Apparatus 22, “Dressing Fiction”, workshop

Fashion has the liberty to plunder and refashion bits of history into various intricate signifiers, shapes or symbols. Furthermore, those bodily ornaments carry the ambivalent potential to disconcert bodies, identities and perceptions.

For the program Costumes and Collapse, the art collective Apparatus 22 proposes a workshop that will use tactics of storytelling to imagine fictitious clothing and accessories that navigate from historical narrative to present.

Starting from the biographies of fictional characters inhabiting their utopian universe of “Suprainfinit'' (a conceptual framework using hope as a tool able to make cracks in the status quo and imagine other futures), collective discussions and collage making with language and imagery will guide the participants through a critical, corrosive and puzzling material. Disparate references to recent histories in Eastern Europe, textile traditions and current realities-to-be-challenge will form the tools to move the imagination of participants into the hybrid expectations of utopia.

“Dressing fiction” is part of a series of projects Apparatus 22 has been developing since 2011 with the aim to analyse and comment on how art, politics and economy have been making use of clothing in building Utopian programs.