Items where Year is 2025

Franca Donda (Italy, 1933-2017) was an activist, filmmaker, and photographer who lived in Caracas for most part of the second half of the twentieth century. During these decades, she made several short films with the Venezuelan collectives Cine Urgente/Urgent Cinema (1968-1973) and Grupo Feminista Miércoles/Wednesday’s Feminist Group (1979-1988). Throughout her life, she also took thousands of photographs of women across Latin America. However, her work has received little scholarly attention, and her archive has not been properly preserved. This article demonstrates the importance of protecting the legacy of Donda, Cine Urgente, and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. To do so, it explores Donda’s multifaceted identity and outlines the production of the two collectives. It maps, locates, and assesses the conditions of some of the materials that could comprise their archive. And it reflects on issues of positionality and briefly describes the transmedia project that is emerging from this research.

Elsa Schiaparelli was well known for her collaborations with avant-garde artists, particularly those associated with the surrealist movement, however previous research has rarely discussed her relationship with the artist Leonor Fini. Between 1937-1940, Fini produced several designs for Schiaparelli, comprising three fashion illustrations and the bottle for the couturier’s perfume. Focusing on these illustrations, this article examines how Fini’s artistic aesthetic, particularly her use of animal-human hybrids, complemented and amplified the surrealist elements in Schiaparelli’s designs at this time. Capitalizing on the increasing popularity of surrealist imagery in contemporary fashion magazine publication, Fini and Schiaparelli both used the image of the woman-animal hybrid to evoke a sense of unease in contemporary audiences in a way that reflected deeper cultural tensions. These illustrations were a site of exchange between the two women, with a lasting influence on the Schiaparelli brand and on Fini’s ongoing artistic practice.

Captivating fusion of dance, art and costume design at The Moving Canvas Project Exhibition. This exhibition showcases the innovation work of Pavillion Dance South West’s adult contemporary company Co-Evo in collaboration with researchers Jenna Hubbard and Adele Keeley from Arts University Bournemouth.

In 2023, Co-Evo dancers worked alongside the research team to create a unique performance where movement and drawing intertwined. Though collaborative exploration, the dancers designed their own costumes by drawing and dancing simultaneously, allowing their movement to inspire their artistic expression.

This paper conducts a comparative philosophical analysis of the works of the speculative, design-fictional architect and film maker Liam Young, and the academic design theorist Tony Fry, focusing primarily upon their responses to questions of sustainability in the context of design and architectural practice, and their respective approaches to de- and re-futuring the Earth.

Whilst Fry's Design as Politics (2010) aims to highlight the urgency of environmental crisis and the implication of designers in this, its predominantly rational, absolutist and logico-propositional mode of communication distances it from an audience more attuned to affective, emotional, forms of exchange, and to imaginative modes of visualization. It is claimed here, firstly that Young’s project Planet City (2021), a multi-platform, design-fictional response to a very similar set of concerns, is better able to engage Fry’s intended audience, through its rallying of affective and fictional modes of graphical communication, and secondly that Fry’s overly strong commitment to a reality principle, and his call for methodological standardization in the context of design futuring, runs the risk of defuturing the more hubristic, imaginative and speculative responses that are nevertheless important to the process of ontological transformation.