For Lucy Orta architecture is one of the
external reference points by which the individual self connects with the
social self. Her medium, however, is not buildings but clothes, albeit
garments that contain many of the attributes of built structures and which
also function, crucially, as rudimentary shelters. Orta’s mobile habitats do
more than simply fulfil the utilitarian role of covering the body and
providing it, when necessary, with an elementary form of dwelling. As an
artist initially trained as a fashion designer, Orta is acutely conscious of
the role of clothes not just in defining the self, but in articulating the
social codes that bind communities.
While ‘Refuge Wear’, the multi-purpose protective clothing series of the
early 1990s inspired by the first Gulf War and the growing phenomenon of
refugees, which included Habitent (1992) and other wearable structures,
highlighted the plight of homelessness and, by extension, social exclusion,
‘Body Architecture’ (c. 1995) focused more directly on the interdependency
that underpins communities through designs that could be worn both
individually and reconfigured to form communal habitations. With ‘Nexus
Architecture’, exhibited at the Venice and Johannesburg Biennales in 1995
and ‘97, emotional and social ties between people were explored symbolically
by means of tube-like appendages that attached one person to another, often
in a long chain, in a literal expression of solidarity and group identity.
Other projects, such as ‘Modular Architecture’ (from 1996), have comprised
sets of components – domes, zips, panels, pouches, extensions and so on that
can be assembled into multiple formats including tents, sleeping cocoons,
backpacks, furniture or even entire villages – whose function only becomes
fully revealed when integrated into a larger and more complex whole.
It is in these more elaborate constructions that Orta’s designs are at their
most political, particularly when covered with slogans, texts, images and
other cultural signifiers that allude to contemporary political, social or
ethical issues. But the various ‘solutions’ that Orta’s structures propose
(though she would emphatically reject the finality of such a term) rarely
reflect her individual response to a perceived issue or need. In most cases
her projects are the product of workshops with selected social groups who
undertake the design and production under her guidance. When the team has
arrived at a successful prototype, the process frequently culminates in a
public performance. Since so many of the communities with which she
collaborates have been rendered invisible by circumstance, visibility is one
of Orta’s key concerns, and bodily participation is central to activating a
design’s expressive characteristics and attracting public and media
attention.
Orta’s work defies easy categorisation, touching on design, installation,
performance, social and environmental intervention and political and
ideological activism, to name the most obvious. Of all artists engaged with
what is frequently described as ‘public art’, her work is among those that
most comprehensively interrogate the term. And as her strategies have
evolved, her concerns have also changed from those of clothing, habitation
and social exclusion, to food, sustainability, the environment and
consumerism. In recent years food waste has emerged as a major theme,
resulting in several projects in which discarded produce has been salvaged
from markets, preserved or cooked and then served ritualistically at a
series of public meals (All in One Basket and 70x7, The Meal, 1996–2000). At
the same time, the audiences and social systems that she targets have
progressed from local communities and the disenfranchised sectors of society
to corporations and even governments. In 2001 her installation,
Vehiconnector – a collection of field ambulances converted into survival
units covered in slogans addressing poverty, BSE, drinking water, refugees,
Rwanda and other topical issues – was sited outside the G8 summit on the
environment in Trieste.
Orta has always maintained that her work is as much a poetic as a practical
response to contemporary conditions, employing strategies of metaphor and
détournement. For Totipotent Architecture and Connector Body, produced for
‘Arte all’Arte’ in Italy in 2004–5, the historic buildings of Buonconvento
in Tuscany – both actual and models made from metal armatures – were strung
with clothes and filled with organic blown-glass forms that referred to
religious beliefs as well as traditional regional crafts and industries. For
once, it seems, the elemental values of functionalism, wearability and
survival receded, and the buildings themselves emerged as protagonists.
However, references to the body remained present even here as metaphor for a
structure that supports a set of life-giving functions, which in turn
maintain the individual and, by implication, the wider social sphere.
Such developments nevertheless prompt questions. As Orta periodically shifts
her gaze from the global to the local in search of new themes and imagery,
it is intriguing to speculate whether she can continue to discover the
connective principles that have enabled her work to resonate so successfully
across peoples and cultures, and to unite her own, very diverse audience.
Davina Thackara is a freelance writer and editor