Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology

Elegance & Grace in the Forms of Nature: "George Nakashima, Woodworker" by John Terry Nakashima @ The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF)

Most of us set upon studying a subject because they feel they have a passion for that specific field and eventually build their career around it, but there are very few people among us who truly question the reasons behind their choices as George Nakashima did.  The designer is currently being celebrated with the documentary "George Nakashima, Woodworker" (2020) at the Architecture & Design Film Festival. Due to Coronavirus the festival was rescheduled online and it is now possible for architecture and design fans based in the U.S. and Canada to watch the 17 films part of the virtual programme until December 3 (tickets for individual films and all-access passes are on sale at this link; but you can also watch the DVD or watch it online here).

The documentary, directed by John Terry Nakashima, George's nephew, is almost two hours long and the actual title refers to how Nakashima used to describe himself - not a designer or an architect, ego-based labels according to him - but woodworker, a definition that emphasised the craftsmanship aspect in his work. This description in a way fits only the second part of the documentary as the first part takes us on an intense journey through Nakashima's studies and experiences in different countries that helped him finding his path in life.

George Katsutoshi Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington, from parents who came from samurai families. He studied architecture, earning a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1931. In the midst of the Great Depression, he decided to follow his instincts and travelled to Europe, Japan and India feeling he couldn't create until he found a reason why he should do so. In Japan he worked on Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo under Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond, but, little by little, he was fascinated by the local architecture such as the Katsura Imperial Villa, a finest example of Japanese architecture and garden design from the early-mid 17th century in Kyoto, and by the Japanese philosophy. 

He absorbed indeed from Zen scholars a passion for irregularities and asymmetries found in nature, for simplicity, subtle beauty, unconventional creativity and silent tranquillity. After Japan, Nakashima continued his journey to India where he became a follower of guru Sri Aurobindo. In India he followed the construction of a reinforced concrete building, the first of its kind, the Golconde Dormitory in Pondicherry, in the south of the country. While working on this project he started understanding why he wanted to create and realised that designing for him was a spiritual act rather than something that merely satisfied his ego.

He returned to America in 1940 but, when in February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066, a directive that authorized the internment of Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese heritage, he was interned with his wife Marion and young daughter Mira in Camp Minidoka in Hunt, Idaho. He went through difficult experiences and hardships, but he managed to find new inspirations when he met at the camp Gentaro Hikogawa, who taught him traditional Japanese carpentry. 

Released from the camp in 1943, he was invited by Antonin and Noémi Raymond to live on their farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Nakashima remembered how at the camp he had learnt to improvise with the wood he could find and started experimenting with wood. At the end of the war, he was finally free to explore new possibilities. 

He bought three acres of land in New Hope and built a workshop and a house, living simply and close to nature he started creating things of beauty: inspired by early American houses and furniture he produced his first pieces of furniture and soon created lines for companies such as Knoll and Widdicomb, also accepting private commissions. His sculptural yet functional chairs, desks and chaise lounges were a combination of architecture and of his beliefs in nature.

Nakashima kept on experimenting, reaching new levels when he realised that the imperfections of wood were the distinctive parts of the tree, the most beautiful features of his material of choice. 

He therefore set out to design around these imperfections to bring out of the wood the grain imprisoned in the tree, conceiving this process as an act of creation that allowed him to free these dynamic tensions and movements trapped in the wood. A strong, creative force allowed him to bring out of the tree its beauty and its spirit in this way, that's why he usually chose boards with knots, cracks, burls and wormholes. He embraced the flaws and highlighted them at times with his signature elements like his butterfly joints.

In the '70s Nakashima also created magnificent tables like his massive altar for peace; he died in 1990, but his legacy continues through his company and through the George Nakashima Woodworker Complex, the 12 acre complex (a National Historic Landmark) located in New Hope, Pennsylvania, that features 21 buildings, all designed by Nakashima. 

There have been other documentaries mentioning Nakashima and looking at his unique legacy of craftsmanship and design, but "George Nakashima, Woodworker" is the most complete not just because it was researched since 1990 by his own nephew who worked on it with his cousin, Mira Nakashima-Yarnall, the designer's daughter (who is also a woodworker), but because it is the most complete one about him since it also looks at the architectures George Nakashima designed.

Last but not least, while the documentary is a way for his nephew to rediscover his uncle George's history, it is also a way to question the audience about the reasons why we create, inviting those designers among us to consider how they should first and foremost find the reasons behind their choices and then share their visions with other people, like Nakashima did.

Looking for Ideas for a Fashion Exhibition? Leaf Through Some Vintage Magazines and You Will Find Them

It is not so rare to leaf through a vintage magazine and spot a creation by a designer who may be worth rediscovering or that may inspire curators to do more researches and, who knows, even lead to exhibitions. For example, the ensembles featured in this post appeared on Italian magazine Annabella in November 1960.

The first image shows the model in a graphite grey flannel skirt suit matched with a practical coat with ample collar and a lining inspired by Norwegian motifs; in the second the model wore a similar coat (with a different cut - it is indeed collarless and features kimono sleeves and oversized buttons) with a swamp green skirt matched with a sweater characterised by the same motifs of the lining of the coat. 

The designs were created by German fashion designers Uli Richter and were actually among his most popular creations. There haven't been many exhibitions about him or featuring his designs, but, between 2016 and 2017 the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin organised an exhibition celebrating him entitled "Uli Richter Revisited – Fashion Visionary, Teacher, Inspiration" (the museum has its own Richter collection).

Born in 1926 in Postdam, Richter contributed to forging "Made in Berlin" fashion and style. After his apprenticeship as a Diplom-Textilkaufmann, he started his training at the Horn fashion house in Berlin in 1948 and, just a year later, he produced his first dress. Dubbed "Marcelle", the dress looked simple yet stylish, with a pleated skirt and a fitted bodice and it soon became a bestseller.

Richter became Head Stylist at Horn and also manager at the fashion house Schröder & Eggeringhaus, later on renamed S & E Modelle Uli Richter. Richter favoured simplicity and functionality, but his designed still retained some elegance: his reversible coat with Norwegian pattern from 1960 perfectly represents his passion for practical yet smart fashion. While the inspiration and colours for this design were borrowed from his couture collections, the doubleface coat was produced industrially abroad, which guaranteed consumers more affordable prices.

The "Uli Richter Revisited" exhibition also featured this doubleface coat that became for visitors a sort of timeless proof of Richter's intuitions and inspirations. 

In the mid-'80s Richter became a Fashion Design lecturer at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin (today known as the UdK) and was an inspiration for his students. Yet, while he started teaching only later on in his life, there were lessons to learn already in his most famous creations, such as the designs included in this post: Richter got indeed an exclusive right to use the Norwegian knitwear pattern for his coats, so there was no mere appropriation of traditional knitted motifs in his garments.

Finding an interesting item in a vintage magazine can therefore help us finding a designer we may want to rediscover, a creation that may prove inspiring for a younger generation of fashion designers or even a theme worth investigating (copyrights in this case). So, are you a curator still looking for ideas for your next fashion exhibition? Leaf through some vintage magazines and you'll definitely find them.

From Vintage Cars to Vintage Gowns

In yesterday's post we looked at an architecture documentary, "Tokyo Ride", narrated by Japanese architect Ryūe Nishizawa, on board of his Alfa Romeo Giulia 2000 GT Veloce. As stated in that post, the vintage car becomes a sort of house on wheels in the documentary, an expedient that allows the directors to have an intimate chat with the architect while moving through the city. As the car is the co-star of the documentary, let's continue the thread today with a brief story of this car and a fashion comparison around the "donne & motori" theme that we also analysed in previous posts.

The Alfa Romeo Giulia 2000 GT Veloce was the 1971-76 incarnation of the Giulia GT (1963), created by Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro when he was just 25 years old and worked at the Italian automobile company Bertone, that styled cars for many companies, including Fiat and Alfa Romeo (Giugiaro's Giulia GT series marked the golden years of Alfa Romeo).

In 1971 the 2000 GT Veloce replaced the 1750 GT Veloce: the engine displacement was increased from 1779 to 1962 cm³ and its design was updated with chromed bars on the front grille and a prominent Alfa Romeo logo. Giulia GT fans could also customise the car with "Millerighe" alloy wheels by Campagnolo.

Inspired by a sports car (the adjective "Veloce" defined the main quality of this car, its speed), the vehicle still preserved elegant lines and a smart body design. This series of cars was created for those drivers who loved sports car but who couldn't afford them and who also appreciated more practical vehicles (Pier Paolo Pasolini owned an Alfa Romeo Giulia 2000 Veloce GT).

It is not rare to find fashion and car photoshoots and adverts showing a model in a design gown next to a Giulia GT. Among the best images from the '60s-'70s there is this one that shows a model in a striped sequinned rainbow coloured evening dress matched with a kimono sleeve cape and accessorised with golden sandals. While the image is a classic interpretation of the "donne & motori" theme, so it is not an unconventional car advert, the colours of the gown go pretty well with the bright yellow Giulia GT, perfectly embodying the dynamic qualities of this car and the glamorous lifestyle evoked by its sleek design.  

Driving with Giulia Through a City in Constant Transformation: "Tokyo Ride" by Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine @ The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF)

Directors who set upon shooting films about architecture often end up focusing on buildings, drawings, documents, blueprints and photographs. But Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine usually approach their subjects from an unconventional point of view and in a refreshing way, as proved also by their first work, "Koolhaas Houselife" (2008) , discovering the house in Bordeaux, designed by Rem Koolhaas / OMA through the stories and daily chores of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper.

Their latest documentary, "Tokyo Ride", is a journey with Japanese architect Ryūe Nishizawa, co-founder of the SANAA architectural firm with Kazuyo Sejima (the acronym stands for "Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates").

The peculiar thing about the documentary is its format: rather than doing a conventional interview with Nishizawa, the directors jump in his car, his iconic vintage Alfa Romeo Giulia 2000 GT Veloce, for a trip through Tokyo. The journey took place on 25th April 2019, the only rainy and foggy day in an otherwise rather warm season, and the trip starts at 9.00 am with a visit at a temple.

Then follows mystery destination - Sejima's house - where we learn more about the division of spaces in this building designed by Nishizawa with an ample patio area, but we also discover more about their professional contrasts, especially while Nishizawa was working on Sejima's house, and the fact that they have left all the fighting and quarrelling about projects behind them as they grew older.

Viewers are also invited to SANAA's studio, located in a warehouse in the Tatsumi area of the city, a space filled with work stations, partitioned by free-standing shelves stacked with books and magazines.

As the journey continues we discover Nishizawa's process behind designing a house, that dreaming phase in which he imagines how a kitchen or a bedroom will be used and his thoughts about the longest projects he will ever work on - his own house.

Nishizawa's beloved Giulia becomes a living room on wheels: in the car he talks to Bêka and Lemoine about his admiration for architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Oscar Niemeyer, his views about European and Japanese culture and Kenzo Tange's Yoyogi National Gymnasium.

Around them Tokyo is in constant transformation, a mutable city of canals now criss-crossed by the elevated highway, a jungle that grows constantly: Nishizawa talks about the passion Japan seems to have for new things, opposed to the "architecture of addition" in Europe where new things are built on old things, creating in this way monumental cities.

There is a final destination in the film - Nishizawa's Moriyama House (2002-2005) - a structure that could be defined as an experiment in semi-communal living, located in a part of Tokyo that still preserves a traditional Japanese atmosphere.

The project became well-known among architecture and design fans for being rather peculiar and throughout the years it achieved a cult status: it comprises indeed ten units rather than one house, scattered on one level. Each unit is similar to the next one, yet different in its configuration.

Made of thin sheets of steel and painted in white, the units never touch: five of them are mini-houses with kitchens and bathrooms, others function as single rooms and the owner decides which ones he can use and which ones he can rent. In this way the house owner enjoys various spaces and lifestyles. The project radically transformed the life of its owner blurring the line between solitude and togetherness (a very relevant theme in our times marked by lockdowns and social distancing due to Covid-19).

Nishizawa's moody Giulia has a key role in this documentary shot in black and white (a tribute to Japanese directors Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu): like the motorcycle in André Pieyre de Mandiargues' La Motocyclette (The Girl on the Motorcycle, 1963) or the car in Dino Risi's Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), Nishizawa's car is a "psychogeographical" element and has one specific function, that of moving the characters in space or moving them through past memories, present impressions and future intuitions.

The architect is passionate about Italian cars that he conceives as biological machines, almost like creatures with a mechanical heart (as opposed to German cars, industrial and cold, or to Japanese cars, that he defines "electricity" and "computer"). It would be interesting to see what Nishizawa may come up with if he ever redesigned for Alfa Romeo a new Giulia.

So, rather than being your usual documentary about architecture (you may not learn a lot about specific buildings, materials, dates of constructions or even about SANAA's practice while watching this film), "Tokyo Ride" is an engaging road movie, especially because Nishizawa and his Giulia are a formidable couple.

"Tokyo Ride" won the Artistic Vision Award, Depth of Field Competition at the Docaviv Film Festival, 2020 and the Best Prize at the Milano Design Film Festival, MDFF 2020. It will be available to watch online from December 2020, while architecture and design fans based in the U.S. and Canada will be able to enjoy it during the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF: 2020). Due to Coronavirus the festival was rescheduled online and it is now possible to watch the 17 films part of the virtual programme until December 3 (tickets for individual films and all-access passes are on sale at this link). 

Ode to the All Powerful Void: "Charlotte Perriand, Pioneer in the Art of Living" by Stéphane Ghez @ The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF)

A picture showing architect and designer Charlotte Perriand reclining on her Chaise Longue Basculante (1928-29) is widely considered an iconic modernist image.

Yet Perriand, in her trademark bobbed hair and ball bearings necklace, wasn't just acting as a model and demonstrating the function of this piece. Perriand was indeed one of the driving forces behind modernism in design and also the designer (credited with Pierre Jeanneret and his cousin Le Corbusier) of the elegant chaise longue (still produced today by Cassina together with several other designs by Perriand such as the armchair and sofa with leather cushions and a metal frame and the "Ombra" chair).

Perriand was celebrated last year with the exhibition "Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World"  at the Fondation Louis Vuitton and she is currently being celebrated also at the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF: 2020) with Stéphane Ghez's documentary "Charlotte Perriand, Pioneer in the Art of Living". Due to Coronavirus the festival was rescheduled online: viewers across the U.S. and Canada can now buy tickets and watch the 17 films part of the virtual programme until December 3 (tickets for individual films and all-access passes are on sale at this link).

The documentary is conceived as a tribute to a woman who had a key role in designing modernity and it is also an inspiring exploration of her principles, ideas and style. Everything for Perriand started from the void.

Born in 1903 in Paris to a tailor and a seamstress working for the haute couture houses, Perriand encountered the void for the first time in her life when, as a child, she was hospitalised to get her appendix out. In the sparsely furnished hospital room, she found a sense of calmness and tranquillity and realised that the void is "all powerful because it can contain everything", it is indeed in the void that the essential resides. After she graduated from the École de L'Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, Perriand started exploring the possibilities of the void also in compact spaces.  

Her first explorations into design led her to the creation of a built-in wall bar made of aluminium, glass and chrome and a card table with built-in pool-pocket drink holders - also known as "Bar sous le Toit", that is "bar under the roof", meaning "in the attic". She designed it indeed for a section of her apartment and presented it at the 1927 Salon d'Automne. 

At the time Perriand applied to work at Le Corbusier's studio, but the famous architect told the 24-year-old female furniture designer "We don't embroider cushions here". Yet, after seeing her "Bar sous le Toit" at the Salon, Le Corbusier, struck by the modern light-reflecting nickel-plated copper stools, anodised aluminium cocktail bar and chrome-plated table nestled beside a leather banquette and a built-in gramophone cabinet, changed idea. 

Perriand was fascinated by modern materials and also designed an ingenious extendable table that could accomodate up to 10 people, it made with materials borrowed from the automotive industry and featured a black rubber surface stretched between chrome runners that would roll out of a box concealing the mechanisms.

Realising Perriand's inventiveness would have been an asset, Le Corbusier asked her to join his and Pierre Jeanneret's studio. Here she became Le Corbusier's director of interior furnishings and from 1927 to 1937, she focused on designing furniture. Perriand benefited from the international environment at Le Corbusier's studio and her experiments soon led her to designing all the steel tube furniture for the iconic Villa Savoye.

In the 1930s Perriand became more active on the social level and helped founding the "Union des Artistes Modernes" (UAM), while, inspired by organic forms and natural materials, she started using more traditional materials such as wood and cane as they were more affordable. In 1936 she took part in the Households Arts Show where she presented a photomontage entitled "The Poverty of Paris" in which she raised awareness about the conditions of the people living in housing estates that had become urban prisons and realised that architects had to work to give people comfortable good houses. This concept was developed in a project revolving around the creation of 150 sq. feet-per-resident units designed around the idea of the void with all the objects needed integrated within the storage walls. This became the cornerstone of her work and was used for projects with Le Corbusier, such as the dorm rooms at the Cité Universitaire de Paris. 

Perriand also became a pioneer of the society of leisure, designing functional and flexible weekend houses and mountain shelters such as the "barrel refuge", an octagonal aluminium-clad cylindrical capsule with a warm wooden interior.

At the 1937 Paris Exposition Perriand worked again with Le Corbusier, but also with her friend Fernand Léger, with UAM and with a group of communist architects. The exposition marked the end of her collaboration with Le Corbusier and, after working for a while with Jean Prouvé, Perriand went to Japan. 

The local art, architecture, philosophy and lifestyle had a huge impact on her: she travelled for four months visiting art schools, factories, potters, silk painters and bamboo artists. Forced into Vietnamese exile because of the war, she returned to France only in 1946.

The post-war reconstruction allowed her to put into practice the studies about the 150 sq. feet-per-resident units at the Cité Radieuse, Marseille, designed by Le Corbusier, and later on in her life at Les Arcs, a ski resort in Savoie, France, designed in the 1970s by a group of architects led by Perriand to house 30,000 visitors at a time. For Les Arcs she looked at nature and developed a series of terraces incorporated in the side of the mountain that become invisible when covered in snow. For this project Perriand also developed fibreglass bathroom pods that could be made off-site.

In the 1950s, she designed the Tunisia and Mexico bookcases, storage systems that anticipated the assembly-ready furniture as they offered consumers a DIY approach to design and, in 1955, she returned to Tokyo. Here she continued her researches about the synthesis of the arts, such as her "resonances", creations born out of the encounter with the Japanese culture, like her "Ombra" chair, inspired by the concept of the void, but also by the invisibility of the Bunraku puppet masters or her Chaise Longue Basculante recreated in bamboo. Japan also inspired one of her last projects, a sanctuary-like teahouse originally commissioned in 1993 by UNESCO as part of the Japanese Cultural Festival.

The portrait that comes out of Ghez's documentary is that of a free-spirited and politically engaged woman who had a passion for pushing the boundaries of modern design, an extraordinary energy and a great sensibility. Perriand was a revolutionary mind and a genuinely exceptional figure.

One of the best pictures of Perriand portrays her standing topless on the mountains, back to the camera, arms raised, almost a symbolical gesture of liberation from the socio-cultural constraints affecting women in their careers and preventing them from achieving their goals. 

Iconic Accessories with Hidden Meanings: Charlotte Perriand's "Ball Bearings" Necklace

There are often accessories that characterise our styles, but also hint at our passions or professions, ending up defining us in unique ways: think about Nancy Cunard's bangles or Peggy Guggenheim's iconic sunglasses. French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, for example, used to wear a necklace made of chrome-covered copper balls.

"I had a street urchin's haircut and wore a necklace I made out of cheap chromed copper balls," Perriand recounted about it. "I called it my ball-bearings necklace, a symbol of my adherence to the twentieth-century machine age. I was proud that my jewelry didn't rival that of the Queen of England. I was labeled 'inhuman', an allusion to Marcel L'Herbier's film L'inhumaine, and was an easy target for Parisian street kids."

 

Perriand had asked an artisan with a workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to make the piece out of lightweight chrome steel balls strung together on a cord. The piece was inspired by Fernand Léger's still life "Le Mouvement à billes" (1926).

The necklace became a symbol of Perriand's passion for the mechanical age and a tribute to her fascination with airplanes and automobiles. It also came to define a period in her life: Perriand would wear the necklace while she was working at Le Corbusier's atelier in the Rue de Sèvres where she collaborated with other modernist architects, such as Pierre Jeanneret, Ernst Weissmann and Kunio Maekawa, and at the beginning of her research in metal furniture.

There are quite a few pictures of Perriand wearing the collier at work, while posing for a picture with her collaborators or reclining in the Chaise Longue Basculante (1928-29) she designed with Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier (this is an iconic image that came to define the modernist age View this photo).

The necklace was showcased at the exhibition "Bijoux Art Deco et Avant Garde" (2009) at the Musee Des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and was also included in the show "Charlotte Perriand 1903-99: From Photography to Interior Design" (2011) at the Petit Palais. LA-based modernist designer Sophie Buhai recently created a necklace inspired by this iconic piece, it is called - you guessed it - "Perriand" and it is available in gold or silver. 

Jewellery designer Yael Sonia, a passionate fan of mathematics, geometry and physics, came up instead with a more literal interpretation of the ball bearings concept, and applied it to her perpetual motion pieces and in particular to her spinning wheel bracelets with Tahitian pearls or gemstones such as blue topaz spheres. In Sonia's pieces the dynamic movement of the pearls or gems are designed to accompany the movements of the wearer. As the spheres roll in their slot, they also create a unique rhythm that accompanies the wearer throughout their day.

Between Art & Mathematics: "Escher: Journey Into Infinity" by Rob Lutz @ The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF)

"I fear that there is only one person in the world who could make a really good film about my prints: myself," Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) wrote to an American collector in 1969. This quote is the starting point and the main inspiration for the film "Escher: Journey Into Infinity" (2018), narrated by Stephen Fry and directed by Robin Lutz. 

The film is part of the 2020 edition of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF: 2020). Due to Coronavirus the festival was rescheduled online: viewers across the U.S. and Canada can now buy tickets and watch the 17 films part of the virtual programme until December 3.

The programme features a wide range of films, some more focused on architecture, others on design, urbanization, and the role of women in the industry (tickets for individual films and all-access passes are on sale at this link). "Escher: Journey Into Infinity" is dedicated to all fans of art, graphic design and mathematics as well. 

Stephen Fry guides us through Escher's life and experiences by reading about his passions, fears, work and inspirations (Escher's sons George, 92, and Jan, 80, also appear reminiscing about their parents) from letters, diaries, lectures and catalogs in which he described his thoughts and observations.

Escher was born in 1898, in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, the son of a wealthy family. As a child, he was in poor health and spent many months away from his family in a children's boarding house by the sea. He often said he hated going to school, but loved the drawing class. 

To make his parents happy, he went to the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. Graphic techniques teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, saw something in the graphic work of his new student, who left the engineering department to become a graphic artist.

In the '20s Escher travelled to Italy where he met his wife, Jetta, and where he was fascinated by the Tuscan landscape, by nature and the complicated beauty of plants. Supported financially by Escher's parents, they settled in Rome where two of his sons were born. After Mussolini's rise to power, Escher left Italy with his family. They relocated to Switzerland, but Escher hated snow, "I hate that white shroud that covers the earth," he states in the film. 

To escape the snow, Escher and Jetta made a sea voyage around the Mediterranean in 1936. In Spain, they visited the Alhambra in Granada, where they drew the geometric tessellations that fascinated and inspired him. Escher was struck by the tiles of the Alhambra and the motifs and geometrical figures distributed according to a system. It was then that Escher started systematising and thinking about recreating the figures using motifs borrowed from nature, such as birds, fish and bees. These first experiments eventually led to Escher's tessellations (from the Latin "tessella", small square stones or tiles used in ancient Roman mosaics), regular divisions of the plane that created an endless effect, like his famous prints "Day and Night" and "Metamorphose", or his circular tessellations.

Gradually, Escher's work became a reflection of his inner world and of his ideas, images inspired by landscape and nature that, on closer inspection, revealed themselves as impossible and very much influenced by mathematical rather than artistic principles and based on a sort of association mania (he would think about geometry and the hexagon, then about the honeycomb, and therefore about bees).

In 1941 the family moved to Baarn and during the war years Escher worked in silence. When he heard that architects who were members of their union would be accommodated in the guilds, even if they did not want to, he immediately cancelled his membership of Pulchri Studio and of the Graphic Association. He refused to work with the Germans and was deeply affected by the deportation in 1944 of his beloved teacher Jessurun de Mesquita. He kept a work by Jessurun that he found on the floor of his ruined studio, trampled down and with the print of a German soldier's boot on it, throughout his life.

After the Second World War, Escher's fame grew: he became increasingly popular and was amazed at the fact that illegal copies of his prints, reinvented in fluorescent colours, were sold in the US in the '60, becoming a hit with young people and with hippies in particular. Artists and musicians got in touch with him, among them Mick Jagger who hoped to be able to use his prints on an album cover.

His definitive breakthrough in the Dutch art world came in 1968 thanks to a major retrospective exhibition at the Municipal Museum in The Hague. He died in March 1972, and, in 2018  the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden dedicated to him the exhibition "Escher's Journey".

Escher visualised his words and thoughts, allowing them to become real in his drawings and sketches, woodcuts and wood engravings. The figure of artist that comes out of this movie is fascinating: Escher was passionate, but also obsessed about his work and in the film we often see him working constantly, fanatically and tirelessly. His paradoxical worlds take new meanings when they are animated in the film, something that allows viewers to consider the beauty of infinite worlds within the limited spaces of his artworks.   

Suspended between art and mathematics, M.C. Escher turned throughout the years into a constant inspiration, appearing in comics, adverts, films, tattoos and even in dance performances, proving that his works, these depictions of extraordinarily paradoxical and dynamic universes in constant movement, are genuinely timeless visions that will keep on being appreciated by generations to come. Indeed, as Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) states in the film, Escher's works "will transcend into the future brilliantly, the crazier this place gets, the noisier this place gets, the more his work is really interesting."  

Textile Progessions From Analogue to Digital (and Back): 2020 China & USA Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art Virtual Exhibition

Coronavirus may have temporarily shut down many museums and galleries all over the world for the time being, but the pandemic also prompted many institutions to find new ways for visitors to explore art and exhibitions.

The 2020 China and USA Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art Exhibition, for example, was moved to a virtual space in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdown. The Academy Arts & Design, Tsinghua University (AADTHU), in Beijing recently developed a 2.5D virtual platform that allows to visit the exhibition online at this link (23 November - 24 December 2020). 

Presented by the Beijing Culture & Art Fund, together with the University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia, and the Academy Arts & Design, Tsinghua University (AADTHU) in Beijing, and curated by Mi-Kyoung Lee, UArts professor, and Yue Song, AADTHU professor, the exhibition presents a selection of fiber artists who explore in their textile researches innovative approaches, methodologies and technologies. This edition features twenty artists from China and twenty from the United States, divided in two virtual pavilions.

The starting points for all the artworks included in this event are traditional techniques passed on by craftspeople century after century, such as weaving, sewing, knotting, coiling or dyeing, but they are combined with cutting-edge technologies, including scientific and digital technologies, to create an innovative intersectional art genre.

The possibility of combining science and technologies with traditional crafts allows to come up with new pieces, but also to develop new researches in the educational and industrial fields.

The evolution of crafts and technology illustrates the relationship between spirit and materiality, as well as soul and body," co-curator Yue Song states. "Unlike the evolution of nature, the provocation of technological evolution, particularly digital technology, comes into the world with such a short history. The effects of digital technology and software usage in society are often unpredictable, especially when we talk about the new revolution of technology in the Information Age."

Yet this degree of unpredictability combined with crafts and advanced technologies, allowed the artists involved to explore in innovative ways themes that go from gender and intimacy to environment, politics and science. Going through the various projects on the exhibition site is an exciting process of discovery that virtual visitors from all over the world will find engaging and intriguing.

"While contemporary arts and crafts adopt the ancient cultural and historical crafts, the technological evolution has influenced not only the advancement of technology but also the change of aesthetic values in the creative visual field," Lu Xiaobo, Dean of Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University states.

If you visit the virtual event, you will easily realise the future of textile art will be very different on the aesthetic and the material level from what we may imagine. Stepping into the China pavilion will allow visitors to discover Gao Jing & Lu Qi's embroidered flowers that bloom thanks to a deformable memory alloy that turns the static tapestry into a dynamic artwork with a movable frame.

Themes such as mutability and transformations are also tackled by Guo Yaoxian's works based on systems and variables: when viewers pass in front of the woven pieces, a sensor is activated and starts a motor that, changing the wefts, creates a new combination of colours.

As every intervention creates a random result, the continuous action generates endless images and meanings. The artist uses this system for coloured pieces and for black and white pieces, the latter ("Code's Text") are very clever as the warp and weft change and compose a morse code image, ending up creating a new woven semantics composed of basic symbols of Morse codes that change constantly.

There's beauty in fragility as proved by Gu Yue's works slightly reminiscent of Ruth Asawa's structures, costructed from chemical fibers melted and cut, metaphors for women blooming, or in Li Hui, Yang Yitong and Zhuang Xiafen's PLA cloud-like structure made with a 3D pen, a piece that symbolises the linear language of today's vast and rapid flow of information.

Shi Jindian's X-ray like sculptures of vehicles exploring the complexity and beauty of machinery, look very fragile, but they are actually made with stainless steel wire.

American artist Warren Seelig also works with the theme of ethereal structures: his translucent textile installation made of hundreds of monofilament nylon threads that can stretch for about 8 metres across the circumference of a room, the abundance of threads accumulating in the centre creating an illuminated floating ring. Jayoung Yoon usually transforms fragile hair into geometrical sculptures, but her "Umbilicality" project featured in this exhibit consists in a live performance with two dancers connected by a funnel shaped organic web made of human hair. 

Nature is a great inspiration for some artists: Hong Xingyu & Luan Xinyu's wool fiber tapestries are inspired by natural colours; Jiang Yunge's landscapes recreate mountains in felt and flowing streams of water with gorgeous threads, while Tali Weinberg materialises climate data with plant-derived fibres and dyes in her tapestries. 

Some artists focused their projects mainly on textiles for the tactile and visual pleasures they can provide us with: Yang Jing and Li Na's thermochromic/photochromic yarn hand-made abstract paintings change colour when exposed to heat or light, while Zeng Qiaoling projects digital images on her intricate three-dimensional tapestries allowing them to become dynamic pieces.

Other artists use their works to develop narratives around social issues: Jia Zijian employs industrial gloves as a medium and a rust staining technique to create textures and prompt visitors to ponder about the connections between people, cities and industrial processes. Wang Lei's military parade armor of Emperor Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty, recreated with Liberation Army Daily newspapers, assumes a new meaning, reuniting in itself a series of dichotomies -  war and peace, force and culture, fragility and hardness.  

Architecture is the main force behind Jin Ansha's installation in which she employs plastic to create urban landscapes that activate a dialogue about pollution, but it is also present in Liz Collins' crowd control and traffic barriers transformed from urban elements into giant looms.

Annet Couwenberg's origami patterns (engraved on laser cut buckram and then hand folded) and the structures supporting them designed in Rhino, a 3D software program, hide some architectural principles. There are more references to architecture in Anne Wilson's "Errant Behaviors" a video combined with Shawn Decker's sound composition, a frame-by-frame animation that calls to mind the structural development of lace and that features a series of fragile and odd cytyscapes. 

Errant Behaviors from Shawn Decker on Vimeo.

Quite a few artists are drawn by the possibilities of optical fibers and LED lights: Li Wei intergrated this technology in her screens inspired by Chinese ink paintings; Yue Song's tree blooms with optical fibers celebrating the connections between ecology and information; Lin Lecheng, Li Guangzhong and Lin Yuehong's Pavilion of Light combines bamboo segments of different lengths witn LED lights programmed to create gradual transitions between colours, while Wang Jian's silica gel bags and plastic snap buttons statues integrate inside them sensor lighting systems.

Very contemporary themes such as cyberbullling, Internet addiction, online sexual abuse and over-sharing personal information are tackled by Xie Yong's statues of kids protected (or maybe trapped...) in cocoon-like structures, while Lia Cook worked on data visualisation in her 32 woven images of the same face translated differently through the weaving process and incorporating data and neural connections to trigger different emotional responses in the viewers.

But the event is not just about visiting the virtual pavilions of China and the USA and passively admire the various installations. Lin Lecheng, Professor of Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, and member of the exhibition Advisory Committee thinks indeed that the Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art Virtual Exhibition is a great way to get inspired and push the boundaries of textile art even more. "I do believe it is essential and meaningful for these two countries' fiber artists, educators, and scholars to continue to exchange their artistic, educational, and cultural research and investigation to support and prepare for the future of the
Fiber Art field," he states. 

The programme of this event also features an international symposium online via the Tencent 腾讯 conference platform ( VooV Meeting ). Taking place from 9 to 12am CST on 5 December 2020 ( 8 to 11pm on 4 December EST ), the discussion will bring together six fiber artists to share their perspectives on the history of fiber art, as well as details of their practice. Art professionals, students, and other interested audiences are all welcome to participate.

If Letizia Battaglia's "Cuties" Scare People (Without Even Twerking)

In September there was a huge debate on social media about Maimouna Doucouré's French-language feature debut "Mignonnes" (Cuties). The film is a modern coming-of-age story about a Senegalese Muslim immigrant girl living in the suburbs of modern-day Paris who makes friends with a group of girls and starts hanging around with them. The movie was attacked on social media by many people (who didn't even bother watching the film) who believed it was about a twerking dance crew of young girls and that it glamorised children's sexualisation. In the last few days there has been a story in the news in Italy that seems to have some connections with the reactions about "Cuties".

Italian phortographer Letizia Battaglia, famous all over the world for her brave black and white images of crime and Mafia killings in Sicily, took part in a campaign organised by Italian brand and manufacturer of luxury sports cars Lamborghini.

Entitled "With Italy, For Italy" the campaign is a celebration of Italy and a hymn to beauty in a difficult and scary year that saw the world ravaged by the Coronavirus pandemic and Italy becoming one of the hardest hit European countries.

Art director Stefano Guindani, a fashion and lifestyle photographer, selected 21 photographers to picture beauty in a journey through the Italian regions. A wide range of photographers was chosen, from artists who have a passion for streetstyle and design to photographers who specialise in social themes, art, architecture and the automotive sector.

Each of them presented their vision: some juxtaposed Lamborghini luxury sports cars to a sublime landscape, others to an iconic architectural landmark. Palermo-born Letizia Battaglia, selected to represent her region, Sicily, put the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ in the background and let her girls take centre stage. Battaglia, who is 85, has indeed been shooting portraits of young girls throughout her career.

Yet, judging from the reactions she got, most people who left comments about the images didn't really know her work: social media erupted with some people complaining about the fact the shoot wasn't in her trademark black and white tones (she actually took two different sets in black and white and in colour and Lamborghini chose the set in colour). Others stated that this was too commercial for her, even though fans of commercial campaigns disagreed, saying this wasn't commercial enough as the car is mainly in the background or blurred.

Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando, a friend of Battaglia who also served as town councillor for the quality of life in Palermo, asked Lamborghini to withdraw the campaign as the City Council never authorised it (the company actually asked for the permission to make a cultural and social shoot to celebrate the beauty of Italy, but the local authorities complained they never got the details about the campaign). According to the local City Council, the female body in these images was used for commercial messages and marketing purposes.

As highlighted above, Battaglia, often portrayed young girls in her shoots as they played, stood still in the street or stared back at the photographer with a sweet yet inquisitive look in their eyes. Battaglia has always loved taking pictures of young girls as she identified herself in them.

In this specific set she wanted these young and carefree girls to represent not a vision for the next Pirelli calendar, but hope and a metaphor for the future of Palermo. If you look at these images and you know Battaglia's work, you will find connections with previous photographs: the red-haired girl with the blurred car in the background, for example, is reminiscent of the young child in Battaglia's picture "Young girl with rose", took in Palermo in 1995.

But there are clear connections between these Palermo girls and other young girls living in other countries. The girl in shorts may be the Italian sister of Maimouna Doucouré's "Cuties": in one image she looks a bit bored; in another she's hugging a friend while around them there's the chaos of the city. In the background there's a blurred yellow Lamborghini, its colour creating connections with the restaurant sign behind the girls. The images are as simple as selfies, the main protagonists of the shoot aren't indeed the luxury cars, but unsophisticated girls in ordinary clothes because real beauty, raw beauty, is not sophisticated.

Lamborghini was happy with the results as they wanted the car to be an accessory of this campaign and not the real protagonist, after all, this story wasn't about selling cars, but about beauty in Italy. 

In car campaigns and in the history of fashion there has always been a trend to portray a beautiful woman next to a car but this is not the intent of this campaign. As you may remember from a previous post, between the late '50s and early '60s, Vogue US published a series of Cadillac and Chevrolet adverts in which models donned designs inspired by cars. One of the Chevrolet ads featured a woman in a bright red design and stated: "Cherchez la femme en la Chevy. Look for the woman in a 1959 Chevrolet – and you'll find a woman in style!"

The fashion-cars symbolism became even stronger thanks to glamorous movies and film stars: Edward Quinn’s photographs offer a great chance to look at film icons such as Gina Lollobrigida, Grace Kelly, Alain Delon or Jane Fonda, standing next to or sitting behind the wheel of beautiful cars. Quinn chronicled through his images how cars became for many celebrities symbols of their iconic status and of their glamorous lifestyles.

Decades later visual artist Cheyco Leidmann populated instead his universe - a fantastically surreal, impudent and at times disturbing world born out of violence, obsessions and sex - of women's bodies wearing tight clothes in hyper real colours provocatively posing next to cars.

Battaglia's shoot is not a "donne & motori" (a theme that also Miuccia Prada explored in her S/S 2012 collection) themed cover for Italian magazine Quattroruote (its covers, as stated in a previous post, were characterised by two key elements - a car and a woman) nor it is an advert in the style of Chevrolet's "Cherchez la femme en la Chevy".  

The shoot is about girls who, like the "Cuties" are in a limbo between childhood and girlhood, they long to become women, but they also hope to stay children for a little bit longer. It is not about girls dreaming of becoming the sex toy of a man with a luxury sports car, because that's what some men read behind these images. 

For the time being, though, this opinion prevailed: Lamborghini removed the images from social media and while Battaglia wonders if the time has come for her to leave the International Centre for Photography (Centro internazionale di fotografia at the Cantieri cuturali della Zisa) that she helped founding and that she still manages, you wonder why young and carefree girls scare grown-ups - especially grown-up men - so much. But you also wonder why these men are never ready to stand up and attack those ones who really exploit the female body. 

When fashion designer Philipp Plein posted on his Instagram account images of scantily clad ladies washing his luxury cars and playing around with sponges and water or provocatively posing on and around a Ferrari nobody screamed about the female body being sexually exploited (apart from Ferrari that, more concerned about their trademarks, sent the designer a letter stating "Ferrari's trademarks and model cars are associated in your pictures with a lifestyle totally inconsistent with Ferrari's brand perception, in connection with performers making sexual innuendos and using Ferrari's cars as props in a manner which is per se distasteful").

In 1982 Battaglia took a tragic picture of a sex worker killed in Palermo. Her name was Nerina and was killed by the Mafia because she had started dealing drugs by herself, disrespecting the Mafia laws. Nerina was killed in the small flat where she lived, together with two friends, but Battaglia's photograph allowed Nerina to keep on telling her story to other generations.

When we see Nerina's picture in galleries and at photographic exhibitions we do not scream in horror while we should definitely do so thinking about this tragic story of sexual exploitation, drugs and violence. Battaglia's images for Lamborghini represent new possibilities for the young girls portrayed, possibilities that 38 years ago were denied to women like Nerina, such as the possibility for a woman to dismantle the male gaze with her self-determination and live a happy and carefree life. 

Coronavirus Mink Mutations & The End of the Fur Trade

In a previous post we looked at the debate about the decision of the Danish government to cull the country's entire mink population - that is millions of minks - to prevent a mutated Coronavirus from being passed to humans. In that post we also briefly looked at the consequences the cull may have had on the fur industry. But there are further updates regarding that story that we should look at. This week it was indeed announced that the Covid-19 mutation found in mink in Denmark was probably extinct.  

Infections among mink were first reported in April when mink in multiple farms across The Netherlands were first infected with Coronavirus by their farmers. Then followed infections of mink in other countries, with outbreaks in Spain and Denmark; in August around 10,000 mink died from Covid-19 at fur farms in Utah, in the US. More outbreaks were found in mink farms in Wisconsin and Michigan. The symptoms of Covid-19 in mink are not dissimilar to the ones in humans, and the animals usually show breathing difficulties and discharge from their eyes and nose, and eventually die very quickly. 

The Danish government was worried when the virus first passed from humans to animals and then mutated. The mutation occurred in the spike protein on the virus' surface (the mink variant, known as Cluster-5 or C5 seems harder for antibodies to neutralise), the part of the virus that infects healthy cells and Coronavirus vaccines are designed to disable the spike protein, but such vaccines may not provide protection against this mutation. The main concern of the Danish government was that the mutation may have passed again to humans, creating a new pandemic.

 At the beginning of November, the Danish government announced the decision to cull more than 15 million of mink as a precautionary measure at farms where infections were recorded or that were based near infected farms. A few days later Frederik Waage, law professor at the University of Southern Denmark, stated the cull order was illegal: the government didn't indeed have the legal authority to mandate the killing of mink on farms unaffected by Covid-19. Besides, the mass culling should have been a recommendation rather than an order. Yet, the cull had already started and went officially on (but the debate over it forced the resignation of Denmark's agriculture minister, Mogens Jensen). Two days ago it was announced that the Danish Covid mink variant was probably extinct, in the meantime Covid-19 mink variants were discovered in other countries as well, including Russia, Italy and Greece.

The news about Covid-19 mutations in mink had some positive effects as they raised alarms regarding animal farming and the conditions in which mink are kept: in September, an investigation by an NGO uncovered animals kept in horrific conditions in mink farms in Poland with cases of cannibalism, self-aggression, open wounds and sick animals, and the Polish government recently announced a bill banning fur farming (even though in this case the reduction in demand may be the real reason behind the decision of the government). At the moment Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, the Republic of North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and the UK have banned fur farming. In August the Dutch government announced that mink fur farms must permanently close by March 2021: mink fur was banned in 2013 in The Netherlands and the deadline to comply was originally set to 2024 but Covid-19 accelerated the process. France may also join these countries as the last four remaining mink fur farms in the country are expected to close by 2025.

Kopenhagen Fur, Denmark's cooperative of 1,500 breeders, originally founded in 1930 and the world's largest fur auction house, announced this week it will shut its doors in the next two to three years. 

"Unfortunately, the loss of the Danish mink production means that the ownership base disappears and therefore, the company's management has decided to gradually downsize the company and make a controlled shutdown over a period of 2-3 years," the company said Thursday on its website. "Kopenhagen Fur is built on the cooperative spirit's belief in the individual and its strength in the community. Unfortunately, even the strongest community cannot survive the consequences of the decisions that have now been made." 

In the short term the business will go on as usual as the company will receive Danish skins from healthy farms and skins from other countries as well in the next weeks to be sold at four auctions planned for 2021. Besides, another auction may take place in 2022 and maybe in 2023. Kopenhagen Fur's younger brand - Oh! by Kopenhagen Fur - also shut in October.

These new developments accelerated by Coronavirus are marking the slow yet relentless end of the fur trade. And while we may be nearer the end of animal cruelty in the name of luxury, the next few years will be crucial for those fur farmers who will have to radically rethink their lives and who will hopefully be able to move towards more sustainable businesses.