Emanuele Coccia offers us his reflections on fashion, ecology, and transforming city/home. (Exhibition-Magazine, 2021(?))
This pandemic has shown us a kind of corporeal continuity between all human beings. This is a big deal because it’s a physical and sensible consciousness that we recognized in a single, selfsame flesh. It’s the first time that there has been a global event where everyone is aware of at the same time with a unification of bodies and consciousnesses. Everything that we had created to produce politics became obsolete: nations no longer make sense. We are truly on a single planet, and we will have to invent instruments that allow us to do politics at that level. This is true for the current question of vaccination. Everything that we have produced was conceived for a fractured world. The progressivist discourses – the “true left” – are those which will allow us to understand how to find a non-imperialist way of living together, which is at the level of this self-evident truth and this shared suffering. This virus has definitely closed the door on the political and cultural experiment of the 20th century. All of the current debates about identity are not very interesting. They are battles defending territory which has already been conquered. The great battles of the future are elsewhere I think.
Coccia with Sophie Abriat
We only need design because we are born without having either the experience or the idea of happiness. This is why we spend the rest of our lives observing, touching, measuring the world and tasting it to understand what makes us feel good. In this way, we also explore our body and our mind. This continuous exploration of self and the world in search of happiness is what we call dreaming. And design is the ambition or claim that there is a method in the way we dream, and the attempt to give a single name to all possible forms of happiness.
[…]Actually, what interests me most is not to observe the present, but to explore what in the present is already working on shaping the world of after tomorrow. And not tomorrow, which is always a consequence of today, but after tomorrow — the kind of future that is not yet predictable and that is unrecognisable compared to the present. That is precisely why it can afford to coincide with an ancestral past. The most radical form of exploration for this should be in dreams: the dream is already an exploration, and being able to explore the dreams of others is the most important faculty for any creative. So much more than observation, dreaming is the most powerful tool of exploration.
A Take On Fashion: Emanuele Coccia
