Angelicas new draft
Aggressively Fun – Hillary Clinton the Musical
Connie meets Angelica
- The next show in Preface Space will be Hillary Clinton the Musical a new work by the Swedish artist Angelica Falkeling.
- Tell us about your artistic practice. I was educated as a fashion designer and I’m trained as a dressmaker. I’m interested in costumes, and how to appear in them. I think about clothing as a language. My focus has been on the history of the western male suit as a symbol of power. I approach this from a postcolonial, art historical and queer feminist perspective. By doing so, I started to visit rooms for politcal decision-making, such as parliments and city halls. Here the suit is still the norm. I claim that such places of assembly exclude certain bodies that is not defined as white and heterosexual, and predomenently male. The suit is past of that scene. In my exhibition practice I suggest other forms for representations, what a gesture of inclusion might look like.
- You are now taking steps into the politics of fashion, why? My deep hang-out* with the suited community made me look at how female politicians dress in parliaments. I used Margret Thatcher as a starting point. Thatcher writes in her biography how she chose to wear bright colors in order to become visible amongst masses of black suits.
- How does it relate to your performances? My work dosen’t always operate as art every time it appears in public. But in the framework of contemporary art, I do sometimes frame it as ‘performance’ with fixed dates, times and places. But to dress and to put on a costume is something you do everyday, you can easily move between different spaces, contexts and room with them. I think the performance of dress is something everyone can relate to.
- What fascinates you about Hillary Clinton? I have a facination with women in leading positions in society, no matter their stand points, rhetorics, ideology or actions. The right to publicness can never be taken for granted. The musical will not only be about Hillary Clinton as a figure. I imagine it as a massive crowd of characters waking up from the dead, for the second phase of their political career. The stage will let historical female characters to take power of their own public apperance. The script will also pay attention to how an audience listening and look.
How will you transform Preface Space and what can the visitors expect to encounter? It will be a celebration. It will unclide close intimacy, sweety tears and aggressively fun. I approach the exhibition space as a filed for negotiation. It’s a show case for how the political reality literacy feels towards the skin. I will include freaky burlesque theater and historical costume dramas. They will have sex and they will get drunk.
- Can you describe how the space will look like? Preface Space has a huge glass window towards the main street so you will always see the stage set from outside. The show most go on and it will always be on, 24/7. People can pass by drunk 3 am and there will be a chorpgrahed light setting. But as I mention above, my blurry relationship to performance, so there will be specific times and dates when the actual musical is happening. If we focus on the aesthetics, I’m inspired by playground in a public park in Malmö. I don’t know if it’s made as a paradoy, but it can be used as a speakers corner. It has a functioning microphone 24/7. Its aesthetics is connected to my palette, bright neon and pastel colors, home-made pattern. Fluffy furry textiles rarley appear in public, but there will be fluffy furry textiles in my show at Preface Space.
- Deep Hanging Out was coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in 1998 to describe the anthropological research method of immersing oneself in a immersed in a cultural, group or social experience on an informal level. http://cyborganthropology.com/Deep_Hanging_Out