The CHANGING ROOM
in collaboration with the Departure Lounge,
Intercultural participative project, 2019
At the heart “The Changing Room” is a temporary, staged fashion boutique that is at once: a photo studio, an exhibition space and a meeting place. Each visitor is invited to try out their own or others’ clothes and reinvent themselves into a new persona. Protagonists are accompanied, treated, portrayed like in a professional fashion shoot. “The Changing Room” examines the internal processes and involvement of a multicultural society. The project explores this by examining the image of migrant women as an integrative constituent, revealing the polarity between the diverse cultural heritage of the protagonists’ countries of origin, on the one hand – and the similarities in their everyday lives, – on the other. Explores the image of migrant women in the context of modern British society, where they are trying to fulfil social requirements while complying to cultural and religious dogmas. Migration is inevitable. We all have routes and not just roots. The portraits and the movie focus on the importance clothing plays in personal and cultural identity and on the “double lives” lived by women, who may not always feel that they can dress as they want. Based on the question ‘who are you, and who you want to be? In a time of post-capitalist global unrest and strengthening of right-wing extremism, the growing influence of religion that limits women’s rights again.
The project is liberated from being a purely everyday object, consumer service and commodity. No salaries are paid and nothing is sold. Participation and curiosity are in the forefront. The outcome is a mosaic that stands as a confident statement for a modern, self-conscious image of womanhood.
The Changing Room presents a picture of women from all walks of life who are at turns hardworking and professional, nurturing and caring, glamorous and performative in a project, which asks searching questions about how clothing and (staged) photographic portraiture can define and redefine us. We are facing a situation in which women must fight anew for the rights that had been won long ago. If we look inwards, not as a retreat, but to ground one’s self, one’s being. We can be light and playful, fearless and fragile, free just to be. To live in a world of equality.