Angelica questions&answers

Hawaiian Shirt day

2015

Video shown on 42” flatscreen w. headphones 7.30 min

a pattern shirt hanging on the wall

a framed photogprah (13x18 cm) placed on the floor

What kind of things will you do to reproduce?

The piece is put on display in an exhibition entitled Precarious: on the new labours ethics and aesthetics. It consist of a 7.30 min. long video essay, a pattern shirt a framed photograph. The video-essay borrows its visual material online from companies product images and peoples home-made-instruction movies on Youtube, in which men explain the rules of sartorial elegance. The voices are replaced by the artist's own written text explaning the history of tropical shirts, cotton production and concepts like Aloha Friday and Casual Friday. We see female hands in action, showing the entire process of how to make a dressed shirt. All the images and videos in this show, are reproduced and claim to be images of labour. The framed photograph is a snapshot documentation from a laundry in Gothenburg. In thewindow, they make themselves visible with a big sign saying: “A SHIRT IS CLEAN AND SMOOTH” alongside prices to get different piece's of clothing and fabrics washed. The pattern shirt hangs on the wall, next to the flatscreen.

Where is the closest form of extra terrestrial life?

Youtube channels and the shirts pink buttons. Pink is my favourite color. I always use it. I have a whole book about the color. My fantasy is really bad, I’m more hands on and practical, but realism would be the wrong word.

What are your essential properties?

The pattern shirt. It's made out of digital printed pattern on plain white cotton. It’s colorful and the pattern is made out of my everyday surrounding props – a pink wig, shiny black shoes, a pinapple, a blue thin plastic bag and folded fabrics in different colors.

Cork? Walnut? Maple or Sage? Box thing tell me how you privately behave?

There is no privacy in this world. Everything stands on a grey broadloom. Multiply desks made out of walnut. The work takes place in what we might call ’professional life’, in this case an open office-space. The tropical shirt is not usually associated with such a strict environment. Imagine surfers on the beach. The artist Kristoffer Svenberg claim surfers to be the new colonialists. A friend of mine, who works as a researcher in evolutionary biology told me that a lot of men at conferences she attends wear this kind of shirt, it’s their academic dress code.

What is the weather like with you?

The work take place indoors, it’s an office space or a big chamber for decison-making where air-conditioning is essential for survival. The weather played an important role in 1962, when the state of Hawaii said yes to a resolution that advised all men who worked as politicans and official workers in the senate to wear Hawaiian Shirts during the hot summer months from May to October.