We proudly introduce you to the curatorial team for New Fashion Narratives 2023; Enzo Aït Kaci, Chinouk Filique, Jonathan Ho, Lotte de Jager and Boris Kollar are invited by FASHIONCLASH to develop a multimedia presentation concept for the exhibition program component of FASHIONCLASH Festival 2023.
They first met during a physical Residency Week (18-22 April 2023) in Maastricht, where they got to know each other and worked on developing the concept for the exhibition.
Enzo Aït Kaci
Enzo Aït Kaci is a researcher with a background in Graphic Design, with a major in digital communication & branding, and Fashion Design, with a focus on textile practices and fashion images. In their most recent works, they have explored the value of fashion imagery through the digital prism of the internet – taking into account how the videogame industry, information networks, and photo-editing software affect fashion production. They intend to render clothes via multimedia techniques and cross dimensional practices, by building a system between dimensions where the images' flatness and the clothes' volume dialogue together. The fabric prints transform into distorted photographs, and those same photographs are reused as fabric prints again. The whole formulates a visual circuit in which 3D clothes and 2D images morph into one another back and forth. The garment circulates in an endless cycle and shifts between analog and digital realities. By doing so, they aim to develop circulation as a method to sample their work.
Chinouk Filique
According to Chinouk Filique, fashion has become, willingly and unwillingly, inextricably linked with digital culture. Her practice analyses, translates and visualises this disciplinary crossover, with a focus on introducing digital literacy to fashion. With the aim of instating (alt-forms of) agency for practitioners and consumers, her projects hold a strong focus towards demystification of contemporary hierarchical structures within our current (digital) fashion landscape, articulating what happens in the back-end, and how we might be able to utilise or approach these differently. A great deal of her research practice explores the premise that artistic crossovers are needed in order to ensue change within traditional frameworks of artistic disciplines. Chinouk has a BA in Lifestyle Transformation Design and a MA in Critical Fashion Practices.
Lotte de Jager
As a result of her sustainability studies (BA Fashion Design and BA Future Planet Studies/Geology), Lotte de Jager is very aware of the alarming state of our planet, her ecologies, and the fashion industry's negative impact on climate change. According to Lotte, fashion is a very powerful medium of communication between identities, bodies and cultures, and she is convinced that it is possible to change the course of fashion's history. In an attempt to innovate the fashion industry and decrease its negative impacts, her practice evolves around performance, body emancipation and movement. She hopes that we can learn to live fashion moments in a zero-emission way by refusing to create new garments and instead focusing on creating a performance, inviting the audience to stand still, in the here and now.
Jonathan Ho
Jonathan Ho his practice is an ongoing study and investigation into the design and development of contemporary textile culture. He sees himself as a designer, artist and craftsman, especially interested in the history and aesthetic properties of textiles and how as a material, it can and has been used to shape (or magnify) the needs and desires of the human condition. As the textile medium sits at the intersection of many disciplines (fashion, visual culture, interiors, craft, design, etc.), he explores many different industries within his practice with a transdisciplinary approach. Jonathan has a BA Industrial Design and a MA in Contextual Design and a Modinette and Costumiere diploma from ENSAID Modevakscholen.
Boris Kollar
In his practice, Boris Kollar is fascinated by the migration of forms, people, and cultures. For this reason, textiles and garments have become his preferred medium. He studies invisible, but often overlooked, elements of clothes. Sound, scent, temperature, and tangibilities embedded within garments impact how we feel, behave, and eventually how we perceive each other. Observation and deep listening are therefore essential values in his design approach. He is interested in dialogue, both verbal and silent. In that respect, Boris considers clothes and fashion to have a diplomatic ability to bring cultures to meet, mediate or even merge.
New Fashion Narratives is an initiative of FASHIONCLASH, organized in the context of the FASHIONCLASH Festival 2023 exhibition program (17-19 November 2023). For the upcoming edition, five fashion practitioners are invited by FASHIONCLASH to collaborate on the development of the co-curatorial concept for a multimedia exhibition program that will be presented at Bureau Europa in Maastricht.