Iuav – cluster

Value

Dune. Writings an Fashion, Design and Visual Culture

Vol. 002 n. 002, dicembre 2021

biannual journal

Editorial

Maria Luisa Frisa

pp. 6-8

Every issue of Dune is an open field of research, analysis and exchange. The theme that, every six months, the workgroup decides to tackle always springs from an urgent need for verification. And it finds new ideas in the ever broader and more unpredictable response to the call for papers.

Value has proved a topic able to expand its boundaries, prompting a series of reflections that can challenge convictions and definitions. Multiplying the routes of exploration: the relations between different cultures, shifting paradigms of design and the concepts of authenticity and invention, just to give a few examples.

>>>

Reflections that are intertwined with the consequences of the crisis caused by the pandemic and that do not need answers but attention.

“Why do we value the original over the copy?” is for example the question that opens Bianca Weeko Martin’s essay, in which she investigates the architectural landscape of Manila in the Philippines and reconstructs the stylistic influences of the various colonial occupations of the country. While Petre Mogoș and Laura Naum, founders of the journal Kajet and the store called Dispozitiv Books in Bucharest who through their magazine are trying to reshape the thought and imagination of Eastern Europe, reflect critically on counterfeiting, one of the most widely debated subjects in fashion.

It is from the perspective of the stratagem developed by Sianne Ngai in the book Theory of the Gimmick (2020) that Aude Fellay looks at the contemporary economics of the media and the internal policies of the fashion industry, taking her cue from the T-shirt with the DHL logo, an almost perfect copy of the original, presented with great clamor on the runways of Paris by Vetements.

According to Jessica Caroline Holburn, fashion labels like Natasha Zinko and Hood By Air are central to any reflection on contemporary streetwear. Abjection and eroticism, obsession and explicit provocation make evident a post-Soviet sensibility in the former, whereas in the latter they project a dark and dystopian mythology, an atmosphere of anger and destruction typical of the pandemic era.

Through “Xeroxed: Wearable Pages, Readable Garments,” Dune instead introduces fashion in its design dimension. A pair of pants, conceived by the designer Alia Mascia for this issue, are turned into a page on which to reactivate the routes of an archive of ephemeral and underground publications.

And it is the importance of the ephemera of fashion, as objects which are able to generate value in the fashion system and which are today the focus of particular attention on the part of institutions, brands and designers, that is at the center of the conversation Lisa Andreani holds with Marco Pecorari, author of the volume Fashion Remains: Rethinking Ephemera in the Archives

(2021), and Gregory, founder of the Instagram account RareBooksParis.

Also coming from the perspective of fashion studies is the aniconic text by Maria Claudia Coppola and Margherita Tufarelli

that tackles the design of the self and the cultural role of fashion in relation to digitization.

Sonia D’Alto puts the thoughtful productions of Denise Ferreira Da Silva together with the work of the Claire Fontaine collective

and the practices of Valentina Desideri and Adelita Husni-Bey to present an idea of magical and poetic materialism that united

with confabulation becomes a curatorial and artistic strategy.

The landscape, in particular that of the urbanized coast, affected by the rise in sea level caused by climate change, is the central question in the essay by Francesca Dal Cin, Beatriz Freitas Gordinho and Cristiana Valente Monteiro. This vulnerability is forcing architects and planners to reexamine the value of urban and architectural elements and the concept of authenticity.

The contribution from Muslin Brothers, a fashion studio founded in Tel Aviv by Tamar Levit and Yaën Levi, is twofold, positioned

in different parts of the journal and connected to a residence at Arad in the Judean Desert, in Israel. The residence, in this city away from the center of things, took place during the lockdown of spring 2020. The Muslin Brothers reflect on the dimension of time, on clothing and the body, on the centrality of self-criticism and on the occupation of a space. If the first part of their contribution is a sequence of images, in the form of a visual essay, the one that closes the issue is a performative text that is defined as a “meditative interactive score.”

A conclusion that becomes litany, prayer, meditations. An invitation to look beyond things.

Index

by Petre Mogoș and Laura Naum

The Lure of the Fake

pp. 8-17

ESSAYS 002.032

By proposing a critical exploration of fakeness, this article interrogates whether the “fake” has become a worthless parasite that thrives on mimicking fashion or a valuable tool of subverting global capitalism. The departing premise is the transition from state-socialism to market-based capitalism in Eastern Europe and the resulting series of performative appropriation that followed. Caught in the webs of capital, it may be that the copy, the fake, and the original are not what they seem to be.

Keywords

Fakeness, Authenticity, Imaginary West, Performance, Eastern Europe

bio >>>

Petre Mogoș and Laura Naum are the founders and editors of Kajet, a journal that seeks to reconfigure the Eastern European thought and imagination. Their research navigates the intersection between neoliberal politics and popular culture, cultural memory and visual culture, and (post-)socialist art worlds in the context of marginal and uncertain settings. They have also launched a bookshop in the city center of Bucharest, called Dispozitiv Books, which functions as a publishing program.

Petre Mogoș and Laura Naum, independent researchers

contact@kajetjournal.com

petrica.mogos@gmail.com

laura.naum@gmail.com

by Bianca Weeko Martin

Philippine Copycats:

In Praise of

the Reproduction

pp. 18-27

ESSAYS 002.033

How can we find new approaches to historico-cultural value in the post-colony? Can we live with a multiplicity of origins in visual culture? The architectural landscape of Manila, Philippines is offered as an example where stylistic influences introduced through successive colonial occupations are altered, translated, mistranslated, and reactivated, until a new locally reinscribed source of value emerges. A survey of architectural typologies, such as churches and Brutalist buildings, is supported by Benjamin Buchloh’s writings on reproductions in art.

Keywords

Reproduction, Postcolonialism, Southeast Asia, Architecture, Philippines

bio >>>

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

by Francesca Dal Cin, Beatriz Freitas Gordinho, Cristiana Valente Monteiro

The Value of the

Archetype. Monuments

in the Uncertain

Future of Coastal Cities

pp. 28—37

ESSAYS 002.034

The urban occupation at the boundary between land and water has become vulnerable due to the rise in mean sea level, which requires us to rethink the value of urban and architectural elements in this threshold space. Indeed, various vestiges and ruins of architectural and infrastructural elements can be observed along the coastal urban landscape. The need to rebuild the city requires a re-semanticization of the concept of the authentic, questioning the processes of copying, modeling and archetyping architecture.

Keywords

Archetype, Monuments, Utopian Collages, Authentic, Dystopic

bio >>>

Francesca Dal Cin (Conegliano, Italy, 1990), graduated in Architectural Science with Urban Planning specialization from the Architecture University of Venice. In 2017, she began her PhD at the Lisbon School of Architecture of the Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal), with the thesis “Streets by the sea. Type, limit and elements.”

francescadalcin@fa.ulisboa.pt

Universidade de Lisboa

Beatriz Freitas Gordinho (Lisbon, Portugal, 1998), Master student in Architecture and Urbanism at the Lisbon School of Architecture of Universidade de Lisboa.

beatriz.gordinho@campus.ul.pt

Cristiana Valente Monteiro (Lisbon, Portugal, 1997), Master student in Architecture and Urbanism at the Lisbon School of Architecture of the Universidade de Lisboa.

cristianavmonteiro@gmail.com

by Muslim Brothers

Feral Intervention.

A series of images

exploring domesticated,

wild, and feral

states of being

pp. 38-49

STUDIES 002.035

The proposed contribution is a series of images, a visual exploration of the buffer zone between the city and the desert, made next to the town of Arad in the Judea desert, Israel. The series address bodies and beings as feral, a wild state after domestication. Once shaped into houses, thumbnails, and zippers, these entities are now living freely, perhaps not in their “natural” habitats, yet are back to be wild.

Keywords

Feral, Expanded Fashion Practice, Body and Embody, Wearing, Photography

bio >>>

Established in 2011 in Tel Aviv, and located in Brussels, Muslin Brothers (Tamar Levit and Yaën Levi) is named after muslin fabric, that is widely used to make veils, men shirting, and clothes prototypes prior to production. The studio acts as both a fashion brand and research studio to speculate about the way personal and social systems are shaped through clothes. The duo’s work exists in the fertile ground between design, art and research, a poetic investigation into the experiential biography of non-designers clothing, collecting statements from makers, wearers and protocols.

www.muslinbrothers-shop.com

by Maria Claudia Coppola and Margherita Tufarelli

Mediated Identities:

Values of Fashion

in Digital Culture

pp. 50-59

ESSAYS 002.036

The essay sets out to investigate the contemporary design of the self and the role of fashion in the production of cultural values. In particular, digital culture has given rise to a mediated fashion, one that has repercussions on identity and authenticity, as well as on cultural memories. This invites us to look at the interdependence between the values that fashion produces and the ones on which it feeds, which present themselves as compasses we can use to find our bearings in the fluidity of the digital world, where copies and

simulations are the fruit of a symbolic (re)mediation expressed in a concrete form.

bio >>>

Margherita Tufarelli has a PhD in Design and is a researcher at the DIDA (Department of Architecture), Design Campus section, of Florence University. She is currently working on a research project funded by the Region of Tuscany. The focus of her research is on studying the interaction between the cultural heritage and digital technologies through the lens of design culture.

margherita.tufarelli@unifi.it

Maria Claudia Coppola is a graduate student of Design at the DIDA (Department of Architecture), Design Campus section, of Florence University and a member of the DIDA Lab REI (Reverse Engineering & Interaction Design). Passionate about digital culture, she combines the approach of design culture with the theories and methods of social and political science in her research with the aim of promoting alternative models of public innovation.

mariaclaudia.coppola@unifi.it

Florence University

by Alia Mascia

Xeroxed: Wearable

Pages, Readable

Garments

pp. 60-63

PROJECTS 002.037

The project XEROXED: Wearable Pages, Readable Garments proposes a possible way of reclaiming underground printed material and bringing it back into circulation, using clothing as its main instrument.

The material utilized comes from a private archive belonging to my family that first started to be kept in 1974 and went on growing until the end of 2001, when it was put on hold. In 2016 I took the archive in hand and tried to reconstruct it, adding missing items and new acquisitions. The collection, which covers the period from the second half of the 1960s until the early 2000s, comprises flyers, fanzines, booklets, posters and publications linked to underground culture in Italy and elsewhere.

XEROXED aims to bring about an ontological reactivation of the contents in question through fabric, which becomes a canvas and is turned into a new page on which to reawaken universes of meaning sleeping in the archive.

bio >>>

Alia Mascia recently graduated in Fashion Design from the IUAV University in Venice and is currently enrolled in the Master’s Degree course in Critical Fashion Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Her research is focused principally on the phenomena and ephemera of underground culture, which she intertwines with fashion design through graphics, prints and manipulations of fabric.

by Lisa Andreani

Histories

Are Complicated.

An Attempt to

Trace the Multifaceted

Lives of Fashion

Ephemera

pp. 64-75

CONVERSATIONS 002.038

Taking the research into the ephemera of fashion carried out by Marco Pecorari and published in the volume Fashion Remains: Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive as its starting point, the threeway conversation involves, in addition to the author, Gregory, the founder of RareBooksParis, an Instagram account that offers rare and out-of-print publications. The discussion explores the encounter with some “fashion remains” and analyzes the development of an interest in them on the part of institutions, brands and young designers.

Keywords

Ephemera, Archive, Collection, Becoming, Martin Margiela

bio >>>

Lisa Andreani is a curator and art critic based in Rome. She is currently Editorial and Curatorial Coordinator at the MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma). In 2019 she completed the Global Modernism Studies research program run by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in collaboration with the V&A Museum, London. Since 2018 she has worked as an archivist and researcher for the Archivio Salvo, where she has become a member of the advisory board.

hellolisaandreani@gmail.com

Gregory is proprietor and founder of RareBooksParis, an online bookstore that offers rare and out-of-print publications, volumes that are hard to find and collectable fashion imagery. After a career in fashion design working for Maison Martin Margiela, Louis Vuitton and Hermès, he set up RareBooksParis on Instagram in 2013 as a personal project. Since then his work with the website has been covered in several publications and he has curated exhibitions, among them Retail Apocalypse at the ETH in Zurich, A Book Affair at Radio Athènes and Daybed at the MACRO in Rome.

Marco Pecorari is program director and assistant professor of the MA in Fashion Studies at the New School Parsons Paris. He is the author of Fashion Remains. Rethinking Fashion Ephemera in the Archive (Bloomsbury, 2020) and is coeditor of the coming volume Fashion, Performance and Performativity (I.B. Tauris, 2021). He is also cofounder of the Printing Fashion magazine and festival based in Paris (www.printingfashion.fr).

by Jessica Caroline Holburn

Surplus Aesthetics

pp. 76-85

ESSAYS 002.039

It’s no secret that luxury streetwear is less a subversive subculture than a cunningly playful facade of such, appearing indifferent to capital even while sustained by it. While the world is glutted with serviceable clothing, experimental fashion brands such as Natasha Zinko and Hood By Air maintain their allure through eclecticism and transgression, assigning worth to populations that capitalism routinely ignores or treats with scorn..

Keywords

Capital, Value, Dead Labor, Surplus-value, Surplus-pleasure

bio >>>

Jessica Caroline Holburn has work published in Art Agenda, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Caesura, Fence, Filthy Dreams, Full Stop, Overland, Stillpoint Magazine, and Topical Cream, among others. She holds a BA in Art Theory & English Literature from Sydney University.

softassemblies@gmail.com

by Aude Fellay

What’s With the

Gimmick?

pp. 86-95

ESSAYS 002.040

Based on Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), this essay examines the reception of fashion collective Vetements through the lens of the gimmick as a “compromised” form that simultaneously “overperforms” and “underperforms.” The gimmick triggers an estimation of both an excess and a lack of labor, which indexes, in Ngai’s words, an “uncertainty about time and value.” The essay discusses the label’s infamous DHL T-shirt as a prime example of the gimmick and draws out the gimmick’s affinities with contemporary media forms and its instrumentality for emerging designers. Finally, it connects the now widespread use of the gimmick to structural changes that we have arguably barely begun to grasp.

Keywords

Vetements, Labor, Scam, Gimmick, Information

bio >>>

Aude Fellay is a researcher and educator based in London. She coordinates the theory-based courses of the Master in Fashion and Accessory Design at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD–Genève), and co-supervises the program for the year one of the MA with designer Emilie Meldem. Her research focuses on the relationship and dynamics between image, fashion, and labor. As an educator, she is deeply invested in collaborative practices and the integration of theory and practice. She holds an MA in art history with a specialization in fashion studies from The Courtauld Institute of Art (London), and a BA in history and art history from the University of Geneva.

aude.fellay@hesge.ch

Geneva University of Art and Design

by Sonia D’Alto

Exercises of

Confabulation:

Toward a

Re-appropriation

of Life Value

pp. 96-105

ESSAYS 002.041

I speculate on the possibility of a re-appropriation of life values through poetics and magic materialism. Following a curatorial frame, I consider Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s proposal about a poetic mode of intervention to change the economic value and the injustice inscribed in it, intertwining them with the theories of the feminist collective Claire Fontaine about the de-subjectivation and extending them to the artistic practices of Valentina Desideri and Adelita Husni-Bey

Keywords

Subjectivity, Value, Curatorial Discourse, Speculative Thinking, Magic and Poetic Materialism

bio >>>

Sonia D’Alto is a researcher, writer, and curator. She is currently a PhD candidate at HFBK in Hamburg, and a member of the curatorial team of the Adolfo Pini Foundation in Milan. She is part of a feminist research group based in Palermo. She is currently working for the curatorial office at Madre Museum in Naples and on an editorial project about poetry with Archive Books (Berlin/Milan).

sonia.m.dalto@gmail.com

by Muslin Brothers

Good Measures.

A meditative reflection

score and research,

exercising fashion

practice in times of

elastic time

pp. 106-111

PERFORMATIVE WRITINGS 002.042

Keywords

Subjectivity, Value, Curatorial Discourse, Speculative Thinking, Magic and Poetic Materialism