CURATING EMOTIONS

Closed for renovations since April 2018, Antwerp’s ModeMuseum, also known as MoMu, has finally reopened its doors. Thanks to Kaat Debo, who has been the museum’s director and curator for almost two decades, MoMu has cemented the privileged relationship Antwerp has with fashion, culture, history and innovation. 

Debo isn’t your typical curator, and she loves to push the envelope with exhibitions that are often surprising, compelling and original. ‘E/MOTION. Fashion in transition’ opened this weekend and presents fashion as an illustration of our fears, longing and desires.

We sat down with Debo to discuss renovation during a pandemic, the importance of emotion in her work and how she shops designer collections as a museum curator. 

Renovating a museum within a pandemic outbreak must have been challenging. How did you deal with this?

3 years sounds like a long time, but as the renovation itself was complex, it was in fact quite a short period for such a task. The pandemic affected everything of course, starting with the preparation of the new exhibition. Most fashion houses were focused on saving their businesses and delivering on time, so we were not a priority for them. It was very difficult to get the loans we wanted, and for the books we were working on, some photographers could not access their archives anymore due to the lockdown. The building itself was delayed due to shortage of materials, until quite recently. That was challenging.  

Guess calling it a ‘labor of love’ is not an exaggeration then.

At the same time, I don’t want to complain, because I know how tough it has been for other museums that were open and had to change their rules constantly, losing considerable income as well. In that sense, the timing was not bad for a renovation, it was just difficult to do it.

“I don’t think you can separate emotion from fashion.”

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Did COVID-19 influence your exhibition planning in any way?

We had started working on ‘E/MOTION. Fashion in transition’ before the pandemic started, but when it came to the direction of the exhibition itself, I really wanted something that reflected the moment we were in and the challenges designers had been facing. If you look at the past three decades, they show the growth and evolution of globalization, which affected fashion in a really strong way, so the idea was to reflect on the big transformative moments taking place over the past 30 years, from economic recession and political turmoil to global terrorism and different kinds of health crises.  

Emotion is an important part of what you create as a museum director and curator. How do you see its relationship to the fashion world?

I don’t think you can separate emotion from fashion. Faced with COVID-19, designers had to find new ways to communicate their storytelling digitally as opposed to physically, and that meant finding alternatives to the traditional show format. This search for new ways was very interesting for me, as well as trying to figure out what the place of real emotion would be within the industry today. We wanted physical presence in the exhibition through performance, which is new within that context. We thought it’d be wonderful to have a human presence after months spent behind computer screens.

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 Some brands continued doing shows even after the pandemic started. Did that feel strange to you? Can things be exactly the same as they were before?

Well, I did find it a bit strange as well. Digital allowed many designers to be innovative and find successful ways to communicate with their audiences. This doesn’t mean that everyone was successful doing it, but the possibilities of digital are huge.

I’ve wanted to ask you this for a long time: how do you keep up with the changes at major fashion houses, where designers seem to come and go? Does this make your job harder as a curator? 

That is one of the biggest challenges when you collect contemporary fashion as a museum. It’s very difficult to decide in the moment whether something is relevant or has historical importance. A curator should be able to enjoy some kind of critical distance and space for reflection, but fashion doesn’t allow you to do that. You need to decide immediately what pieces to buy and don’t have the luxury of waiting for another 6 months. Most of our purchasing takes place during the show period, which is quite complicated. What we acquire as a museum should not only reflect the times we’re living in, but also present a designer’s signature, as well as express political and societal changes. It is true that creative directors come and go at a rapid pace, which means that, as a museum, we also have the responsibility to document this, even though it’s quite a recent phenomenon within the industry itself.

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Kaat Debo was interviewed by Philippe Pourhashemi

www.momu.be

SLICED INTO EXISTENCE

Shimmering on the flyaway paper of a cut magazine, the delicate sensuality of a pale male silhouette has something of a renaissance painting: the world of collage artist TheSkinnyType.

 In a world where reality is but a Photoshop brush away from fiction Colombian-born, London-based Martin turns his source material of photographs into idyllic scenarios of love and poetic (self) obsession. A lo-fi performance that he achieves with little more than a sharp blade, a stack of magazines and an endless fascination for images.

 But beyond the almost translucent quality of his productions, he carves out another reality: the idea that images are but partial stories that unfurl fully in the mind. From the Dadaists to the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Henri Matisse to Oscar Wilde, collage has long been an interlope media that artists have wielded to extend narratives well into surreal territory. Chimaeras and impossible situations come to life under the hands of those who see beyond the fixed reality of a flat page.

 For Behind The Blinds, he lifts a corner for a peek into the layers of his world. 

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Your images are usually quite sensual, but there’s more about the factual nudity of the Antiquity, rather than the provocative, confrontational, sexualized nudity of today’s world.

 Agreed. Sensuality is obviously one of the main drives in my work. For me, sensuality needs some drama, needs to leave something to the imagination. To portray the instant before an action happens but not quite the action itself. That is something that classicism and Renaissance art do quite well. I’ve always been fascinated by classical art, especially the Greek approach to the human body and its concept of idealised beauty, maybe combining that with today’s wider and more transversal approach to gender and masculinity.

How did you become The Skinny Type?

I don’t have an artistic formation but I’ve always been fascinated by art, first as an observer then gradually as creator. I’ve also tried different mediums –photography and drawing primarily– but somehow it was through collage that I found consistency on creating constantly, which I really, really enjoy. I work in architecture, designing structures for buildings, so this is more of a hobby for me. I guess the enjoyment of being meticulous and spending time and energy in small details is the connection between the two.

Theskinnytype started with myself. I have always been very skinny, perhaps too much, and it took me a while to feel comfortable with that, to learn not only to accept this thinness but to love and celebrate it. When I started creating collage, it felt just natural to use the name as my artistic pseudonym.

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What was attractive about the non-digital process of making collages?

I love doing things with my hands, especially if they need to be precise and time consuming. I also love the constraints that the analogue process imposes on you. On digital works the possibilities are endless. You can manipulate and adjust an image as much as you want – that kills the magic for me. On the other hand, with analogue collages, you are constrained by the physicality and rigidness of the raw material. Backgrounds, size, colour, you name it, which for me adds to the excitement when two different images actually come together to generate a new story or composition.

You’ve started to superimpose layers of analogue images as well. Why?

The layering started by chance, just by looking through a page of a magazine against my window and discovering how beautiful the combination of images from both sides of the page were. It’s like a different kind of collage, less realistic but with the ultimate constraint: I cannot decide which images I superimpose nor the relationship between the two. It needs to be there already and come together by chance so my role is less about creating than about discovering something that is already there – more like curating, perhaps. I also like the fact that because I have no control over the mixes, I’m more willing to incorporate elements that I wouldn’t choose for a normal collage. These superimposed images look amazing in lightboxes as the work only comes alive when the light is on.

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What makes the cut? How does a collage start?

There is a lot of trial and error and the process always bring surprises. Sometimes I think two images would perfectly match and only after cutting and trying do I realise that the sizes are wrong or the composition doesn’t work. During the process, there is a lot of adjustment and diversion from the original idea – that’s the fun part! 

By contrast with more traditional collage, my works aims to create a composition that looks real but at the same time creates a sense of disturbance, as there is always something that is not quite right about the final image. You can see it is artificially put together but can’t instantly understand how. I’ve always enjoyed seeing friends with a collage in their hands trying to find out where the cuts are by sliding their fingers against the page, as they cannot work it out just by looking at the work.  There is a lot of treatment of the cut edges to make them vanish in the composition and there’s no digital retouching whatsoever.

How do you select an image for your work?

The selection has always started with a feeling; a desire to cutting an image and forcing someone else into an interaction that is unreal. A fantasy would perhaps be a better description. A constant in my work since the very beginning has been collages that create a sensual interaction between one guy and himself. I call this series “Narcissus dreams”.

Is there a story behind each of your images? Or do you create them more to express a feeling?

More than expressing something, I think I create them to materialise a fantasy. The original images have to instigate something in me but the final work has to tell a story. I love how mixing images conveys a completely different story or feeling to the original images taken in isolation.

What’s your preferred source material?

A handful of magazines mainly and of course some books from photographers I love. It is very interesting how you connect with other artists’ work and how what I do, I think, adds another layer to already amazing works. I’m constantly searching for images of photographers I like and to discover new ones. Even more relevant, I keep finding a connection with the people who curate those works for magazines; it is no coincidence that most of my works come from a few sources and photographers. Behind The Blinds is obviously a clear case. I discovered the magazine’s second issue and have never missed one since.

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Interview by Lily Templeton

TheSkinnyType