Dialogical Bodies Conference:
Everything and Everybody as Material
2024
Conference Organisation
Design Research Conference
Amidst the blurred boundaries of fashion and research, as they collide with various fields and disciplines, a profound challenge arises: the very foundations of knowledge in fashion practices must be rethought. As bodies and materials alike become increasingly expansive in their potential, we find ourselves asking:
What are bodies and materials in the realm of
fashion practices? And what may they become?
The shifting classifications of materials, as they transform into tangible forms of ‘matter’, and the body that both creates and performs fashion, captivates, confounds and challenges practitioners. Linear methodology no longer suffices to capture the current state of fashion design; the future spaces of fashion design and research demand imaginative reconceptualisation. Fashion, traditionally understood as the association of materials and objects with established cultural, social, and commercial categories, transcends these categories to produce novel cultural identities, meanings, and ways of being. Its materials, though non-linguistic, contribute to the construction and substantiation of cultural capital.
The Dialogical Bodies conference was held at the Sweidh School of Textiles in Borås, on April 19th and 20th of 2024, in conjunction with RMIT University and ArtEZ University of the Arts. Over 80 artistic and practice-led researchers from across the globe presented and discussed their explorations of matters’ artistic potential in fashion design, as they shape the body and unlock new modes of creative expression. Through experimentation and research, the attending conference delegates revealed materials’ previously undiscovered capacities and agencies in fashion design, unlocking novel ways of thinking, being, wearing and living.
Thus, acknowledging the material’s propensity between things and bodies, the aim of this conference was to experimentally explore the artistic potential in all aspects of materials that is of importance to fashion practices.
The proceedings in the link below document the delegates’ artistic research contributions, continuing the dialogue of the conference theme and making it shareable with the wider research community.
Conference organsiers: Ricarda Bigolin, Danielle Brüggeman, Jan Tepe, Clemens Thornquist
