Stefanos Levidis, Embassy for the Displaced NoBorders Backpacks, Lesbos, Greece, March 2016

What is the role of clothing in the representation of the phenomenon of refugees’ migration in art and performances? What aesthetical canons are adopted to stage the current phenomena of refugees’ migration? And what types of wearable artefacts have been identified as symbolic by/within artists and artistic practices at large? How does the employment of the aesthetic regimes of clothing in these exhibitions/performances dictate a specific understanding of refugees’ agency?

The Students of the course Fashion Systems and Global Perspectives’ – MA in Fashion Studies – begin to answer to these following questions through the exhibition Contact Points at the Parsons Paris Gallery. As final project of the course, the students explore in this exhibition three garments and/or wearable objects ­ the life jacket, the gold emergency blanket and everyday garments ­ as means to represent and explore the current migration phenomenon. As cultural anthropologist Jeffrey David Feldman explains, garments and accessories are powerful sensorial artefacts able to re­donate agency, stage the absence of identities and bodies. Clothing and accessories can become objects of proximity, or what Feldman defined as ‘contact points’ intended as a category of objects that, on the one side, visually compel the removal and destruction of the body and, on the other side, may often prove insufficient as analytical strategies to represent the absent body and its meanings.

Employing Feldman’s idea of ‘contact points’, the exhibition stages students’ research process as well as the networks of signification emerged in their study of those wearable objects which are canonically used to represent refugees in art exhibitions and performances. Here these objects are investigated in their multiple origins, uses and complex meanings, evidencing their powerful but also limiting potential in addressing the agency of refugees.

 

Section – What’s in a Blanket? – Students: Rachel Fenderson, Soukaina Himmi, Abbygail May Talo and Kirsten Wang

 

Section SPHRAGIS – The Refugee’s Life Jacket: Objects and Bodies in Transition – Students: Adriano Appelius, Chanel Host and Sarah Safar

Section RE:Laundromat – A Response Catalogue – Students: Tala AlGhamdi, Anqi Ni and Beatrise Gutmane