Nude
Cotton dresses
Variable dimensions
2018
When the body becomes the center of disputes over the consolidation of meanings, variations occur that are expressed at the level of language. With Nude, Claudia Casarino invokes horizontal forces that, apart from the disputes that constrain women's bodies, that limit fluid exchanges between them, are capable of creating networks and consolidating new directions for care and communication; either to resist the attacks of differentiation, or to untie its oppressive knots.
There is a synonymy of color. In certain languages, different words are used to refer to color, whether or not it is a human body, and which imply specific connotations, subjective evaluations. An intention is implicit in the choice of words, and, likewise, the undifferentiated use of words can lead to misunderstandings, if not deliberate attacks.
There is also a polysemy of color. Anchored in the terrain of culture, crossed by colonial distributions of bodies, there are competing economies that assign different values to what in other contexts may have been so nonspecific; like what in the West was called race.
The visual perception of the other can be fixed with the force of a symbol, and actions can be justified based on it. But to normalize the values of a sign, playback devices are needed. What is what is known as skin color if not part of a disciplinary regime? In any case, what color?
Alternating with the anglicism nude, the jargon of textile design summons a chromatic signifier intended to partially surround the clothed subjects, so that it is possible to measure the distance or proximity of some bodies with respect to others, in tonal variations.
Advertising has reinterpreted this problematic place of skin color. Campaigns celebrating diversity create limited propaganda paradises with the promise of tolerance for all bodies. There, all colors would be possible. Although it is clear that they will no longer be.
Perhaps Casarino's dresses appeal to a desire to appropriate the soft utopian promise, that offered by the crisis-free celebration of diversity, with the desire to subvert it. Perhaps the differences weighed by the watchful eye of the market are no longer only called to integrate its diverse and uniform paradise, but are called to combat it.
Damian Cabrera