LIGHT MATTERS
THE FEMALE WISDOM

TREAP

Performance Art
Project

TREAP, 2014
Fashion is deceptive. It is a “player” that pretends to rip the duration away from our modern fast moving times and to be indispensable for a timeless period. As long as you are on their level, there is a strong feeling of being contemporary.
At the same time, it is a rule that something really fashionable only lasts for one season. Juggling coquettishness with rash changes and the strength of the formal amenities of a cycle of coming and going. The tempo is ever more rapid and in its discrepancy this construct as a vision becomes forever more unattainable. Fashion models emerge as taller, blonder, younger, and thinner as in the previous season. And yet, as written by Walter Benjamin, female eroticism becomes defined by a borderline with death. The emergence of women is merely a suspension of death, and such a definition could also be applied as the meaning of fashion. “That is fashion. And that is why she changes so quickly; she titillates death and is already something different, something new, as he casts about to crush her.” It is precisely in a time of crisis, when the market economy can no longer conceal its ugly side so well behind the sheen of consumption, that the appraisal of unbroken beauty is held constant. The yearning for beauty, that for some is the hope of better times to come, and for others an aesthetic resistance against a barren and inhospitable world. They have altered the way we regard youth and age, beauty and character, our own selves and femininity. Modern life has become fare moved from anything resembling authenticity or truth. However, the ideal body appears as a constant factor transported through all of these changes. In the media image created by the Fashion World the gaze stays trained upon a distorted vision of the human body. The transience of youth and a potential estimation of naturalness is suppressed in favour of the perfect silhouette. It is impossible to deny that an obsession with the slim dynamic body and never-ending youth are intrinsic to this system.