By Nico Pazzaglia - MA Contemporary Photography, Central Saint Martins for Walls in Online Places
This work explores the status of embodied subjectivity during lockdown and drawn from Feminist phenomenologists’ understanding of “lived gender” in terms “style”. Style is not considered a superficial matter, such as clothing or hairstyle; rather style is understood as a personal expressive gesture able to create a primary link between the individual biological and social world. If gender, according to feminist phenomenologists, “anchors one’s existence” its undoing is the self’s undoing.
In the video-performance the compulsory actions of dressing and undressing, of adding and removing multiple layers of clothing, depicts the attempt of anchoring one’s existence in a time in which the self, deprived of its “style” because of isolation, undergoes a process of undoing.
The paradoxical outcome of these actions, in which layers and layers of clothing end up to almost paralyze the subject, speaks of the collapse of reason people witness in unexpected and unfamiliar times and wherein subjectivity is also forced to reshape itself with new meanings.
Walls in Online Places is an online exhibition programme for UAL postgrads to share their work whilst in isolation and practicing social distancing.
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