De_sign is a performance-installation that examines how design systems orient the body and reproduce gendered behaviour. Combining movement analysis, garments, and spatial props, the work stages a series of directed actions in which the body negotiates objects that structure posture, balance, and orientation. Through these interactions the body becomes disaligned—skewed, unstable, or off-balance—revealing how seemingly natural gestures are learned, repeated, and culturally encoded.
The work investigates how design and media representations produce gender norms through cultural artefacts. Through an act of DE___SIGNing, the project dissects the visual and spatial codes that organise the mediated body, extracting and reassembling them into an abstract vocabulary of gendered signs. These reconstructed artefacts are activated through performance, allowing the body to rehearse alternative orientations and positions.
A central component of the work is The Act of Sitting, which examines the culturally coded differences in how gendered bodies occupy the same posture. Garments and props guide the performer into positions associated with gendered meaning, exposing them as learned behaviours while opening the possibility of new movement vocabularies.
Credits
Concept, Research, Design: Gabriel A. Maher
Film: Kimon Kodossis
Movement: Floriane Misslin, Olle Lundin, Naomi Jansen
Format / Materials
Performance installation with garment series; block screen-printed textiles on linen; custom garments; wooden chair prop; film documentation and movement choreography.
The cultural contrast and stereotype that still exists between differently gendered bodies in the same sitting position was noted as a starting point. The interaction explores the position itself, the space taken up by the position, the object/garment which controls the position and the site of the body. The mark of claimed space is physically stitched into the garment. The body is directed into positions which have gendered meaning. The interaction seeks to reduce the gendering of these positions and reveal them as learnt behaviour.
This garment series is designed to articulate, define and reconfigure ideas about the construction of gender. The design explores constructions of gender through vocabularies of movement. The series is an abstract and symbolic exploration demonstrated through performance and movement analysis and documented through film.
The purpose of this series is to deconstruct the ways in which clothing is used to compose and structure our genders. As such, the garment series alludes to how we read the body, how we divide and dissect it, using visual cues to establish gendered meaning. The aim is to subvert and explore these readings in an abstract way.
Film Produced by Kimon Kodossis, 2014
Movement: Floriane Misslin, Olle Lundin, Naomi Jansen