The fragment is an indication, a clue. A detail that can be interpreted in many ways, each able to trigger a different creative process. In William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, the “coolhunter” Cayce Pollard, a solitary heroine always on the move from one continent to another, is struck by a series of film clips distributed, one fragment at a time, on the internet.

No one knows who made the clips, where they were shot or what is the purpose of this strange visual puzzle. Thousands of people all over the world begin to collect the parts, assigning them different meanings. These scraps of narrative have such a power of fascination and emotional intensity that people become addicted to them. The story calls to mind a novel by another cult science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, in which the I Ching is used to guide the actions of some of the characters with its texts, obscure fragments whose meaning changes in relation to the expectations of each reader and the moment in which they are read.

Memory and prophecy. Fragments spark off narrations on different temporal and spatial planes, and this is even truer in our own day, a time in which fragmentation is the condition that characterizes the comprehension and interiorization of the world, or our attempts to do so.

However, this issue of Dune also looks at some practices of the fragment that are paradigmatic of cultural conditions of the past. This is what happens with the essay by Gianbattista Contini devoted to Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Un weekend postmoderno. The article explores the beauty and brazen character of the collages commissioned from Juan Gatti by the writer as illustrations for the novel, taking us back to that outrageous mix of styles and references typical of the eighties, and at the same time it delves into the Italian culture of that decade and the relationship between ideologies and heteronormativity, queerness and subversion. Subversion, or rather squatting, was a concept dear to Anna Piaggi, who used the term to define her way of “making images”. Piaggi’s combinatorial and almost mathematical practice as an image maker is the focus of analysis by Caterina Cristina Fiorentino, who examines its linguistic code and considers it as a curatorial approach in which the fragment is the whole and vice versa.

Ricarda Bigolin uses details of clothing to tell stories of illegality and resistance, outside the fashion system. The biography of objects is read through their adaptation to situations of necessity: thus “wrong” fragments help us to discover the negation of the mass identity of items of clothing and. their targeted personalization. If for Bigolin the fragment is the hint that sows the seeds of doubt and prompts us to investigate more deeply, for Ellen Sampson it is the glaringly obvious material expression of doubt, a useful starting point for understanding and speculation. The essay is based on her project “The Afterlives of Clothes” and asks fragments to tell an alternative story of fashion.

As indication and solution, the fragment necessarily assumes a political dimension. Fragmentation is the condition that Sebastiano Fabbrini identifies in the planning processes supported by funding from the European Union. Shifting the attention to South America, Elizabeth Kutesko reflects instead on national identity and, starting out from the documentary value of a single photograph taken by Claude Lévi-Strauss, questions the definition of fashion as a geographically situated phenomenon, proposing on the contrary a transnational and decentralized interpretation.

The conversation conducted on a curatorial principle by Rafael Kouto and Giada Olivotto, bringing in other people’s voices, constitutes an investigation that, starting out from the worlds of fashion and art, identifies the fragmentation of identity as our contemporary condition, and sees the realization of this fact as a necessary act of liberation and one that is potentially capable of demolishing the assumptions of conflicts founded on discrimination.

The contributions that, in whole or in part, visually illustrate further notions of the fragment have been conceived specifically for this issue of Dune and made up graphically by Luca Trevisani and Garbage Core. Trevisani presents, both in words and in visual form, his own research into the fossil, in an exercise in writing that maps images of different origin and reactivates them within his own discourse. “Garbage Studio Visit,” a series of photos that are the fruit of a collaboration between Giuditta Tanzi, founder of the brand/project Garbage Core, Giovanni and Gregorio Nordio and Alessia Gunawan, shows how the fragment is an integral part of research in and on fashion.

This issue of Dune is dedicated to Pier Vittorio Tondelli, in the year in which we commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his death. His writings have left a decisive mark on contemporary culture and still have a strong resonance for us all.

Thanks to:

Aldo Aymonino, Laura Casagrande,

Fernanda De Maio, Alberto Ferlenga,

Laura Fregolent, Mario Lupano,

Laura Mariano, Monica Martignon

Gianbattista Contini graduated in History of the Medieval Miniature at Parma and took a Ph.D. at the University of Siena, specializing in the history of the decorative arts in the modern era. He holds the post of conservator at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia and teaches History of the Applied Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Verona.

gianbattista.contini@gmail.com

Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia - Accademia di Belle Arti in Verona

Sebastiano Fabbrini is a Postodoctoral Fellow at the Università Iuav di Venezia, where he conducts the research project The Architecture of European Integration. He holds a PhD in architecture from the University of California Los Angeles, where he also worked as a Teaching Fellow. He is the author of the book The State of Architecture: Aldo Rossi and the Tools of Internationalization and has published in a multitude of journals, including Thresholds, Ardeth and Architectural Histories.

sfabbrini@iuav.it

Università Iuav di Venezia

Caterina Cristina Fiorentino is associate professor at DADI, Department of Architecture and Industrial Design, she teaches in the degree course of Fashion Design and in the degree course of Design for Innovation at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli.

She has a PhD in Urban Design and collaborates with the research group SIDE, Sustainable Industrial Design of DADI, regarding the contemporary scenarios for research and innovation in fashion design and the visual communication of product and service systems.

caterinacristina.fiorentino@unicampania.it

University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli

Ricarda Bigolin is a designer, educator and researcher, and Associate Dean of Fashion and Textiles Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research explores the social, cultural, ethical and political context of fashion production and consumption. Key practice includes D&K, a critical fashion practice producing garments, performances, exhibitions, texts and films in leading art and design museums, galleries, publications and universities globally. Fashion languages across multiple mediums are interrogated to explore the broader influence and everyday impact of fashion.

ricarda.bigolin@rmit.edu.au

Luca Trevisani is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice has been given international exposure in museums and art institutions. Trevisani’s research ranges between sculpture and video, and spills over into adjoining disciplines such as the performative arts, experimental cinema and architecture, in a perpetual and constantly changing state of magnetism. In his works the historical characteristics of sculpture are brought into question or even subverted, in an incessant probing of matter and its narrations.

http://www.lucatrevisani.eu/

Elizabeth Kutesko is a cultural historian and alumna of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she obtained her PhD in 2016. She leads the MA in Fashion Critical Studies at Central Saint Martins and is the author of Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic (Bloomsbury, 2018).

e.kutesko@csm.arts.ac.uk

Course Leader, Fashion Critical Studies

Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London

Rafael Kouto is founder and creative director of the homonymous brand of upcycling couture, founded in 2017, and focuses on the production of ethical and sustainable fashion. He devotes himself to the promotion of this practice, in part through upcycling workshops and strategies of involvementin a variety of institutions.

rafaelkouto@rafaelkouto.com

Giada Olivotto is a curator. She has organized exhibitions and cultural events in Switzerland and other countries. She is co-director of Sonnenstube, a member of the jury of Plattform, co-curator of Residenza La Fornace and founder of the radio project Canale Milva.

olivotto.giada@gmail.com

Garbage Core is Giuditta Tanzi. She founded her upcycled clothesline in 2019 and she is based in Milan. Giovanni and Gregorio Nordio are working as freelance designers doing consultancy for several brands. They are both based in Milan. Giuditta, Giovanni and Gregorio share a studio in Milan in the Casoretto neighborhood. Alessia Gunwan is a photographer and video maker based in Milan. She recently completed the master’s degree in photography at ECAL.

www.garbage-core.com

Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher who uses film, photography, and writing, to explore the relationships between clothing and bodies, both in museums and archives and in everyday life. Her monograph “Worn: Footwear, attachment and affect” was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. She is Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Fellow in Design at Northumbria University, and was previously a Polaire Weissman fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Professorial Fellow at UCA. Sampson, has a PhD from the Royal College of Art.

ellen.sampson@northumbria.ac.uk

Vice Chancellor’s Senior Fellow in Design, Northumbria University

Northumbria University, Newcastle