Wearing Seeds, Sand, and Seawater. Living Garments as Sensory Images

Abstract

Dress has already been denoted as active by diverse disciplinal strands, especially material culture studies (e.g. Woodward 2005; Miller 2010), affect theory (Ruggerone 2016), and new materialism (Smelik 2018). Yet, how living could dress truly be? This question leads us into the realm of biomaterials, a term that in fashion describes garments made out of biological matter (cotton or animal/plant leather), but that in the work of Peruvian dress artist Verónica Madueño is pushed further towards keeping matters alive while they are acting as dress: gelatinous creations encompassing in an amber-like manner herbal/flower seeds, sand, and seawater, as well as accessories fabricated from corn and spirulina. As conceptual clothes, Madueños’s works celebrate the contingencies in creating (making-with instead of making-of) and wearing (mold and ice) living agents. In a world that is becoming increasingly pictorial, these environment-as-garments loosen our visual grip of the world, but enable us to experience it differently and most immediately when wearing it. Bringing our senses to life, Madueño’s living dresses shock and shove their wearers towards the image’s exit.