"small bell...on the bracelet, a souvenir from Summer vacations and life on the countryside, proposed to chic Parisians by Ricci"
Eikones magazine, 1962
image courtesy: Saprophytes
everybody's contemporary
The online collective project "everybody's contemporary" is triggered by the "DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION: 1 to 8” exhibition. The exhibition is curated and designed by Nadja Argyropoulou, Adam M.Bandler, Mark Wasiuta and organized by the Deste Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum between June and October 2014.
Encountering the destefashioncollection items and questioning "the tensions, affinities and distance" between art and fashion that the exhibition curatorial has noted, this DIY sartorial project is an open-format, unscripted, collectively authored experimentation.
Each participating member - everyday people with no relation to the specific collection - has a different understanding and experience of art, fashion, style, life and visual culture; The surface they all project onto is that of play, reinvested with its profane vocation, complemented with attention and curiosity.
Within a simple, almost home-like setting, listening to music they prefer through their i-pods and youtube, at their own time and availability, they create humorous mises-en-scène, enact personal scenarios inspired by the item each has chosen; they thus strip the specific fashion collectibles from their market value, study and deactivate them, destabilize their references through unpredictable, humorous mixes and invest them with new experiences, fantasies, concerns.
Foreshadowing but also challenging the upcoming exhibition, this play-based project works like a pseudo curatorial/artistic/collecting research or even a bluff online gazette; it creates odd connecting modalities so as to explore the bleeding edges of art and fashion, test body vocabulary and enjoy the awkwardness of situations where desire is at play but seduction is absent.
Furthermore, it seeks to demonstrate the shape-shifting character of visual culture with its branded realities; the fluidity of identity in today's wired world, where the inherently unstable construction and perception of the self is exceedingly dependent on the Other.
Inhabiting the "DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION: 1 to 8" exhibition, the way that the poet Stéphane Mallarmé inhabited the contemporary fashion journal of the 19th century by publishing his own La Dernière Mode, this project creates a démodé collection of performance vignettes. Made by a peculiar, growing chorus of individuals, the project "everybody's contemporary", plays with fashion intoxication, teases art stereotypes and raises questions on style.
As for the project's (un)timeliness it can only refer to the following:
... So, being in fashion, like contemporariness, entails a certain "ease", a certain quality of being out-of-phase or out-of-date, in which one's relevance includes within itself a small part of what lies outside of itself, a shade of démodé , of being out of fashion. It is in this sense that it was said of an elegant lady in nineteenth century Paris, "Elle est contemporaine de toute le monde", "She is everybody's contemporary".... Giorgio Agamben, "What is the Contemporary" from "What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays", Stanford University Press, 2009
DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION: 1 to 8