Brass Paw Heels, 2024
Courtesy: the artists and Company Gallery, New York

Codependent City Women Dress, 2024
Courtesy: the artists and Company Gallery, New York

“Clothes,” says Emanuele Coccia, “are not only objects, they are the transformer that makes the Self exist in things.” Dressing tells a social, political, and individual story. The intervention by Women’s History Museum (Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan) thus stages a colorful carousel of characters, set up through the presence of figures dressed in clothes made by the artists, which incorporate text to create walking sartorial poems. In this context, the reuse dummies by the Women’s History Museum tell the complex and multifaceted personalities of the community members who gather in the shared space of the exhibition, a place for developing new forms of coexistence in which to formulate alternative codes of cohabitation and relationship. The use of found materials, used clothes, and discarded fabrics, focused on themes of anthropomorphism, currency, and the city of New York, alludes to different stories, times, and situations, which here find an original translation, in a process of hybridization and exchange. The artistic practice of the duo, always focused on the questioning and manipulation of pre-existing elements, and on the creation of clothes as a political and identity manifesto, is expressed in the creation of garments that reformulate the aesthetic categories of a plurality of forms and characters.