ROBERTA BERNABEI: STATEMENTS

Rendering Space Wearable

The focus of my attention is the space surrounding the human body and its transformations due to the body’s movement; in addition to those spaces generated by the proximity of multiple bodies. The memory of the aesthetic and functional aspects of the domineering claws situated around the perimeter of paper dolls, and their analogy to the role of settings in traditional silversmithing, inspired the series of works that protect and display objets trouvés. A process of subtraction prompted the discovery of intriguing ‘memory spaces’. The systematic study of these memory spaces was transposed to those spaces surrounding the body through an intuitive cataloguing of specimens. Through the analysis, limiting, and objectification of the presence of this absence, and by combining it with extreme states of nature, the key to reading the macrocosm may emerge from the microcosm. By creating ‘life givers’ the intention is to transmit protection through fragility and solidity. ‘Life givers’ were described by Lévi-Strauss when writing about the Boroboro tribe of central Brazil: “For them, life is connoted with activity and hardness, and death with softness and inertia [...] Their ornaments make hard that which is soft so they substitute those reprehensible parts of their bodies that prefigure death.” By reconsidering that primordial font of archaic methods of measurement, that is to say, the human body, I use its surrounding spaces as a parameter of measurement in objects that enable the wearer and observers to understand and reconsider the confines of their bodies and the surrounding world.

May 2003