There's a lot of talk about how the '90s are cool at the moment and how certain trends from that decade have made a comeback. Yet there is something from around that time that should definitely make a comeback, but that nobody seems to have mentioned – artworks and projects by Lucy+Jorge Orta. This research-based artistic practice has been focused since 1992 on fostering interactions and connections between human beings.
In the early '90s Studio Orta created the "Refuge Wear" series: everything started around the First Gulf War when Lucy Orta (whose background is in fashion; Jorge's is instead in fine art and architecture) tried to create a series of portable shelters or "habitats" destined to the refugees fleeing war zones who had ended up living homeless in the streets of Paris.
Orta's first portable habitats looked like tents that people could convert into anoraks and backpacks and revolved around two main principles – mobility and transformation.
More projects and social interventions followed, all of them tackling contemporary issues such as the economic crisis, mass unemployment, social unrest and social inclusion, nomadic living, environmental sustainability and recycling.
Among them there were experiments in which the duo conceived the body as a building such as the Modular Architecture igloos, pieces designed during a second-hand clothes transformation workshop in collaboration with the Salvation Army, sleeping bags made with life saving vests, military surplus fabrics and technical textiles, and the iconic Nexus suit.
The latter was first developed for the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale: Lucy Orta organised for this occasion a workshop with refugee women from Johannesburg's Usindiso Shelter.
The women learnt during the project to cut and sew the Nexus Architecture, consisting in a series of work overalls with a fabric tube attached that connected by zipper from one person's stomach to another's back (Studio Orta's cutting patterns are as fascinating as their projects and you can discover more about them in the volume Lucy + Jorge Orta Pattern Book: An Introduction to Collaborative Practices by Paula Orrell, Lucy and Jorge Orta). The fabric tube represented the physical and social link existing between all human beings.
On Studio Orta's Nexus Architectures project page a quote states: "It is through our connections with other people that we find our own centres. Another way of saying that our identities are formed by our relationships. We are the sum total of what others have given us and what we have given others."
Studio Orta kept on developing further projects along the same humanitarian lines in the last few years, some of them showing continuity with "Refuge Wear". Yet revisiting some of the previous installations and rethinking about them in our times of migrations, xenophobia and intolerance may help us finding more human solutions to modern emergencies. In a nutshell, Lucy+Jorge Orta's projects are the "trends from the '90s" we should be rediscovering and relaunching rather than high waisted jeans, scrunchies and platform boots.
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