Caterina Pecchioli
2023
For the months of June and July, Thami Mnyele Foundation is very happy to welcome a new resident Caterina Pecchioli. During her time in Amsterdam, she will work on her project Decolonizing the Gaze: The Colonial Heritage of Italian and International Fashion Design and Its impact on the Collective Imagination.
The project proposes a visual and historical analysis of dress items, fabrics, and accessories from the Italian and Dutch colonial period that are preserved in the collections of the Ex Museo Coloniale in Rome and Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. The study, which involves Afro-descendant stylists, artists, and fashion designers of colonial heritage, intends to identify new meanings about widespread colonial dressing practices and body policies and the effects of colonialism on the individual/collective imagination and design practices. An in-depth study that aims to bring the Italian decolonial perspective within a live European debate on the decolonization of fashion and culture and on the political uses of fashion and clothing. The complex relationship between de-colonialism, heritage, cultural globalization and Made in Italy is tackled through a program of workshops and seminars with the collaboration of institutions engaged on the subject in Italy, Holland, Ethiopia, South Africa, and the USA.
During her stay in the Netherlands she will organize a workshop as well a public debate within the framework Decolonizing the gaze at CBK Zuidoost and Framer Framed.
Decolonizing the Gaze - The Colonial Heritage of Italian and International Fashion Design and Its Impact on the Collective Imagination" is a project by Caterina Pecchioli, supported by the Italian Council (2022), Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture.
Project Partners: Africa e Mediterraneo - Afrosartorialism B&W-Black&White, The Migrant Trend APS - CBK Zuidoost - Framer Framed - Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Addis Abeba (Etiopia) - Museo delle Civilt - Thami Mnyele Foundation (Amsterdam, Olanda) - Georgetown University (Washington DC) - Moleskine Foundation Nation25 - Orientale di Napoli - Università IUAV di Venezia - Politecnico di Milano.
Caterina Pecchioli is a multimedia and multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, curator, and art director, whose work explores critical aspects and effects of power on mass behavior and socio-cultural and political dynamics. Her artistic process and creative output are based on a hybrid of traditional and relational aesthetics. She often works via participative process and action-research.
She studied at the Art Lyceum Leon Battista Alberti of Florence and at the DAMS (Visual Arts, Cinema, Music and Performing Arts Studies) University of Bologna, where she received her master degree with laude in 2005. Her thesis, Antonin Artaud: Signs and Drawings, won the DAMS Prize and become part of the Fonds A. Artaud at the Biblioth que nationale de France. In 2006 she moved in Amsterdam where in 2009 she graduated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and she was nominated for the Gra Award. In 2007 she took part in the project Performativity of Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Master in Fine Art in Rotterdam.
She is currently part of Nation25 that she co-founded in 2015, an artistic-curatorial collective and participative platform that deals with contemporary socio-political and environmental topics, with a special focus on migration issues, and she is the initiator and art director of the art and fashion project B&W - Black & White, The Migrant Trend that promotes migrant design and fashion production made in Italy through research activities, exhibitions, counseling, best practices, and training.
Caterina Pecchioli links