In the last few weeks I have neglected the "art" aspect of this blog a bit and haven’t therefore featured a lot of posts on exhibitions about art and fashion. With yesterday’s post, though, I have re-launched the theme, and I hope throughout this week to concentrate only on various exhibition and art events taking place around the world that might be relevant to this blog. One of them is the project entitled “Anyone but me, anywhere but here” by Romanian visual artist Olivia Mihaltianu and Olah Gyarfas, designer of cutting-edge label Rozalb de Mura. 
What struck me about this exhibition - currently on at the Contemporary Art Gallery of the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, Romania - is the fact that it starts from a missing scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’eclisse (The Eclipse). The inspiration for the film came to the Italian director while he was filming a sun eclipse in Florence in 1961. Struck by the sudden cold, the silences, the darkness and the total stillness surrounding him, Antonioni thought that perhaps during an eclipse also human feelings suddenly freeze and are in a way “eclipsed”. 
In the film a young woman, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), splits up from her boyfriend Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), an intellectual. She later on meets a stockbroker, Piero (Alain Delon), but this new love affair is doomed to finish soon. There is also a fashion link in this film. I have explored the connection between Antonioni’s films and fashion in a previous post, but haven't yet focused on L'eclisse.
The costumes featured in this film (by costume designers Bice Brichetto and Gitt Magrini) assume a more important role than in La Notte (The Night) as they are often used as symbols. To symbolise the fact that Vittoria is a static character who never changes throughout the film, she always wears the same boatneck tunic tops with matching skirts. 
Her smart but simple and often monochromatic look, fits her bored state of mind while the colours of the dresses hint at the dramas she’s living: she wears a black dress when she’s splitting up from Riccardo, a white one during her brief love affair with Piero, a print dress when she finds herself surrounded by the chaos of the Stock Exchange. Vittoria’s style and the geometrical cut of her dresses also match the background and the modern and urban architecture of the buildings of the EUR area in Rome. The style of this film is more fragmented than La Notte and L’avventura (The Adventure) and, since the characters find impossible to communicate between themselves, words and dialogues in L’eclisse are almost used as a commentary to the images. 
The alienation and isolation of L’eclisse are just starting points for Mihaltianu and Gyarfas’ exhibition, they are indeed used as ways to explore the relationship between past and present and to analyse identity issues. 
The exhibition space is indeed filled with two rails of clothes designed by Gyarfas, by colonialist pieces of furniture and wooden crates and by Mihaltianu’s cases that contain meticulously folded garments, perfume bottles and personal accessories and magazines. 
While exploring issues of cultural identity and parallel lives, Mihaltianu’s personal belongings hint at social alienation as they are exhibited in a rather cold way, almost with the accuracy of a scientist, as curator Anca Mihulet states. 
Gyarfas’s creations represent the shells left by discarded human bodies, and are also symbols of the designer's attempt to create alternative and conceptual designs and not just simple garments.
I must admit that the more I get to know the Rozalb de Mura label, the more I like its approach to fashion and the fact that its founders actually conceive it as a multi-disciplinary platform that encourages new collaborations between fashion designers, visual artists, musicians and writers. 
After Antonioni’s L’eclisse was released some critics saw in it an important message to human beings: rebel to the "eclipse" of feelings that overwhelms and destroys human relationships or you will end up living in a cold and dumb reality. Rozalb de Mura’s message is somehow similar, it’s indeed a call to all the young and talented minds out there to establish a stimulating and innovative environment that encourages the creative development.
(Special thanks to Dragos Olea for sending me the images for this post.)
“Anyone but me, anywhere but here”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Brukenthal National Museum, 6 Str. Tribunei, Sibiu, Romania, until 9th November 2008.
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