Biennial of Arts & Crafts & Design
”Liquid life is the kind of life commonly lived in our contemporary, liquid-modern society….Liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty. The most acute and stubborn worries that haunt this liquid life are the fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast moving events, of overlooking the ’use by’ dates and being saddled with worthless possessions, of missing the moment calling for a change of tack and being left behind.”
Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid Life. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
‘The Eternal Moment’
Seeking to capture poetic moments in time and manifest them in a dress, the project sets out to establish frameworks and conditions for these moments to occur and be preserved in photography or in three-dimensional form on the body. Materials and techniques combine characteristics of speed and slowness.
The speed lies in the high-tech material Morphotex, in both its production and expression, which also reflects the fleeting character of the reflections of light off a butterfly wing thanks to a technique developed through in-depth lab studies in Japan. The hemp is also Japanese but painstakingly hand-woven, based on old traditions, while the addition of the digital print brings the speed back up.
These reflections on time, our use of time and content in time have inspired my development process and relate to the biennale theme, ‘Liquid Life’, and to Zygmundt Bauman’s theory on ‘Liquid Modernity’, in which modernity is viewed as an eternally temporary, varying and fragile entity.
Ole Akhøj
Anne Damgaard
Danish Arts Foundation
