Eliana Lorena | Multi colourated butterflies

exhibition MADE IN AFRICA

Milan 7 March 2011 | Triennale di Milano

Curated by Patrizia Rappazzo

Ph. Neri Oddo

One hundred and fifty barbies-women all equally dark and with very black hair offered the designer, as well as fabric design expert, Eliana Lorena, the incisive tool to represent a wise kaleidoscope of one of Africa's many dress codes, the Bou bou.

The barbies that enrich Sguardi Altrove, as in the event created for Save the Children, with the Unico-World Exhibition, demonstrate that the uniqueness of the physical model is overwhelmed by creativity, by the fantastic multiplicity of an infinity of cultures that in costume give expressive opportunities even to the most 'silent' among us women.

The enormous contradiction, or schizophrenia, of dressing as Marc-Alexander Descampes defines it in "Psychosociology of fashion", is the constant dialectic between homologation and differentiation; change and sharing are the phenomenological cause of fashion, in time acceleration from 1700 onwards, or of customs, in less wealthy societies.

The exhibition tickles us with fundamental reflections on aesthetics, expressive joy and chasing patterns.

Creativity of the printed or fabric design, and / or the combinations of color and materials, are tools for enriching the dress that, especially between Africa and Europe, have emphasized the importance of the 'fabric' and of the details, ornaments and applications.

African women are queens of mother earth, imposing colorful butterflies to which Eliana Lorena gave the grace of the artistic reconstruction of a pluri-linguistic journey of textures, textures, crossings, geometric shapes, Ikat, prints and decorations.

Where it seems more ancestral and linked to the earth, cotton and more natural materials, the fantasy-generating function of textiles takes over again and thanks to Lorena's planning, it gives back to the Queen of Africa the majesty of the thousand possibilities of women to 'create positive image.

Rietta Messina