‘Hope this feels familiar’
T* MITROVSKA
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Dushan Stefanovski
‘Hope this feels familiar’ is a collaborative project between T*MITROVSKA and the visual artist Dushan Stefanovski which was showcased on 10th March 2023 as the headlining show of Fashion Weekend Skopje.The project is playfully titled ‘hope this feels familiar’ as it was anything, but familiar for both collaborators, as well as, the local fashion scene. The idea was to create something disruptive which will occupy the ambiguous space between Teodora’s and Dushan’s backgrounds i.e. fashion and art.
The show took place at an industrial-looking office space in the newest shopping center in Skopje, East Gate as an opening show for the second evening of the fashion weekend. Apart from showcasing disruptive fashion, it was really important for me and Dushan to make sure the entire experience was immersive. There were no phones allowed in the audience (not even bloggers or the official social media crew, only the accredited photographers) as we wanted to remind the attendees to be present and enjoy the moment, but also strip away the ego moment of ‘look at me I am at an event and I am posting about it’ and allow the work to to be the loudest in the room.
With ‘Hope this feels familiar’ we wanted to explore and push the idea of what else can become ‘clothing’. Does clothing need to be made from fabric, or can it be a found object? Also does it need to be permanent or can it be assembled and disassembled within a 15-minute presentation?
While exploring the relationship between the body and the 3D objects we started thinking about the ability of objects to distort the body. Unlike clothes, which usually adjust to the body, using 3D objects meant that the body had to adjust to ‘the clothing’, changing its natural state and morphing into a new part-human part-object entity, we like to call a live sculpture. Looking to artists and designers Erwin Wurm and Rottingdean Bazaar, we wanted to incorporate the playfulness of the process and thus decided to allow the audience to witness the assembling and disassembling.
The final element of the performance was Dushan using these ‘live sculptures’ as 3D canvases to create the type of art he normally does in 2D. Using classic graffiti techniques to produce abstract art.
We were extremely grateful to be working with music artist Aka Thesaur, who also created the music for my ‘Mind Your Mind’ collection. For this occasion, he got inspired by the doily sculptures I had made from my grandma’s old doilies, which were part of the looks at the performance. This meant there were elements of traditional Macedonian songs incorporated in the ambiental music he created. In addition to this, it so happened that a lot of the objects we had used were resembling traditional Macedonian objects, so as the audience had gathered, there was an element of cultural disruption of tradition in the performance. This was not, a conscious aim for us, as we kept the process very organic and spontaneous, but we were very excited to have allowed the audience space to interpret the performance in their own way, and with that continue the life of the project, beyond the 15-minute presentation.
The spontaneity in the creative process was also dictated by the remote working we did. With me being in London and Dushan in Skopje we had nothing else but IG chats, video calls and those disappearing images you can send, to rely on. We both worked on separate elements of the looks. Dushan was gathering and curating the objects, while I was working on the doily sculptures and headpieces. This meant we only had a few days prior to the presentation, once I arrived in Skopje, to assemble the actual looks. It felt extremely liberating not to have to spend weeks on perfectly finishing hems, and just allow the moment to guide us, while we roughly tied things together with elastic, strings and tape.
It felt really refreshing to truly focus only on creating and the joy it brings to play with fashion.