 And my presentation is called Agente Costura, Instant Improvised Interventions. So Agente Costura in Portuguese has a triple anterior. Costura means soy, and Agente translates into the people, and it's also a colloquial term for us, the collective. And Agente translates into agent, a force or substance that causes the change. So we are a soy agent. The video in the background is footage from my latest performance, Fashion Orchestra, from a camera that I wear around my neck. Fashion Orchestra was a very intense learning experience. It was my biggest performance today, and my aim was to involve all the artists that have invited me into their shows. I was the artistic director and my stroke to coordinate everybody. The idea for the show is mine, but all of the collaborators helped in shaping the show. I designed the structure, and then all of the 30 people involved all had their own individual input into the work. In the article, one place after another, Miwan Juan points to an aesthetic of administration explaining that the situation now demands a different set of verbs to negotiate, to coordinate, to compromise, to research, to promote, to organize, which can all be seen as aspects of my role in Fashion Orchestra. I'm proud of all of that. I was also performing in the show. My practice began in 2003 in Curitiba, Brazil, with the exhibitions in progress. I would set up a sewing machine in unexpected places, such as coffee shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, inviting the public to experience and engage with the transformation of clothing. In 2009, I opened the doors to the garage, my artist studio and shop, where I work as an upcycler. In the garage, I also began promoting art shows, fashion shows, and music shows. This is where musical sewing was born, out of the interactions with other artists. At first, I was invited by musicians to collaborate on their shows, and after starting in this program, I began creating my own performances, for example at Instant Coffee, Last Summer Intensive, and Fashion Orchestra. This is the practice that I brought into the program. To use the sewing machine as a musical instrument in collaborative performances, altering clothes to the beat of the music. My work can be defined within two instances, the studio work and the offstage work. The offstage performance is a semi-scripted version of what happens in the studio. In the garage, I have created a space where the viewer becomes participant, by bringing their clothing to be transformed. This is done through a process of trying on the garments and having a dialogue as to why that particular garment does not suit them anymore. I will then come up with alternatives in shaping that garment. This creates an intimate, interhuman relation. I am aiming to define my practice within the history of performance art. Starting with the dotties, and the convertible terror, which was a space for artists to come together and perform. A lot of the times, pushing the limits of the audience, they were really interested in shocking and anti-art in order to discuss the social-political context at the turn of the 20th century. This in turn influenced New York-based artists in the 1960s. For example, Al Capro and the Odeo of Happenings in his aim of the blurring of art and life. Brazilian artist Eru and Sica was in New York at the time and he brought these ideas back into the Brazilian context in his works of the Parabolaes, where there were textile sculptures that were meant to be worn and he was working with carnal artists in Sao Paulo in a very huge and little context. Within contemporary art discourse, I have focused my research on Nicolas Burrio's theory on relational aesthetics to try and stitch all of this into my practice. Burrio mentions more contemporary artists working in the 1990s in this idea of relational art. For example, Fedex Gonzales Torres, where he would set up a room full of candies, people would come in and take that candy, the candy, and regret, Terevanya would just set up a social space with a fridge full of drinks and invite the viewers in the gallery to just have a dialogue. So, Burrio writes, the role of the artwork is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real. The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the settings of his life, his links with the physical and conceptual world into a lasting world. So, in entering the program, I began to explore my work more critically and I created a diagram to explain the performance work using my instrument, the sewage. I will use this mechanism to explain the aspects of my current practice. So, the school of thread represents the audience, as they encounter the work, and they are threaded through the machine, each point representing an aspect of my work. So, as well as learning about my methodology, you will all learn how to thread a sewing machine. So, it goes here. The first thread guide is the venue. So, this brings up a discussion on site specificity. And as quadrants, locations contribute a specific identity to the shows staged by jetty to the experience, the uniqueness of the place. So, whether in a gallery or a traditional theater or out on the street in front of my studio, the work will take on a different format. But ultimately, I'm trying to get the experience from the studio to relate to the place where it is to really inhabit that space, which is the next thread guide. In fashion orchestra, I explored the idea of tying elastic bands around the space. They were tied around the structures of the theater, and the performance were tied under the performance as part of the actions to create a work-like structure around and over the stage and around the audience. The elastics relate to the idea of rhizome in reference to Duluth and Qatari. And these authors emphasize how knowledge construction is not linear, but it intersects and grows in this rhizomatic idea. And the elastics might also be interpreted as a physical link to the concept of these internal relations that I am proposing. Then we go through this little tunnel there, which is the concept of upcycling. So, the political aspect of my work discusses our current consumption habits, most especially in the critique of the fashion industry. So, I can't say this for certain in Canada, but most people in Brazil, when they buy garments, they aren't really thinking about where the garments came from, how it was constructed, and at what cost. They think about this even less when they dispose of garments every new season, just to be in fashion. The industry leads the public to consume more and more by making products of very little quality that basically disintegrate within a few washes. And then they change the colors that are in season or the lengths of the skirts just to get people to buy more. So, the book, Cradle to Cradle, Willi McDonnell and Michael Brungard explain how there's a crucial difference between recycling and upcycling. Recycling means to break down the materials from a product to make other products. Often, new products are of lesser quality than the original. Upcycling is a refashioning of the same materials, achieving a product of the same quality or better. Within the context of the fashion industry today, upcycling comes as an alternative to the fast fashion industry. According to James LaVaire, fast fashion has been coined to describe low price, fashion-forward clothes sold on the high street. In Britain, it has been estimated that in 2011, the average woman has around four times as many clothes as her counterpart owned in 1980. This result is that more and more energy materials and labor resources are being expended and the landfills are being over. So, if you look, it looks like it's all a lot of fun. It's not just about having fun. Which brings us to the tension discs that represent the performative actions of the performances and each sewing machine has a different tension disc which controls the right tension from the thread to go through the machine and produce the stitch. So, this is very important in getting a stitch. If there's not the right tension, you will get the right result. Which also, in the performances, in a way, each performance has different performers for each different occasion. So, at first, I was interested only in the actions of myself as a seamstress, like cutting and pinning and sewing. But then in the fashion orchestra, we started exploring some different of these performative actions, like cutting hair and layering these performative actions. So, a musician would be playing the flute and she would be getting her hair done and the idea is really to just bring onstage everything that's normally backstage to get ready for the show during the show. This is really like the actual tension part of the performance, because I'm really exploring the idea of real time. Breaking with the tradition of theater where everything is staged and the viewer is supposed to forget himself and put it into somebody else's position. This is all happening live in real time and the participants are also invited to physically interact with what's going on. So, as Kwan writes, a dominant drive of sight-oriented practice today is the pursuit of a more intense engagement with the outside world and everyday life. After we go through the tension, there is this little lever here that goes up and down and makes the needle go up and down. So, we go through here and this represents the music part of the musical song. So, it really is the score to the performances. The music is such a rich example of creating these social relationships. I've been experimenting with the sounds of the sewing machine, the sounds that you make in a percussive sense. So, I'm adding other elements like bells and things to the machine that are activated as I'm sewing. So, in a way, we can say that I've actually upcycled the sewing machine by reconstructing, re-contextualizing it. John Cage is a very big influence in my work as he uses objects that are normally not seen as in a musical way. And also, in the improvisational characteristics of his work and improvisation is our next thread guide. And all of these little guys are very, very important to make the sewing machine actually produce a stage. If anything is not really in place, then it's just simply more. So, improvisation, basically I'm improvising and uploading what the machine would improvise on notes. There's no way to previously rehearse our clothing, so what I do in terms of these alterations are really improvised. Once I cut the fabric, there's no way back. In my previous shows, I would sell out the garments that would go through these transformations previously, but in fashion orchestra, the performance were actually the ones that chose the garments from a pile of clothing that was on stage so that their choices actually dictated my improvisation. There's also an aspect of improvisation in this documentation. There are no cuts. I've put the camera on my neck and there's no way to know how it's going to feel. There's no choice on what it's going to feel. It's just going on. And then the last thread guide to the needle is the idea of participation. So Bourdieu discusses the production of relations. He writes that artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of interhuman relations. So the artist sets his sight more and more clearly on the relations that his work will create among his public and on the intention of models of sociability. So in the studio, participation is a very intimate between the public and myself. The work happens due to this participation. On stage, we have been experimenting with audience participation. So in fashion orchestra, we actually invited the public to come up on stage and dress up from that same pile of clothing that was part of the set. This experiment was successful in engaging with the audience. However, a question of control became really apparent. Suddenly, an audience member began to throw clothes around and then all of a sudden a lot of people were throwing clothes all the way up in the air and I became really, really nervous because of fire hazards and clothes are very flammable and their lights scattered around the floor. So this question of control, like how can you really, there are quite an audience to come up on stage and there's really no way to know what's going to happen. So at first we were afraid that nobody was actually going to come up on stage and then it just became chaos. So Clarke Bishop writes, the creative energy of participatory practices re-humanize or at least de-alienate the society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalism. So for the show at Grant's Gallery that you all got invited for I have put together the two instances of my practice, the studio work and the onstage performance in a full day happening. During the afternoon, the public is invited to bring their own garments and in the evening I will present semi-scripted music piece where the public is also invited to try on garments and become a performer. So to fully thread a sewing machine then you must go through the needle which is really hard to do when you're nervous. The needle is myself. So I feel like I'm stitching the social fabric by bringing different people together musicians, artists and just non-artists, just people that I want to participate and notice how most people want to talk to about my practice they go, oh I have something in my closet that I haven't been wearing but it's just sitting there I don't know why I don't just get rid of it and then finally they're like yeah, let's do something with that so you can do it when you're nervous. So Mewang Kong art is that contemporary artists can be defined as a cultural artistic service provider rather than a producer of aesthetic options. It is now the performative aspect of an artist's characteristic mode of operation even when working in collaboration that is repeated and circulated as a new art commodity with the artist herself functioning as the primary vehicle for its verification, repetition and circulation. So in the past 10 years I have created a patchwork in Curitiba of these interactions. In the fall I will be relocating to Germany where I will intern at a project space called Garment Bodies with artist Brandon LaBelle to research about cultural production in completely different contexts than the one that I'm familiar with. I'm distancing myself from the fixed studio and I feel like I'm going full circle back to the exhibitions in progress where I will engage with different communities in Europe. No, yeah, well there it is. So, yeah, that's how Toronto was so huge. It is backwards for me so that's why it's kind of weird to do this, but... So the floor is open for questions. The video will distract the audience. It's Andres. Thanks for the presentation. I like it very much and I'm especially intrigued by the performative nature that you do in something performative that is usually seen as a quiet and withdrawn activity that takes a long time. And that leads me to the question about the artifact and I'm sure the rapid speed of this performance triggers a lot of decisions and ideas that would be possible otherwise. And then, so what happens to the dress afterwards? Are they, you know, do people actually hit them with them as they are and can they wear them or does it do ideas arise that they from are carried out more carefully and with more care about them? Yeah, well, I'm wearing one of the dresses from a rehearsal for the show tomorrow. This used to be a skirt that I turned into a dress. So these lines are really sort of I guess I would call them the score for the musical song because as I'm singing like to the beat of the music, this is all going on. So it is wearable. The performers, most of the time get the clothes as part of their collaboration in the shows because they're usually there isn't very much money involved so it's all very just for the love of art. So they at least get something from being in the show which is normally the clothes but sometimes I do have to finish the garment because it is done very fast and some of them are not wearable sometimes because the person can't really even get out of it without having to cut it up because it's not stitching so there's like a really some of them I keep as my personal sort of archive and use them in other exhibitions some of them are sold in my studio that's right Thank you so much I have to say it's great to see also how you're you mentioned your influence from Way to Seek and you've also mentioned another artist to me and also see how you and Ricardo Vosbaum are like the next generations of Brazilian artists sort of working in the tradition of let's say Ligit Clark and Way to Seek but then really attaching it to I think re-imaginings of consumption and capitalism as well because here looking at this performance it's really different to see the video of the performance than just you writing about it in our class so I have to say great to see this documentation and the camera attached to you it's really a different experience it's so live and fresh that I think it's really important to keep that live element as much as possible so that's one aspect but then also to think through you and Vosbaum dealing with objects specifically and how the relationship between viewers or consumers and the objects is very important so it's just fun to watch how something like Paris-Golais which is like those fabric pieces that declare space and a space of freedom for the Sama dancers changes into let's release ourselves from the fashion industry or how Vosbaum makes an object that doesn't have any clear use so that people can re-imagine you so anyway I just think that's interesting that both of you are Brazilian dealing specifically with objects of consumption and how there is a kind of legacy and tradition that I can see how it's transformed over time so this is the comment I've actually seen a few lectures from Vosbaum I think that I told you about so he is a really big influence not only he is a Brazilian artist but also his research and as a professor I'm quite intrigued by the device you use to present today using the sewing machine and its elements it's parts that sort of a metaphor for the various parts of your practice that produce the experience for an audience and part of it I was wondering while you were speaking that this machining machining metaphor seems like it should be inherently limiting and it's in a way it's leaning towards the opposite effect of a very free experimental result that's happening how is this possible why is this working but then I realized well if we take the part of the venue for example I forget which part this is the third guy the third guy so I imagine there's a lot of different shapes of thread guides probably but the only ones that are thread guides are the tension discs and the lever all the elements are just to really just lead the thread through the tension disc and the lever I'm curious about with the example of the venue this is a particular kind of venue is that you I now recognize that you can use this as a means to explore all sorts of different variables and it's not limiting the machine in a certain way so I'm curious what sort of venues do you see this potentially transforming to inserting well I mean I think tomorrow Grant will be sort of a new experiment because a lot that used to be gallery space or even this was this very traditional theater very well known theater festival and I think the only reason they let me do this I don't even know why they let me do this but I guess it's because I do have a tradition in Curitiba and people know about my work and they want to see it they're curious about it so I really just see this working in all sorts of venues from when I first started like even just taking the sewing machine to a nightclub and just setting up and just this idea of you walking into a place and all of a sudden there's a girl the sewing machine would really just look back and be like this is actually here and I've had people take off their clothes and be like please so was on me so I think there's really no limit and I would like to explore other I guess when I get to Germany I'm going to find out these limits because in a way in Brazil because there aren't that many rules or like people don't really follow the rules but we're coming along to just do these kinds of things and I I think in Germany these are not like that but I'm really thinking about trains actually as my next sort of idea because take the sewing machine on the train and just do the traveling and actually having the machine as part of that is just my my buddy to travel really good you don't have to get a battery or yeah for deploying computers great presentation really exciting and actually inspirational really cool I'm allowed to say that I've been sort of working along some parallel threads and I really admire your way of grappling with translating the conditions of musical improvisation into I guess you would call it a medium that's kind of counter to what we would think of as live musical improvisation in my point of view you've been hugely successful and in my reading on musical improvisation and in readings on improvisation as social practice which is kind of an emerging field of study something I keep coming across is this notion that in order for improvisation really to exist it has to have a performative aspect and engagement aspect with an audience for a lack of a better term which makes it problematic when you're working in a medium that's normally done in a solitary environment with no one watching and I've found that difficult to grapple with working frame by frame picture making by myself it's kind of the opposite of a live music situation can you explain a little bit how you make that link between the live performance which seems to have really obvious links to musical improvisation how you make that link back to your studio practice which I would assume is kind of solitary not dependent on real time decision making and is kind of counter to what is normally thought of as conditions for true improvisation good question but I think my studio is actually a storefront so I'm constantly being watched so I guess that really plays a big part in this whole performative and being on stage and having that sort of flowing with doing my work and not even thinking that like I don't notice that people are walking by and looking like I'm so into a sewing machine and making stuff but I notice how other people notice when they come to my studio and they feel a little bit like you know there's just a creary of kind of because it's just like a last door and it's a pretty busy road and I think in the beginning when I started wanting to take the sewing machine out was a way to connect with people I was moving to Curitiba I didn't know anybody and I wanted to socialize and I wanted people to know that they can have their clothes upside down like they have this option and I started noticing how people are really intrigued by this machine and by the act of sewing and just stare like I really want to watch as these garments are being made and even like cutting and making something like physically making something so I started to develop that idea and to really get the skills to do it really fast and to do it in 5 minutes I can transfer it to a dress so I am a very fast seamstress even when I'm not performing so I just I guess one thing is very connected to the other like I'm not normally like even though sometimes I'm alone in the studio sewing like I don't really feel that it is a solitary practice that's your question Yeah I think so I mean for me it just always meets back to then what are you what activity are you engaged in if no one is observing you not really so much what activity but are you doing the same thing when there's no longer another participant would you do the same type of work I think I do because normally I always try everything on even if I'm doing it for somebody else so I'm always doing that performative like putting on looking in the mirror seeing if it fits it's like the person is bigger than me sometimes I'll put on like lots of clothes and then put that on top so or if the person is smaller I'll be like you may just need to make this tight and just having these skills as a seamstress and trying things out and really fitting into the body I can always look at a person that I know what size it's going to fit like I know exactly what kind of clothing will fit on that person by just experiencing it on myself so even though it is sometimes solitary I do still feel that performing Maybe with this new the effect of the age of prison will always be watched yeah okay great thank you very much