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, myself, 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, which gradually became our “dream” place. Walls were covered with images, prints from portfolios, various visual references, and keywords BODY | SPACE | DRESS | IMAGERY | CALLIGRAPHY | CRAFT that were central to the curatorial and conceptual framework Linda envisioned.

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

BODY - SPACE - CALLIGRAPHY - IMAGERY - CRAFT - DRESS

Body
Recently, I read a statement by a young designer, Martin Maldonado, saying that “the human body is the most interesting canvas to show the development of fashion design”. Indeed, seen through the lenses of fashion, the body appears as an ideal raw canvas to be covered with endless combinations and re-combinations of colours and shapes. But here, within the event “MOMENTING THE MEMENTO”, we are invited to multiply our lenses and go beyond fashion… merge it with art, architecture, film, music, dance and any other expressive media which can be used in order to articulate new positions and visions. Thus ‘body’ here is seen not just as a backdrop on which to project; it is seen as an instrument – a most extraordinary and unique instrument – that we have, to get to know our inner and outer world. The Body is a threshold; it is a receiver and a parameter. This is what the research of some of the “visionaries” and participants of “MOMENTING THE MEMENTO” seems to imply.
“The body is our hardware - senses are our software”, affirms Sissel Tolaas. Senses serve as our navigators. All are essential, but some appear more important than others. But must it be this way? Do we need to depend so heavily on sight and keep inventing, constructing, and building all kinds of “prostheses” that help us see further, deeper, or in more detail? With the Hubble telescope, we try to “see” outer space and “size up” the universe… with STM (a scanning tunnelling microscope), we attempt to penetrate molecules and atoms and uncover the internal structure of matter. But if we could enhance perception through other senses, just as we have refined eyesight - how would we see or sense the world? Would our behaviour change? Would our methods of communication remain the same? Would we produce different types of art or fashion? 
Sissel Tolaas attempts to spark our curiosity by challenging us to focus on one of the least developed senses - smell. She urges us to break through all cultural taboos associated with this sense and move beyond a simple dualism of pleasant and unpleasant smells. She helps us understand how much more there is still to explore, develop, and enhance in our knowledge and in our most valuable instrument for gaining understanding - the body.  

Space
If the body is the point of departure, the second stage is space. Space is seen as that thin, foldable layer that surrounds and envelops the body that we call clothes, or space is seen as that structured, un-foldable layer that we build around ourselves that we call architecture. Either of them, clothes or buildings, is a shelter, and they are bound in a kind of indissoluble and interdependent relationship, just like skin and bones are. 
If we look at some of the experimental work carried out by Clemens Thornquist, we get caught up in the notion of space elaborated in anthropometric terms. Thornquist brings us back to the moment in time when a “man was seen as a measure of all things”; he takes us back to the Renaissance, and from there he leads us on towards Le Corbusier’s “Modulor” and some other high moments of early Modernism. From there, he puts us on the doorstep of the future in which we will have to rethink the way we conceive/construct the spaces that we will inhabit, be it clothes or other forms of shelters. Either way, he seems to imply, they will have to deal with the human body as a main parameter, and with its movement and mobility. 
But in order to rethink ways in which it will be possible to redefine or newly envisage fashion in the imminent future, it is necessary to ask ourselves about the question of tools, starting with the basic one: language. Writing and learning about certain new forms of fashion, or at least about those fashion-related practices that seek a dialogue with art, film, dance, or any other type of expressive (or scientific) approach, seems to lack an adequate vocabulary. This brings us to the third step: calligraphy. 

Calligraphy 
Just like “Body”, “Space” and other key terms chosen to carry and sustain the thematic structure of “MOMENTING THE MEMENTO”, calligraphy also has an evocative value. It aims to allude to the necessity of attentive writing, be it about subjects such as fashion or any other creative discipline. Moreover, it aims to underline the need for an expanded frame of cultural references, for the introduction of sophisticated arguments and the need for brand-new linguistic forms that will be applied to the new forms of fashion creation. Thus, a number of “visionaries” have been asked to join forces: Sissel Tolaas for her ability to create an innovative lexicon, such as “nasalo” - a language of smells; Ou Ning for his sketching and annotating a new social/communal “vocabulary”’; Clemens Thornquist for his selective approach to the terminology to be used within the fashion design practice, which bans terms such as “collection’ or 'inspiration’; Danilo Venturi, inventor of the title, “MOMENTING THE MEMENTO”, for his ability to create a writing-style based on the fusion of Baroque and Dadaism, and finally Tim Blanks, one of the most intellectually refined authors and commentators of the fashion world. 
Thus, calligraphy as a thematic nucleus stands for a collective effort to build a vocabulary which will be able to define the future of fashion and describe fashion for the future. 
But, on the other hand, we know that fashion belongs to the domain of the visual, and it communicates through non-verbal forms, or forms that are able to convey stories, fantasies, desires and emotions through much more complex, as well as more interpretive language: the language of images. 

Imagery
The World Wide Web produced new forms of visibility. Immediate accessibility of visual contents determined different forms of fashion presentations, starting from hyper-spectacularised fashion shows up to super-sophisticated fashion films and other digital formats. In little more than a decade, our entire visual universe changed, as did the way we are consuming it, thanks to the digital revolution, which seems to be just starting. And, as already happened in the past, each technological shift causes other tectonic movements: a change in production processes is followed by changes in interpersonal and collective forms of interaction. The feeling is ‘in the air’ that we are on the doorstep of that kind of tectonic movement that will inevitably cause the emergence of something and the submergence of something else. Now we can witness the emergence of creative practices based on the encounter between different domains of knowledge and different production procedures. Boundaries between art / fashion / film / music / dance or any other discipline are getting more and more imperceptible, and these new productions and creations are occupying territories which also start resembling each other more and more: a museum becomes like a theatre, a theatre like a cinema, a cinema like a webpage, a webpage like a market… And all of this makes us question, not just sources of creativity and our capacity for creating “new” imagery, but also the destinations of these new forms of creation, which inevitably need to reach new audiences and capture their imaginations. 

Craft
When thinking of future imageries or visions, be they mental or digital pictures, the question inevitably arises of materiality, and the possibility of transforming and translating these pictures into something material and sensually perceptible. When we start thinking about diffusion and dispersion, such as can be achieved now in the digitally connected globalised world, the question of uniqueness and preciousness inevitably arises. This might be the frame within which we should address the question of craftsmanship, understood as a capacity to materially create something, produce something which will still maintain an aura of particularity, exclusiveness, and individuality. Thus, craftsmanship can be seen today as a synonym for the most sophisticated techno-scientific procedures, as well as for very rare craftsmanship and skills. Most of all, craftsmanship can become a synonym for collaboration, exchange and cross-pollination, which can occur between young creative minds and artisans or high-tech companies who have know-how that is either ancient or avant-garde, but equally hungry for new concepts of form and function. 
It is no accident that someone like Stefan Siegel, founder of a digital platform which gives visibility to thousands of young designers all over the globe, speaks of new forms of luxury, which will be personalised and unique, just because they are created somewhere at the intersection between visionary ideas and traditional dying-out crafts. It is again no accident that artists and activists like the Chinese Ou Ning seek to create an “oasis” in which not only will practising all kinds of arts be possible, but also an encounter with ancestral knowledge and skills will be facilitated. 

Dress
Within the thematic structure of “MOMENTING THE MEMENTO”, dress is also a metaphor. It does not stand just for something to wear; it symbolises the unity of all the elements listed above: body, space, calligraphy, imagery and craft. In that sense, it symbolises the complexity and multilayered-ness of fashion, and it has a strong impact on both the individual and collective levels. Thus, rather than asking “What is fashion?”, it seeks to question what it can become if it goes deeper into cross-disciplinary research. But even more, it reminds us that now, more than ever before, creating something new is not only a conceptual or stylistic problem. It is not only a question of “What” but also a question of “How”: by which means and through what kind of production processes. 
To use a denomination introduced in the ‘80s by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer, we are living in the “Anthropocene”, a period in which the impact of human activity is so predominant that it has drastically changed the Earth's ecosystems. 
Bearing this in mind, any creative process should aim to produce not just objects, but awareness and, in particular, awareness that we are all interdependent, and we are all part of a bigger body: the body of a planet.

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