The Dress code program brings together some forty artists offering unique perspectives on identity and clothes in the world.
Clothing is representative of an aspect of identity; it can arouse desire by sublimating the human body, in particular through adornment, but also reveal codes and standards. Dress codes allow integration into society or, on the contrary, rejection, emancipation but also demands.
Symbol of globalization, fashion, place of subjectivation and desubjectivation, intervention and alienation, contributes to social and physical emancipation. This evolution questions us on why clothing is still at the heart of the problem of identities. Clothing always tends to be a marker of gender, age, social status, religion, sexual orientation, political opinions, wealth, subculture. Sometimes adornment, costume, stage or worship dress, the clothes represent singular but also collective identities.
Dress code takes a look at this identity-clothes relationship through, in particular, drag queens in New York, twins in Nigeria, voodoo rituals in Benin and Togo, Zapotec women in Mexico, but also through personal photographic investigations. Between rites and gender markers, the twenty exhibitions propose a questioning of singular but also collective identities and treats clothing as emancipation or claim. Fotohaus offers an amplification of the program with Sein und Schein, “to be and to appear”, just like Fragiles, a choral project of Tendance Floue, inhabited by the tremors that cross our time.
Florent Basiletti
Artistic director
FOUNDATION MANUEL RIVERA-ORTIZ
for documentary photography & film
18 rue de la Calade – 13200 Arles
Until July 26th, 2022
