clothe-graphy

by Jano Cortijo

We live surrounded by objects. From the most indispensable to the most useless, our daily life is inevitably linked to things that either make easier or more difficult the most diverse activities.

These objects come to us under different circumstances and few times do we think about them further from their literal usefulness. A decoration, a book or a garment coexist for some time with us and for reasons equally varied they become silent storages of anecdotes and feelings.

But due to their evident physical proximity, a piece of clothing exceeds its quality of utilitarian object and ends up turning into a kind of emotional shell for whom wears it after having worn it in meaningful moments of that individual’s personal history.

When traditional media for recording events like writing or photography are not sufficient for us, we opt for personal and peculiar ways of conserving and transmitting that which happens to us.

Ruth Pröglhöf and Patricia Zevallos found that the selective accumulation of clothes was nothing else than the configuration of a personal calligraphy to retain moments or times, days or years, of their personal histories. The garments exhibited in clothe-graphy are part of two particular museums of affection and emotion where blouses or dresses have been turned by time into documents of a specific time, into invaluable containers of anecdotes and feelings that until now preserve that unrepeatable coincidence of here-s and now-s.

clothe-graphy proposes something more meaningful that an exact biographical narration or a precise chronological tale: the exhibition recreates atmospheres and sensations through the affective load of those garments saved with special devotion. Pröglhöf and Zevallos go beyond the cliché that associates clothing with the feminine to present an intimate and personal discourse that, nevertheless, admits multiple readings and interpretations on a collective level.

text for the exhibition “ropografia” by Patricia Zevallos and Ruth Proglhof Trujillo, August 2003