Sylvie
Ungauer

17.11.2022

Démembrement

2016

Démembrement

Dismemberment, 2016 Fabric, paper, glue, wood, polystyrene
Variable dimensions

I molded pieces of “generic” bodies from standard models of women and men. These objects, made of paper mache are going to be “dressed” completely in fabric, so that they look like pieces of garment. To make them, I worked with the costume designer Christine Hascouët.
These objects are light, wearable portable as a garment and handleable. They come to impale themselves on sticks to become sculptures ready of being brandished during demonstrations.
They are similar to the objects of strikes and as well as fancy dresses made in the workplace for parties.

Half emblems, half disguises, they are presented in a installation: “Dismemberment” and used for the movie/performance « I’m still working on our new outfit …”.

Produced in framework of the research project” A l’Ouest Toute! Workers of Brittany and somewhere else” managed with Fabienne Dumont at Ecole Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne.

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Dessins préparatoires

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Démembrement, 2016
Drawings for the project of performance

If we imagine a scenario of a “dystopian future”, a future in which “we already live” the labour is affected, the labour is modified, decreased under the control of the money, the dictatorship of the logic. Jobs are moved, jobs are deleted. In garment sector, the disappearance of manufacturing clothes causes the disappearance of the society which it included, or rather, the consciousness of the body pulling its dismemberment, its dislocation.

Here is the basic premise of the piece, which is anchored in a real situation after an investigation at the workshop that made clothes for the Navy in the arsenal of Brest.

Today this workshop is closed. It was the territory of the tailor, the needlewoman, the clothing, the culture of the body. Suits, smocks, collars, pants, shirts, spencers, shorts, sleeves, buttonholes, shoulder straps, epaulets, bonnets, serge, denim and others, are manufactured in distant countries around the world. The uniform of the sailor is a reorganization of fragments of foreign bodies.