Spandex Studies

with a text by Philipp Ekardt
Chicago born Berlin artist Bettina Allamoda has createrd an own format reflecting and merging artist book, fashion spread and fieldguide, displaying the construction (architecture, infrastructure, institution, history) of her works and interventions. She explores how physical experience is warped through media experience and transfers it into the realm of sculpture and collage, formalizing it into a paradigmatic, abstracted, yet concrete spatio-sensory experience, she likes to refer to as Spandex Studies.
“It is also this architectonic approach which guards Allamoda’s works from any form of interpretation –particularly with regard to clichéd gender projections – that would conceive textiles as a medium of animated motion, a medium of emotive affect. There are no fluttering garments here, no moving accessories, no whooshing hems of skirts: the entire inventory of the pathos formula, from Warburg’s nymphs to the “breathing” curtains and and ”animated” draperies in the earliest horror films, which, caught in a draft, elicit fear and menace. There’s none of this in Allamoda’s work, who in this sense also has a radically constructivist approach to textiles.”
Berlin 2017, 146 full color pages, over 99 color images, 32 x 24 cm, flexocover, English/German, Revolver Publishing Berlin