New Bodies
“New Bodies” is a selection of projects by students in “Wearables Spaces”, an interdisciplinary studio-based Elective course taught by Francesca Bonesio, that considers the human body in space and the physical experience as a core experimental field for artistic research and practice.
Through individual and collective projects that address human and environmental questions, students from Fashion Design, Art Media and
Technology and Strategic Design Management investigate the contemporary body in relation to a broad set of senses, artefacts, inhabited structures, interactive spaces and dynamics. Students explore the question of the changing boundaries between the body and the environment.
If we consider the garments humans wear as our last membrane between the human body and its environment, does it mean that humans are wearing space?
Featured projects:
“Natural Instinct”, Ghida Dalloul and Magdalena Zawieracz
This speculative project explores how to get radically closer to nature. Each device has been designed to combine the therapeutic force of the natural elements with wearable structures.
“My Personal Best”, Nicholas Evans and Marlee Lopez
“My Personal Best” is the least efficient way to do things by both arbitrary and input-output standards of measurements, but this makes it deeply human.
“Prosthetics for the new body”, Sacha Assi and Thalia Kassem
Instead of fixing posture, these wearables force the body to stay in the positions smartphones and other devices impose on us. They are the “prosthetics for the new body”, raising awareness about how anatomically
unnatural we’ve become.
“Apocalypse”, Jiaxuan (Kyle) Ye and Ruoqi Wang
Plastic surgery is explored using ephemeral elements as flowers and honey to stress the borders between natural and artificial within the contemporary human body itself. We use flower to replace the the artificial parts also represent the relationships between natural and artificial, as the boundary between these two fields is becoming more and more vague.
“New Bodies” was documented by French photographer Nicolas Guiraud in a dedicated photoshoot at the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin.
Faculty: FRANCESCA BONESIO
Photography: NICOLAS GUIRAUD
Setting: CND Pantin
Special thanks to :
Florence Leclerc-Dickler
Théodora Lemeur and the CND
Leyla Neri
Bridget O’Rourke