Creatures of Future/Past

The Bone Costumes simultaneously speak to the past and to the future. The idea originates from the artist’s research into historical corsets – designed to press natural bodies into ideal shapes, much like sculpting tools. Crossed with contemporary fashion technology, they evolved into exo-skeletons, half-organic half-mechanical apocalyptic outfits. These Bone Costumes take up our ambiguous relationship with animals – the mass consumption of living beings, the ongoing extinction of species, but also the longing for human-animal communication. When worn as wearables, they evoke the complex cultural knot of imagery of death and consumption, of animals as friends, relative, and Other, of separation and merging, and shamanistic ideas of energetic human-animal connections.
While we consume and use domestic animals like industrially produced wares and drive wild animals into extinction by refusing to concede them a minimum of space and resources on the planet, we also dream of harmony between the species. Many concepts of paradise across cultures include the idea of peace between humans and animals. SciFi and popular culture fantasize about extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space, while our industrialized lifestyle is resulting in the mass extinction of the only other known conscious beings in the universe right on our planet.