This collection uses solely existing clothes. Thus, without pretending to be able to answer it, I raise the question of subjective, personal and class creation.
I question the clothes as a sign of status; the status of a piece of fabric or of an existing dress. I question their distinct value and the value of creation. I ask which clothes are valuable enough to be worth preserving? For whom do we design our clothes? And finally, who has the right to elegance?
The methodology is built on two axes. Re-use and the use of melted sugar as a structural and ornamental support.
Through re-use, the aim was to make an inventory. Based on my own memories, I invented a legacy by listing objects that are full of memories of other people. The basis of the work becomes these items. There are no new things, no starting from scratch. The aim was to confront the existing and to give value to these pieces.
The existing is then reformulated through sugar attachments that hold the pieces together, physically and conceptually. These objects are fragile, which gives them a precious and ephemeral quality at the same time, just like memories.
Sugar was chosen because it is an everyday material, commonplace but it can be manipulated to look like something precious. Also because it is an element of preservation and its elaboration -like sewing- relates to domestic tasks, something that is considered to be a feminine space, thus overlooked, so I choose to bring it into my practice in order to open a discussion.
But beyond all these material and physical properties, for me sugar transcribes saudade*. It is a way of materializing the tears due to nostalgia, it is a material that, like the tears, melts, evaporates and is reformed.
*Saudade is a Galician word that could be described as a feeling of nostalgia for places, people or even moments that, in the case of children of migrants, we have only known through the stories told by our parents. It is feeling the past in the present through the memories of others.
