The City Museum of Rimini currently hosts the exhibition titled “Transfashional – Post-Interdisciplinary Lexicon,” curated by Dobrila Denegri with the support of the students of FAST, second degree course in Fashion Studies, University of Bologna, Rimini Campus. Started in 2016, the Transfashional project1 involves researchers whose creative practice is carried out among various disciplines and dissolves the boundaries that have traditionally kept fashion, design, architecture, art and science apart. The exhibition in Rimini is the conclusion of a long path that has crossed different towns and their leading museums.
It consists of a heterogeneous and engaging collection of works that open new horizons on what fashion, in its broadest sense, can be or become. Thus, a way to find new links between traditional craftsmanship and technological innovation, as well as a different way of conceiving the processes of production, communication and consumption by favoring ethical and sustainable imperatives.
The exhibition shows the creative work of Manora Auersperg, Linnea Bågander, Naomi Bailey Cooper, Sonja Bäumel, Christina Dörfler-Raab, Naomi Filmer, Barbara Graf, Shan He, Milena Heussler, Afra Kirchdorfer, Saina Koohnavard, Kate Langrish-Smith, Ulrik Martin Larsen, Maximilian Mauracher, Wojciech Małolepszy & Robert Pludra, Ana Rajčević, Clemens Thornquist, Lara Torres, Aliki van der Kruijs.
Transfashional occupy the Modern Hall of the City Museum of Rimini where the general display is composed of a few essential elements and it deliberately emphasizes materials and creative processes. Wooden or metal semi-finished products, such as trestles and rough plywood boards, wooden sticks and frames, hanging tubular sometimes assembled like scaffolding lattices, are the main supports for the installation: with the help of transparent films and nylon strands, they make clothes and textiles capable of floating in the space.
To accompany the visitor in a real narrative, there are also some videos that show the artist's point of view. According to the not-mandatory itinerary, visitors are free to wander through the exhibition’s open space like into a creative ambient. The setting follows the intent of the exhibition in deliberately revealing itself as a creative laboratory.
Reflecting on the meaning of this exhibition the curators ask themselves: can fashion and art respond to current social, economic, cultural and environmental urgencies and shape new paradigmatic positions? Transfashional explores the ways in which artists and fashion designers are engaging and contributing to these questions.
As mentioned before, the original project was conceived as an exhibition-in-progress which began with a series of discursive sessions which included renowned names such as Hussein Chalayan, Naomi Filmer, Lucy Orta, Clemens Thornquist, and José Teunissen, as well as creatives whose practice is situated between fashion and art, such as Anna-Sophie Berger, Martin Bergström, Minna Palmqvist, Ana Rajčević, and Lara Torres. Fostering collaborative and experimental work in each of the previous exhibitions in London, Warsaw, Vienna and Kalmar, Transfashional evolved through a series of new productions which aim to re-define fashion beyond its conventional notions.
This same direction is further explored through the exhibition at the Rimini City Museum which, especially for this occasion, presents several daring fashion artists and designers: Aliki van der Kruijs, Sonja Bäumel, Barbara Graf, Saina Koohnavard, Ulrik Martin Larsen and more.
As this up-and-coming generation of artists and designers reflect on the world around them, they highlight the need for a profound revision of the processes of production and social relations that derive from them. They turn away from the fashion industry and its super-accelerated rhythms of production. Their quest for alternatives drives and inspires new productions — not of goods but of ideas.
Indeed, many of these works are critical, engaged and conceptual rather than wearable and functional. They are a result of the gradual dissolution of disciplinary boundaries which led us to the present post-(inter)disciplinary condition, which requires a new set of terms capable of defining and describing these hybrid productions. They demand denomination and categorisation in order to be rightly analysed, academically defined and thus legitimised, as well as supported. From the need for wider affirmation, legitimisation and support of practices which are predominantly experimental, research-based, speculative and artistic, comes the call for formulating a new, more adequate vocabulary.
Concluding, the Transfashional edition in Rimini is an attempt to initiate an imaginative new lexicon which is closely related to the educational and teaching methods of the partnering institutions which encourage experimentation, stimulate freedom and unconventional thinking, and highlighting process over product.
The exhibition is also the basis for a new didactic and educational dimension promoted by the major partner institutions of the project: for this reason Transfashional ends not only with an exhibition but also with a catalogue, produced with the contribution of the students of the International Master's Degree Programme in Fashion Studies (FAST) of the Department of Sciences for the Quality of Life at the University of Bologna. The exhibition book includes texts of scholars and artists such as Dobrila Denegri, Naomi Filmer, Ulrik Martin Larsen, Ute Neuber, Lucy Orta, Robert Pludra, Barbara Putz-Plecko, Simona Segre Reinach, Clemens Thornquist.
Transfashional is also a meeting moment and a way to share contents and experiences with the local territory. For example, the Dutch textile designer and researcher Aliki van der Kruijs had a talk with the audience during the opening ceremony: on this occasion Aliki shared her own project “Made by Rain” combined by photographs, very often used as medium for research, documentation and material in her design process.
If you would describe the works of Aliki in one sentence, the phrase would probably be a fluid chain of the following key words: water, blue, textile, trance. Her textile works paint the drops of a rainfall or the cadence of the sea.2
The exhibition was realised in collaboration with University of Applied Arts Vienna, London College of Fashion, UAL, The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, The Swedish School of Textiles – University of Borås, Master of Fashion Studies, University of Bologna, Rimini Campus. It was organised with additional support of the Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture, Constitution and Media, Austria, Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Austria, Austrian Cultural Forum Milan as well as of the Netherlands embassy in Rome and Netherlands consulate-general in Milan.
City Museum of Rimini, “Aliki van der Kruijs. Talk and encounter with the audience,” Press release, Rimini, 26 ottobre 2019.↩