Curated by Alessio de’Navasques
As an initiation, Si/lenzio invites inner reflection while not revealing that which has been seen and experienced. Following /gal-le-rì-a/ at Palazzo Farnese, Sylvio Giardina continues a path of experimenting with the relations between haute couture and visual art, with a project of regeneration and rebirth that touches on the archetypes of human feeling.
The majestic dimensions of emptiness with infinite time, of architecture and ruins that become mythological traces of human history – among the great vaults of the mystical and chiaroscuro sensations in the complex of the ancient Diocletian Baths of the Roman National Museum – lead to a performative experience, revealing theophanic knowledge. A spell is cast as a metaphor of the mechanism for removing the drive and its projection of the image while the performative is clothing itself, signifying the place that the individual body inhabits, through its “agency”, capable of influencing daily life as well as social systems.
Like a map, a landscape, the sculptural dress triggers movement in the space of Hall X, transforming each of its components through a centripetal flow of processes and sensations. The colors fluctuate, like brushstrokes, stratified among the geological layers of a textured and sculptural dimension in which the dress itself becomes both support and installation at the same time. It is the mystery of the performative that invites the visible, but not the spoken. Within the silence of an initiatory atmosphere, the ineffable dimension of sleep allows for an archeology of traces. This includes the stories of all the women who have passed through the Giardina atelier spanning more than ten years in fashion and includes scraps of fabric, yarns and embroideries, remnants of the actions of molding shapes on a mannequin. A vibrant and iridescent mosaic of memories which, among the nuances of past collections and special projects created by the designer, preserves the secret relationships between body and dress, the rituality of unusual occasions and domestic ceremonies. Randomly assembling/attaching/collecting this intimate fragmented archive onto fabric is an action of dripping. Sewing these compositions in the same position in which they accidentally fell, allows Giardina a freedom of action while questioning the codes of haute couture. He envisions the opportunity to create blooms and galaxies, symbols of eternal regeneration.
With the myth of Persephone, Arretos Kore, the “unspeakable girl” as Euripides defines her, who represents life, inspires a performance that becomes a rite of rebirth. The divine maiden – evoked by the Spanish performer Mina Serrano – in her indeterminacy of mother and virgin at the same time, as the most sacred yet indefinite female spirit, who cyclically returns from the underworld to bring back the seasons of spring and summer. “Kore is life in that it cannot be spoken, that is defined according to age, sexual identities and family and social masks” as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes in The Unspeakable Girl, Myth and Mystery of Kore.
Silence, as in all mystery rites, becomes the condition for starting a journey of knowledge evoked by the scale of the large halls of the Baths. The black and white mosaics with the motto of the oracle of Delphi “Gnothi sautòn” – know thyself – summons entry to the space where the sleeping girl, wrapped in her cosmic dress, flowery as if in an eternal spring, proposes a path of regeneration.
With this latest project, Sylvio Giardina questions the expressive modalities of fashion creation, which frees itself from the temporalities, modes, and superstructures of the fashion system. A collection of haute couture garments can be evoked through such an artistic project, which defines the signs, traces and colors of clothes to come as well as through sensations that are experienced. The dimensions of haute couture are for the designer allow for imagining a free space for reflection, where sartorial design becomes the starting point for his own artistic research. A theory which becomes the demonstration of how travel, intercontinental movements, and a strongly capitalistic tendency within the fashion system, can be rethought through new paradigms of creativity.
Alessio de’Navasques
Photograpy by Sara Galletta
