONAL TURN

Well-known English educationalist Ken Robertson pointed out on various occasions: ‘As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. Then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. So, our educational systems are designed to develop analytical, left-hemisphere intelligence at the expense of developing (or even valuing) a person’s emotional, physical, social and creative intelligence. 
Rooted in the models of society which evolved out of the nineteenth century's industrial revolution, these educational systems are totally outdated. 
They don't correspond to what present-day society demands. In this sense, 
Dr. Nick Udall's words are enlightening: ‘there are very few jobs-for-life these days; and what we are taught in our first year of university can be out of date by the time we graduate’.

Educational systems needed today should be ‘teaching us how to know ourselves (our talents, passions, dreams, hopes and fears); how to be curious, hungry learners; how to see beauty in diversity; how to develop multiple ways of knowing; how to appreciate our interconnectedness and interdependences; how to work with creative tension and how to explore new and novel intersections’ between different domains of knowledge and different productive procedures.

Educational models should go along with this major paradigmatic shift called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” which we are facing right now, but they still seem to be stuck in the past. “Educational Turn” has been evoked for more than a decade, but very few actual changes have been really introduced. The entire system and institutions which propel it shouldn't be reformed, but rethought from scratch. 

That’s exactly what Christine Ortiz, professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposes to do with her adventurous and challenging call to establish a new type of university. Her starting point is a simple question: 
“What if you could start a university from scratch for today’s needs and with today’s technology?” And a partly formulated answer is that it should be a university without lessons or classrooms. 
In Ms. Ortiz’s words, it should be a set of “huge project spaces. Large centralised laboratories. Basically, just large, large open spaces, as well as big centralised laboratories where no one really has their own individual laboratory. So it’s just one integrated giant laboratory. 
And that goes with the research model that there would be no departments; it would just be transdisciplinary.” Most of all, it should be a nonprofit institution so that “all of the revenue can be reinvested in the enterprise to serve the public.”

This challenging call comes from the science side, but there is no reason why it shouldn't be embraced and carried on by the humanities and arts (fashion included). 
In fact, in one recent discussion with Rector of Vienna’s Academy of Applied Arts,  Dr. Gerald Bast, I got to know of his eagerness to initiate and implement a similar format of transdisciplinary-oriented platform in the heart of the Viennese university.  
What is emerging through these two examples is a growing need to shape new models able to perform radical change of paradigms not only in the sphere of education, but also in the industry and society at large. 
The possibility to tap into diverse visions, knowledge and sensibilities that IFFTI provided me with was the occasion to probe and search for concepts, ideas, and guidelines of these new paradigms on which our future should be shaped. 

Thus, I posed three simple questions to many of the participants that I had the chance to interview, and in some of their answers, we can trace keywords of the glossary of the future, which is not limited only to the fashion world, but to society in its entirety. 

Published in “Moments: Momenting the Memento”, edited by Linda Loppa, Skira, Milan, 2016

GLOSSARY

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