Once upon a time there was a city build in the middle of a land. Since the city had no particular beauty, the local council decided to decorate it with a special wallpaper.
Soon its walls were covered with images of imaginary and dynamic landscapes. Unfortunately, though, the wallpaper ended up creating a division between the inhabitants of the city, a sort of confrontational visual obstacle, and the council eventually decided to cover it in white paint, erasing differences, fantasies and images with the colourless void of horror vacui.
Yet, as time passed, the paint and the wallpaper layers were scraped by people, revealing new and different landscapes, innovatively assembled surreal compositions and bizarre assemblages.
This is the background story behind "The Allegory of the Wallpaper", the project of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 14th Venice International Architecture Exhibition, commissioned by Petros Dymiotis of the Cultural Service Ministry and with architect Michael Hadjistyllis and junior architect Stefanos Roimpas as curators.
The installation inside Palazzo Malipiero in Venice consists in a series of cardboard panels covered in multi-layered assemblages of pictures. Visitors are given a cutter at the entrance and asked to intervene on the panels, cutting out bits and pieces (that they can also take away), defacing the wallpaper and discovering another layer underneath.
The wallpaper is actually an allegory for the architectural evolutions in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, and for the suffering it went through at the hand of invaders, conquerors and colonial powers.
Charged with socio-political, economical and cultural values, the wallpaper in the pavilion features a series of architectural elements, buildings and spaces that characterise Cyprus, plus shredded images of the local currency hinting at financial and economical problems (installation by George Marcou and Tony Maslic) and a room in which visitors are confronted with the social power of graffiti (by Andrea Katsavra and Maria Papaloizou).
Asking the pavilion visitors to cut the cardboard and scrape off the paper to discover the layers underneath is a way to prompt them to contribute to the creation of further imaginary landscapes, compose their own stories, bring the interior dimension into the exterior, and carve out of the cardboard physical windows to get new perspectives, spaces and views.
In the allegory, the wallpaper story is also a reflection about the winners and the conquerors controlling cultural spaces, and the visitors vandalising and redesigning the spaces inside the pavilion will symbolically do the same thing.
Hussein Chalayan's Resort and Spring/Summer 2015 Menswear collections - both entitled "Moor’s Chorus" - include a series of motifs and patterns inspired by the architectural features of North Africa, with a focus on windows in particular (we will look at windows, as explored in the central pavilion of the Venice Biennale, in a future post).
But the main point of the collection - gazing at hidden areas, revealing secret courtyards, trees and irrigation systems through window-like openings on a dress or on a shirt - make you directly think about the wallpaper allegory at the Cyprus pavilion and the in-depth effects created by the layered strata of paper.
The multi-layered wallpaper effect is recreated in Chalayan's collections through prints or pierced garments, and the menswear collection also features mutable garments that could be considered as derivations of Chalayan's designs from his A/W 2013 and S/S 2014 womenswear collections.
You could argue that these are conceptual relationships between the meaning of the pavilion and Chalayan's new designs, but there is actually a tangible fashion connection with the Cyprus project.
One of the collages at the pavilion and on one of the brochures features indeed images taken from Mary Katrantzou's Resort 2014 lookbook. The collection as you may remember featured a mix of vistas and visuals in bright colours - brutalist and modernist architecture, high-rise apartment towers in São Paulo, snow-capped Swiss Alps, flower fields, a Japanese fisherman, a bridge, a greenhouse and ornamental ponds - none of them strictly from Cyprus, but layered one on top of the other and therefore hinting once again at the main theme of this pavilion.
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