Studium Generale: 'Fashion held in Common. Take back Fashion!' - Pascale Gatzen
Lecture by Pascale Gatzen
To hold something or each other in common means that we are in a relationship of mutuality and interdependence, no longer in a relationship of domination and control. Silvia Federici points out that no common is possible unless we refuse to base our life, our reproduction on the suffering of others, unless we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them. If “commoning” has any meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject.
Marshal Rosenberg underlines that our survival as a species depends on our ability to recognize that our well-being and the well-being of others are in fact one and the same. How can we actively engage fashion’s compassionate potential to meet our common needs for connection, belonging, joy, mutuality and well-being?
Pascale Gatzen (Tilburg, 1969) is an artist, educator and fashion designer based in Arnhem, The Netherlands. Within her art and design practice, Gatzen produces and facilitates large collaborative projects using clothing as her main medium. Embracing fashion as a mode of human togetherness, the focus of both her artistic practice and her teaching is on the relational and empowering aspects of fashion, advancing cooperative models of production and exchange. As an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design in New York she developed and implemented an alternative fashion curriculum with an emphasis on community, selfexpression and love. She is a founding member of ‘friends of light’ a worker cooperative for textile production in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the Head of the MA Fashion Design program, at ArtEZ, University of the Arts, Arnhem, The Netherlands where she is creating and implementing a radically new curriculum named Fashion Held in Common. Her work has been shown and published internationally.
