Survival of the Outfit

Brief

Design and make a garment for surviving the social breakdown

Teammates

Akriti Goel, Cristele Saric, Weiting Chi

Timeframe

16 – 20.01.2023

Development

Selecting narrative

We were drawn towards and imagined the social circumstances of a pregnant homeless woman and her experience at picking up food from the foodbank during a social breakdown.

Initial ideas

Through discussion on the initial brainstormed sketches, we found that our ideas covered a diverse range of perspectives: functionality, protest strategies, technology and nature, and personal connections. 

Specifically, the team leaned towards sharing the weight of pregnancy and food with other women.

Grounding our outcome

We dropped homelessness from our garment because of practical and sensitive considerations about research.

The collected interview responses showed some correlation between the two papers we examined [1] [2]. We saw the connection of other women to help cope with single motherhood. 

Thanks to the support network of family, friends and institutions the interviewed mothers coped with physical, emotional and social challenges better resulting in a good experience with their pregnancy.

Empathising with pregnant women

Context and focus of our garment

The social disruption removed the supportive network – single mothers without connection to family and institutions.

Social connections expressed in the garment

The insight pointed us to social arrangements in space. In the case of a mother with a support network, she felt in the centre while single mothers counted on each other to carry the weight.

Rituals during motherhood

Another idea we explored is the use of performance to demonstrate the passing of time through movement and the use of a journal reading. From here we brought forward the ritual elements, such as rotating and repeated actions.

Challenges of using symbolism

Despite our attempt to link our artefact to specific symbols and express contexts in materials, we did not manage to achieve it as successfully. We could have used the AEIOU exercise to become very specific from where we could extract specific symbols (behaviours, interactions or objects) with which we can make it believable and tangible and decide how open for interpretation to the person to be.

(Dewey, pp. 10-25, 2008) Make the artefact disrupt the typical experience of, in our case, single motherhood by relating it to the broader social civic life. We looked at Lucy Orta’s and Matthew Barney‘s work to get a sense of how we might achieve this.

The garment

Video footage credit: Qibin Cheng. Edit: Slavi Kaloferov.

Reflection

We could have crafted our garment to a more sophisticated level, however, its shape and the connections between the pieces turned relatively complex to work with. We had experienced what Ingold refers to as a “process of growth” where the maker’s idea and labour “join forces” with the material qualities of the raw material he works with (2013, pp. 17-32).

We tried to be as efficient as possible and reduce waste which came at the cost of experimentation that could have helped us to solve the crafting problems and achieve the polished look.

Feedback

The garment could have been more structured to work as a sculpture.

References

[1] Knight, C., 2017. Group work with homeless mothers: Promoting resilience through mutual aid. Social Work, 62(3), pp.235-242.

[2] Bimpson, E., Reeve, K. and Parr, S., 2020. Homeless mothers: key research findings.

Dewey, J., 2008. Art as experience. In The live creature (pp. 10-25). Penguin.

Orta, S. (n. d.) Artwork: Series – studio Orta, Artwork: Series –. Available at: https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artworks/serie/10/relationships (Accessed: January 17, 2023).

Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle (Official Trailer) (2013) Dailymotion. Dailymotion. Available at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz3sba (Accessed: January 19, 2023).

Ingold, T., 2013, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. In The materials of life (pp. 17-32). Taylor & Francis Group. London.