Performing Wardrobes was a an experimental research collaboration by Timo Rissanen, Mari Krappala, Heini Aho, Sebastian Ziegler and Leena Kela. A week-long intensive workshop took place in 2015 within Rissanen’s project on garment use, Designing Endurance, to investigate the artists/researchers’ relationships to their own clothing. Because there is a performative aspect to garment use, working with performance may uncover understanding that might be more difficult to uncover through other methods. Furthermore, the act of the artists/researchers performing generates new knowledge on our relationships to clothing and parallel ways to analyse research data and material that only performance can generate.
The project is discussed in Chapter 3 of Locus out of Focus, and a co-authored account of the research method in the book Opening Up the Wardrobe, edited by Kate Fletcher and Ingun Grimstad Klepp.
Performing Wardrobes was supported by the School of Fashion at Parsons School of Design and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School.