In between Hanbok. Wearable matters actively shape the wearer’s mode of being in the world. Alternative worldmaking comes along with different types of clothing. Yoonha Kim has been spending time with the makers and weavers of Hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, focusing on its underlying relational ontology. After almost 150 years of sociotechnical and sartorial Westernisation, Hanbok is reinvented in diverse forms, even through digitisation. In dialogue with phygital fashion designer Zil Vostalova, this talk focuses on the possibilities of virtual clothing, sparking visions of pluriversality. How can wearables in the digital realm affect relations between humans and Earth beings? How do we compose worlds through digital garment making?

Yoonha Kim is a Korean visual anthropologist. She is interested in how people imagine the future and take action. From filmmaking to 3D design workshops, she explores multi-modal forms of ethnographic fieldwork. In her PhD research at Humboldt University, she is currently looking into traditional Korean clothing – the ›Hanbok‹ – as an active matter. Her focus is on the diversification of garment structures connected to alternative ways of living amid technological contexts such as augmented reality, outer space exploration, and artificial intelligence. She studied Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins, and Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Zil Vostalova is a phygital fashion designer. She holds a degree from the faculty of Humanities at Charles University and in Fashion Design at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute (AMFI). She combines virtual prototyping, 3D printing and body scanning – all connected under the project of the PhyGital FashionTM. This project explores boundaries between the tangible world of fashion and digital representations of a garment. Practically, it examines the possibilities that digitalisation brings into the fashion craft. Along this comes the respect to materiality: garment deconstruction and no-waste patterning combined with the cut-up technique (découpé) concludes in an assemblage of a new garment. Inspiration comes from the process of deconstructing garments, the study of historical costume and the randomness of a game. Currently, she is advancing a project entitled giz’mo lab (https://www.gizmo-lab.com/), preparing a presentation for the Spring 2021 fashion week in Prague.

ANTART Field/Works Talk #9: Yoonha Kim  and Zil Vostalova

"Nani Ghar / नानी घर Images meant the truth; in our school textbooks, of our childhood and definitely of the world beyond; or so we believed. The authority of images as truth was only challenged when I started to make my own (images and meanings). To make my images was to build my world, the autonomy in authorship was liberating but soon, one realizes that this autonomy is a consequence of privilege.Image-making has become an integral part of our lives. We are photographing and filming our food, our friends/family and also ourselves constantly. One can accept this as a practice of creating and maintaining an archive, a live archive that will influence our understanding of our past and hence ourselves. We are heavily into the creation of our image not just for today, but for the years and generations to come. How can this archive then be read and does it communicate a sense of our identity? My grandmother and I ask each other where we are from, individually and collectively, as citizens of the world. We reflect together, she with her shard of mirror and I, with mine. The only scope for mistake in this process is to believe that our shard can reflect the whole truth."

"Hello, I’m Savyasachi and I record everyday videos, sounds and images. Sometimes I make films out of them and sometimes I just play them back to myself. I am primarily interested in the everyday mundane and its reflections/influences on the lives of people across generations and cultures. At present, I am interested in exploring the relationships between photography and film as a medium, as a mode of representation and as a form of public archive/documentation."
"Hello, I am Harsha Menon and I make films and sound pieces for the cinema and gallery. As an artist and anthropologist, I am interested in post-colonial theory, social practice, sonic ethnography, and transnational feminisms. I teach contemporary art, film and visual anthropology. My present project explores friendship as an aesthetic at a Buddhist nunnery."

ANTART FieldWorks #10: Savyasachi Anju Prabir and Harsha Menon

For anthropologists and artists “doing fieldwork” in contemporary worlds, art can be much more than an object of investigation. Curation and creation through visual, audio, or performing arts are at the heart of their work, extending the established anthropological interest in writing as a medium of thought and knowledge sharing. This exhibition presents works by anthropologists and artists who break disciplinary boundaries, and whose practice foregrounds experimental, and open approaches to the theme “field/works”. 

This series is curated by Jen Clarke and Maxime Le Calvé. We intend to provide a new space for discussion around and across the thematic of the virtual exhibition "Field/Works": https://antart.easaonline.org/ 

All members of ANTART (EASA) are all invited to attend. If you wish to participate in a particular talk with a short paper (5 minutes) which would resonate with the topic or — even better — with the artwork presented in that talk, please get in touch with us.

ANTART Field/Works Talk #9: Yoonha Kim and Zil Vostalova

ANT ART

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