Fashion designers Linda Plaude, Ting Gong, and spatial designer Laura A. Dima join forces to create an experimental installation for one evening only. Since they first started thinking about collaborating, they immediately discovered their fascinations shared common origins and often meet. Light is clearly the central theme in their works. Each of the presented works deals with light, and offers its own interpretation. They complement each other, creating a mysterious landscape, playing with light and darkness, what is revealed and what is hidden, what is highlighted and what is left in the shadows.
The space itself becomes part of the work and so does the audience. The greenhouse becomes the host of a magical performance. The idea of the Trio also comes back in the elements that dominate their work: Light/Motion/Water. The installation aims to create a fantastic underwater atmospheric space where people feel like they enter a parallel universe, or travel in time back to the mystical city of Atlantis. The dreamlike quality of the installation is the central point. The three artist strongly agree that Lights after Sunset should be an ephemeral experience, one that people should feel, be part of and later remember. It happens just in this place, and just for one night.
During the night DJ Trish Trash and Jordi Ariza Gallego will perform. Free entrance. Drinks are sponsored by Bos Ice Tea and Goodmans Gin. Cash bar. For updates check our Facebook event.
About Laura A Dima and ‘Atlantis’
Laura A Dima (1991, RO) is a young spatial designer and autonomous artist born in Romania but based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2015 at the Department of Inter-Architecture. Her work has its roots in the fields of architecture and architectural research but it takes multidisciplinary shapes according to each site and adapts to each context. Her multi-faceted installations transform the space, inviting the audience to be part of the work. She uses architectural interventions to influence people’s perception of space and triggers certain ritualistic behaviours in the sacred space she aims to create.
Atlantis is a continuation of Dima’s research, and at the same time, it is also a reaction to the works by Linda and Ting. While researching the great architectural achievements of the ancient civilisations, Dima kept asking herself, ‘Where are we now?’ How come so much knowledge has been lost? Where is the real truth of the ancient mysteries? She translates this curiosity in the shapes she chooses to work with, such as the pyramids, circles and squares and then focuses on finding the right proportions, the perfect balance. Atlantis as a metaphor was the starting point to implement these ideas. She selected water and architecture as her tools to create this world. Atlantis draws inspirations from monumental architectural shapes. It is the temple of light, which projects the reflections of the water to the outside. It sends the motion of the waves to the audience, the walls, whatever comes in its way, until it finds the surface to lay its image. Water as an element can influence the way we experience the space. That is, in the installation water will be a present performer in the space. The audience will be ‘baptised’ while entering the space, as a ritual they have to accept in order to be part of the happening. The work consists of the actual object, but it is the atmosphere and the experience it offers to visitors that plays a central role.
About Ting Gong and the ‘Holocube’
Born in a small village, surrounded by rolling hills and meshed in the dense fog, Ting Gong (CN) was forced to leave her home in early childhood. The first house she lived in was pulled down to make space for the first road to connect the village to a bigger town. Ting believes it is instinctive to start off with what she left behind. The splendid sun that rose high above her hometown, the intermittent immigration process, and the cultural awareness of being Chinese and living and studying in the west. At the age of twelve she started living in a school far away from her parents. In 2010, after having studied Economics in Tianjin, she moved to Amsterdam to study fashion design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In 2015, she graduated with honours with her collection called ________ That Disappears. Ting’s work addresses the awareness of being and a sense of absence in a world that is bombard with images and sounds.
The Holocube introduces a futuristic vision, fusing the realms of oriental philosophy, fine art and fashion design, to offer audience experiences at the present time. Through landing Ting’s floating silhouettes in a holographic capsule, it delivers a temporality of speaking simultaneously with, and of fashion and visual (fine) art. The installation and the audience interacting are made into a documentary film as an art practice. It communicates with the audience about questions such as: ‘Is the garment real?’ ‘Is it proper clothing advice?’
About Linda Plaude and ‘Beings of Frequency‘
Linda Plaude (1991, LV) is a recent graduate from the Amsterdam Fashion Institute (Fashion & Design). Born and raised in Riga, at the age of fourteen she found her way to the Netherlands. There she finished high school and studied fashion design. She is now at the very start of her career. In 2016, during her final year at AMFI, she found her fascination for non-conventional material use in clothing design and the phenomenon ‘light’ as a matter of design. After an extended light conductive-material research, she created a collection with incorporated lights that would react to sound frequencies. She merged fashion and technology and challenges the question: how could clothing serve us in the future? Could we receive personal therapy from our clothing and improve our physical and emotional well-being? ‘By merging different disciplines together, we can create something more spectacular than ever by working alone’, she says. Linda strives for innovation in fashion and wishes to add more meaning and value to clothing.
Beings of Frequency is her research graduation project, presented in the form of a collection in fashion design. In the collection, parallels are being laid between the seven musical notes, the visible colour spectrum (the seven colours of the rainbow) and the seven main energy centres of the human body, the so-called chakras. The collection consists of seven outfits, each representing one of the chakras. During this event, a selection of three outfits will become part of the dynamic installation of Ting and Laura. The clothing has incorporated sound sensors and microchips that activate coloured lights in places on the body where the chakras are located. The collection was designed to give the visitors real-time sound and colour therapy, which is believed to charge the energy of the corresponding chakras; waves of pure sound frequencies will float through space, operating as a resonant, interactive mechanism together with the coloured lights as they move through the temple of light created by Laura.