Archifashion from Denni Bakardji on Vimeo.
People and architecture create the identity of cities. The city is a device. The city is a social machine. The city is a medium. New living conditions serve as a background where new society is constructed and new identity of people is revealed.
Clothes and accessories are device too used to present, to protect, or to hide oneself. It is a semiotic medium showing power, social status, background, racial or group belonging, religious affiliation, and so forth. Clothing is also a manipulation tool; why not a safety tool as well?
The city is a place where people meet and exchange ideas and feelings, where everyday life is also a struggle for survival.. Are we satisfied with the atmosphere of the contemporary cities? Do the pace and the life-style in the today’s industrial cities suggest our connection with nature and keep us intact and safe? Events are milestones in this scenario revealing the motivation of the characters to break with the routine and to develop a new reality. A new fictional urban landscape is created according to the social demand.
This animated story is about a community that resembles Eastern Europe in the last two decades during the period of transition from socialism to the market economy. People have to be inventive and resourceful in their attempt to raise children, to work, to love, to create and to maintain faith, sanity and humour in an almost unbearable environment. The members of this community have experienced an endless chain of absurd events such as: an electricity regimen, a water regimen, a coupon system, a massive inflation, currency denominations, a currency board, a grain crisis, a milk crisis, a toilet paper crisis, a gas crisis, ethnic cleansing, friendly fire, random bomb droppings, political scandals, etc. This society is not governed or organized and there is an intentional lack of desire to fight crime, corruption, mafia, emigration of young people, and the destruction of people’s homes and destinies. As Bill Bryson writes in his book “Neither Here Nor There” some parts of Eastern Europe are not countries; they are experience close to death.
Inspired by Hussein Chalayan’s ‘After Words’ collection, I have depicted some of these events through which my characters use transformable clothing capable to turn into tents in an amusing way for facing difficult situations.
People of my animation have become equipped to live in any place and in any time they wish to. This has been influenced by the British group of artists, Archigram’s ‘Walking City’ and ‘Suitsaloon.’ My aim has been to make them utterly free, mobile and independent of home and attachment. My characters are able to migrate thanks to the comfort of their clothing that is gradually transformed into shelters and dwellings. This interactive couture is a crossing point of the two fields – fashion and architecture which provides a new expression of the packaging of the body and of the appearance of the home. Human beings are provided with a new sense of warmth, protection, with a new urban identity and above all with a new attitude towards themselves. Dressed in portable homes that are their transformable clothing and wearing accessories that are their personal belongings, people experience change of relationships between them, due to newly gained sense of freedom. They are politically and economically out of reach.
It seems that the destiny of the mobile person of the 21 century is already predicted in someway. People are constantly on the move and take with them what they need creating alternative settlements thus escaping manipulation. People need positive alternatives.
I have chosen to use 3D as the basic language of my project. I have added the additional technique of line drawing to my animation in order to give the characters a more personal feeling.
