The Expo 2015 exhibition currently on in Milan (until 31st October 2015) is celebrating the theme "Feed the Planet, Energy for Life". But, if you happen to be in the Italian city this weekend and you're looking for interesting events, you have the last chance to visit an exhibition at Palazzo Morando that has some links with the main theme of the Expo (the energy part at least...), but has stronger connections with fashion and art.
The event is entitled "Fashion as Social Energy" and looks at these two disciplines as catalysts for change, while looking at satellite themes including desire, anxiety, needs and obsessions.
Curated by visual arts critic and theorist and President of the Milan-based non-profit research agency Connecting Cultures Anna Detheridge, and art historian and international curator Gabi Scardi, the exhibition features work by thirteen international contemporary artists.
There aren't just garments in the exhibition, but also installations, videos and photographs, with quite a few pieces created especially for this event.
The exhibition opens with Mella Jaarsma's "Pecking Order", a sort of disquieting installation inspired by the hierarchy in the animal world. When it comes to hens, the bird at the top of the pecking order pecks another of lower status, yet something similar also happens in our human society.
Through a chicken skin garment-cum-table, the artist reminds us indeed that we have managed to re-establish boundaries in our society between oppressors and oppressed, letting violence triumph in social relations.
The power of society in fashion is actually explored by various projects: the capsule collection "Vestimi" (Dress me up) by artistic laboratory and workshop Wurmkos in collaboration with Bassa Sartoria was for example created by a group of people including disabled and non-disabled artists and critics.
The collection features a series of objects, paper patterns and clothes that create interactions between body, space and the wearer and other people surrounding him or her. The pieces can indeed be worn during special performances or they can be displayed in a museum-like environment, but the most important point about them is that they are conceived as methods of resistance and "antibodies against fear, uncertainty and prejudice".
In the same way Lucy+Jorge Orta's series "Refuge Wear", originally created to find answers to the economic crisis, the mass unemployment and social unrest in the early '90s, is still extremely relevant in our times. The project - including new pieces designed during a second-hand clothes transformation workshop in collaboration with the Salvation Army - features an architectural dome-like tent made of garments, and a coat with a set of matching suitcases.
Ethnicity and identity prevail in two installations: in Maria Papadimitriou's "Costume of Yorgos Magas", Roma coats and Firma Gypsy Globales - parts of her T.A.M.A. (Temporary Autonomous Museum for All) project - a series of overloaded costumes and accessories such as the outfit of a shaman-clarinet player, cloaks made with coverlets and kitsch and extravagant bracelets and pendants, explore the culture and aesthetics of the Roma people.
Andrea Zittel's hand-made uniforms created following traditional techniques and integrated in a space completed by objects and furnishings, attempt instead to provide answers to everyday questions such as "Who am I?" or "Who do I want to be?".
Architecture, society and mail art meet and combine in Kateřina Šedá's "For Every Dog a Different Master". The artist presents at Palazzo Morando the very final results of a long and complex project that saw her visiting the district of Nova Lisen, near Brno, in the Czech Republic. Here she took the names of the families from the buzzers and then sent a shirt designed by herself to 1,000 or of the 20,000 residents, accompanied by a letter stating it had been sent by another resident.
This process of storytelling became a social experiment to establish relationships between locals. The colourful buildings printed on the shirts add an architectural twist to the urban and social geography of the project.
The event also references and analyses several other topics including consumption and consumerism, the transience of beauty, the fragmentation of communities and relations between individuals, and working conditions in a globalised world.
The most important artist featured in the event remains Michelangelo Pistoletto. A key figure of the Arte Povera movement, Pistoletto showcases in this exhibition his "Venus of the Rags" (the first one was created in 1967). The work consists in an industrial reproduction of Venus, representing a degraded idea of the western canon of beauty, with her face buried in a pile of clothes. The garments could be interpreted as shadows of human existences turned into rags, while the latter turn into physical witnesses to consumerism and the ephemeral nature of beauty.
Swedish cultural theorist and artist Otto von Busch provides us with the best intervention of the entire exhibition. Through uniforms reminiscent of fascist garments, a pamphlet and a series of documents, he imagined the existence of a Fashion Police, a sort of contemporary inquisition led by a cynical dictator - Karl Lagerfeld.
The designer pulls the strings of the fashion world with all its power structures and joyless, reiterated brands, restricting the freedom to imagine, the spontaneity and desire to experiment. Von Busch arrives to claim that democratic fashion is a myth (well, who could argue with that?) and that fashion brands intimidate us to the point that we desire to escape from the freedom to choose and decide for ourselves, finding a new and restrictive escape in a branded existence.
South Korean artist Kimsooja looked instead at the other face of democratisation via images of exploited workers at the world's largest outdoor laundry, the Dhobi Ghat in Mumbai. Here thousands of people are at work in the open air every day dying and treating the fabrics destined to production lines all over the world.
Fans of revealing stories such as the ones told by Kimsooja's images, shouldn't miss Rä Di Martino's film The Show MAS Go On, a documentary/film/musical revolving around the MAS (Magazzini allo Statuto) department stores in Rome.
This cult venue that went from luxury store to market place was at risk of closing down when Di Martino made the film that turns into the surreal visual story of a very real place.
Storytelling is actually another theme of this event: Claudia Losi is among the artists who loves crafting tales. A while back she created a life-size whale made of fabric that travelled the world, then fashion designer Antonio Marras turned the fabrics from the disassembled whale into a series of jackets (Whale Suits, 2010) that were given to new owners selected by the artist.
In this way the fabrics - enriched by the adventures they lived while travelling - became blank canvases for new wearers keen on adding a further layer to the fabrics by telling their own stories.
"Io in testa" by Luigi Coppola and Marzia Migliora portrays instead the results of a social workshop entitled Cantiere comune di immaginario politico (Shared Workshop of Political Imagery) organised in May 2013 at the occupied traditional Roman Theatre, Teatro Valle. Using newspapers, the participants created a series of paper hats of the kind traditionally worn by joiners and bricklayers, to tackle the theme of the manufacturing of information through a performance event.
Visitors who like getting actively involved in exhibitions will love Nasan Tur's project: the artist analysed extreme forms of mobility and self-sufficiency via a series of backpacks characterised by various functions and hinting at the fact that we are living a temporary existence in which "portable" has become the key word.
People can borrow the backpacks and use them for a while before returning them, in this way the artworks become part of the active life of visitors but also of the city and of the wider urban context.
Though rather small compared to the monumental events revolving around fashion organised nowadays in museums, Fashion as Social Energy manages to question collective habits, undermine conventions and generate new visions and possibilities.
Visitors to exhibitions often stop in the museum or gallery shop to grab a souvenir of the event they have just seen. People who will go and see this event will instead leave with one question in their minds: why don't we see such exhibitions about the social, political and financial impacts that fashion is having on our lives more often and in more places in the world? Who knows, maybe, unbeknownst to us, the Fashion Police already exists and is preventing us from doing so...
"Fashion as Social Energy", Palazzo Morando, via Sant'Andrea 6, Milan, Italy, until 30th August 2015.
Image credits for this post
1. Fashion as Social Energy, Exhibition Poster.
2. Mella Jaarsma, "Pecking Order", 2015.
3. Wurmkos and Bassa Sartoria, "Vestimi", performance, Farmacia Wurmkos, 2014. Photography Antonio Maniscalco.
4. Lucy Orta, "Fabulae Romanae - Dome Dwelling Viminale", 2012.
5. Lucy Orta, "Fabulae Romanae Spirit - Traveller", 2012.
6. Maria Papadimitriou, "The Costume of Yorgos Maga". Installation view. DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, Athens. Photo: Matthew Monteith. Courtesy DESTE Foundation Athens.
7. Andrea Zittel, "Rough Furniture; Consumption and Expulsion, Artifacts from David's Back Yard, Joshua Tree California", 2007. Courtesy Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London.
8. Kateřina Šedá, "For Every Dog a Different Master", 2007, © Kateřina Šedá, Courtesy Franco Soffiantino Contemporary Art Productions, UniCredit Art Collection.
9. Michelangelo Pistoletto, "Venere degli Stracci", 1967, Courtesy Città dell'arte, Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella.
10. Otto von Busch, "Fashion Police", logo.
11. Kimsooja, "Mumbai A Laundry Field", Production Still, 2007. Courtesy Galleria Raffaella Cortese.
12. Rä Di Martino, "The Show MAS Go On", HD Video 31', 2013.
13. Claudia Losi, "Balena Project, Letter Jacket, George Hollander, 2012/2015". Photo by Andrea Rossetti.
14. Marzia Migliora and Luigi Coppola, "Io in testa", 2013. Photo Francesco Niccolai. Courtesy of the artist and the Occupied Teatro Valle, Nomas Foundation Roma.
15. - 17. Nasan Tur, "Demonstration-Backpack", 2006; "Cooking‐Backpack", 2006; "Demonstration-Backpack", 2006.
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