By Swantje Martach and Verónica Madueño
Abstract
Dress has already been denoted as active by diverse disciplinal strands, especially material culture studies (e.g. Woodward 2005; Miller 2010), affect theory (Ruggerone 2016), and new materialism (Smelik 2018). Yet, how living could dress truly be? This question leads us into the realm of biomaterials, a term that in fashion describes garments made out of biological matter (cotton or animal/plant leather), but that in the work of Peruvian dress artist Verónica Madueño is pushed further towards keeping matters alive while they are acting as dress: gelatinous creations encompassing in an amber-like manner herbal/flower seeds, sand, and seawater, as well as accessories fabricated from corn and spirulina.
As conceptual clothes, Madueños’s works celebrate the contingencies in creating (making-with instead of making-of) and wearing (mold and ice) living agents. In a world that is becoming increasingly pictorial, these environment-as-garments loosen our visual grip of the world, but enable us to experience it differently and most immediately when wearing it. Bringing our senses to life, Madueño’s living dresses shock and shove their wearers towards the image’s exit.
Als handlungsfähig gilt Kleidung bereits in diversen Disziplinen, besonders in der Materiellen Kultur (z. B. Woodward 2005; Miller 2010), der Affekttheorie (Ruggerone 2016) und im Neumaterialismus (Smelik 2018). Aber wie lebendig kann Kleidung wirklich sein? Diese Frage führt uns in den Bereich der Biomaterialien, was in der Mode zumeist Kleidung aus biologischen Materialien (Baumwolle oder Tier- bzw. Pflanzenleder) meint, jedoch in den Arbeiten der Peruanischen Kleiderkünstlerin Verónica Madueño noch weiter innoviert wird, wenn sie Materien am Leben erhält während jene als Kleidung agieren: Gelatineartige Kreationen, die bernsteinartig Kräuter-/Blumensamen, Sand und Meerwasser enthalten, sowie aus Mais und Spirulina hergestellte Accessoires sind ihr Markenzeichen.
Als konzeptionelle Kleidung zelebrieren Madueños Arbeiten die Kontingenzen im Erschaffen (machen-mit statt gemacht-sein-aus) und im Tragen (Schimmel und Eis) von lebendigen Akteuren. In einer Welt, die immer bildhafter wird, lockert diese Umgebung-als-Kleidung unseren visuellen Zugriff auf die Welt und ermöglicht uns vielmehr, jene anders und unmittelbar zu erleben, wenn wir sie tragen. Indem sie unsere Sinne zum Leben erweckt, schockiert und drängt Madueños lebendige Kleidung ihre Träger zum Ausgang des Bildes, so hier postuliert.
Introduction
The following text is a conversation between the Peruvian biomaterial dress artist Verónica Madueño, and Dr. Swantje Martach, a German philosopher with a focus on clothing. It was conducted via a singular Zoom meeting on 16.12.2024, when Verónica was sipping her first cappuccino on that morning in one of Lima’s beach bars meanwhile Swante secretly was already in her pajamas in front of the screen. We consider the time difference, the sounds of the waves, the pedestrians taking their walks at the beach, the chats held by other café visitors, as well as of Swantje’s younger child waking up and crying, as active contributors to this text. The oral conversation was conducted in Spanish, Verónica’s mother tongue and Swantje’s Major during her Bachelor. The present text hence is a transcribed translation by Swantje, of which Verónica revised her parts, and which was kindly reviewed by Charlotte Brachtendorf.
At this point, Swantje, in her triple-position as conversation partner, translator, and guest-editor of the IMAGE edition of which this text forms part, wishes to thank Verónica for her openness to contribute to IMAGE, for her time and efforts that made this conversation possible, for her competent openness to engage in this thinking-together, and for her trust in this publication. It was an overall very pleasing (sadly only online) encounter!
1. The Interview
Swantje: [after a first informal making-contact] Okay Verónica, I am now recording. For a start, may I ask you to tell me a bit about your work? From which angle does it come, how does it proceed, and what are its future materializations?
Verónica: Sure! So it all started with my Bachelor thesis, which was questioning the dominance of visual perception (ocularcentrism) in fashion, and proposing an alternative and multisensory aesthetic approach. For a while thereafter, I was happy to explore its lines. However, at some point, it appeared to me a little limited in scope, because it was all about fashion, as an industry and agency. Fashion certainly is very powerful, and therefore crucial to work on. But I became less interested in making dresses, and making people wear dresses, and more concerned with how to explore dress. My interests simultaneously expanded and receded, that is, shifted towards the materials that fashion is engaging with in order to establish itself.
As more and more people are becoming aware of, these materials are often sourced unethically and harm our bodies, e.g. because of the way they are colored, the chemicals that are added to them, and further treatments they receive throughout the processes of their creation. So even if fashion, in most and especially the big cases, prefers to sweep its coming-about under the rug [laughs], and thereby, in a way, denies its material bases their agencies; the latter are alive and active nonetheless. From this thought, I came to wonder: How living could they be?
I did some research and stumbled across the concept and advancements that are made in the realm of ‘biomaterials’. These are materials that are especially created and used in the context of medicine, in which ‘biomaterial’ denotes substances that can be inserted into the body for the sake of treating, expanding, or replacing tissues, organs, or bodily functions. In the field of fashion however, the term ‘biomaterial’ is used to describe all materials that are at least partially created from plants or animals, that is, organic matter. A traditional biomaterial would be cotton or animal leather, but you may have also heard from innovative ‘leathers’, which are made from e.g. fruit leftovers or fish skin …
Swantje: Pardon me for interrupting, but this already strikes me as so interesting! If I read your work correctly, the biomaterials you use are biological, yes, but they are not only materials sourced or created from something living. Rather, they remain alive, also once their creation is finished, beyond their selling, and throughout their wearings. I hope you will tell us more about this in a second!
So it is not only that their/your creation must never be finished, because living means changing, adapting, becoming. But by making living garments, you traverse the borders between human and dress, and potentially also between fashion and medicine, in a way that has seldom been done before: The living usually is only inside the body (organs, consciousness, etc.), and inside the dress (human, body); whereas the outside is rather conceptualized as a lifeless shell. Yet in your work, the living is also the outside, the dress, which might be active also when the human is at rest, or the garment on the hanger. In your creations, the dress hence takes the final step in moving from a which to a who, who is, as you said, becoming able to expand the human. Thrilling! How is it to work with living materials? How do you do it? What are its challenges, and also its pleasures? And how does it feel to work with them?
Fig.1: Front details of dress (materials: gelatin and lemon verbena)
Verónica: I love the whole process of working with biomaterials, not ‘even though’, but truly because a lot of errors happen. There is a theoretic part of it, but you have to really dive into the process and interact with the material/s in order to learn how to make a dress. And still, the dress remains contingent. It can always materialize differently, or even dematerialize, maybe if a change in the weather, or an interaction with another material occurs. There is no guarantee.
For this reason, I consider the material as matter (in Spanish: material como materia), which I ceaselessly explore, how it behaves in different circumstances and what makes it become. And it never stops surprising me. In fact, when matter lives, it creates a lot of subjunctives. So the creative process is not really a making of something, but rather a letting things make their own things. It is a making-with, not a making-of. And this has become a philosophy for me, a philosophy of creation.
Swantje: I really appreciate the thoughts you have and the strategy you developed, of not using existent things, but interacting with the things you confront as living existences, and of creating together. It must truly have this element of admittance, I assume, because in these processes, there is no object, but all protagonists are subjects that influence the work and the result. And in your case, is there even such a thing as a ‘result’?
Verónica: Oh well, there indeed is a result, even two results, I would say. On the one hand, the result is that there is no result, and that is also a finding, I believe. And on the other hand, the creative process indeed contains a result, many results actually: Whenever something goes wrong, e.g. when something is composting itself, this is a result, from which you can learn.
Swantje: Wow, I understand! I saw that you appreciate mold, and this excites me, because evidently, mold is something that people normally want to get rid of. It is associated with dirt and even disease (another link to medicine!). It is considered unacceptable in our society, ugly, and when something gathers mold, it is put in the bin. Even though, indeed, mould is a sort of mushroom, and as such forms part of a rather powerful family of existences, that only recently researchers started to explore for their beneficial capacities. But for you, mold seems to be a proof that your concept works, am I right?
Verónica: Exactly! I am fascinated by mold, even though I am not saying that you should put molding dresses on your body, because this certainly would not be healthy. But mold is very insightful. It questions the whole concept of durability, and it is a materialization of the ephemeral. Mold is a protagonist that can teach us many lessons.
Swantje: And like all other substances, mold is a protagonist that does and does not function, depending on the contexts in which it acts. There is a situativeness of all agencies, including the one of mold, and I am starting to think that this is one thing we can learn from it. After all, what does it mean, ‘to function’? Isn’t this a pretty normative term? Mold functions also, and it serves, e.g. the composting of organic matters, so that it does have its rights and reasons for existence. I really like the change in perspective and judgement that your work is provoking.
Verónica: Also, in the philosophy of biomaterials, everything is entirely different. Beforehand, as a designer and dress-maker, I had all these materials at hand. The textiles and patterns were always the same, and I could just employ them. But now, everything is constantly changing. I’d say there is a heightened situativeness you have to deal with when you work with living matters.
Swantje: This sounds so complex.
Verónica: It is! And what about control? You cannot be in control of the situation, and there is a creative element in realizing that you are just one among other factors in the creation. In fact, it often happens to me that a biomaterial turns out much more rigidly than I expected it to be, so that it does not work for a dress. And then I start to think: With what other technique could I combine it? What strategy could I employ next, in order for it to not result as an error?
So this is what I do: contingent because compostable dresses. But the contingency remains not just within the designing process. It spills over to the wearing, which is not at all repetitive. Indeed, when you wear my dresses for the first time, it gives you a certain shock.
Swantje: Tell more more! Underlying the edition of IMAGE, to which we are presently contributing, is the hypothesis that dress today is becoming increasingly pictorial, due to all the remarkable developments that are made in the digital-only, metaverse, 3D-printing, etc. spheres of fashion. I am reflecting on the relationship between your work with living garments stands and these pictorial tendencies. Could it be considered a point of departure from the pictorial, even a sincere shove towards the image’s exit?
Verónica: I like that. The topic of the image fascinates me. So far, images are entirely visual. But dress is so much more. It contains a material step. You see it, and it already does a lot when presented to your eyes. But then you put it on your body, and the visuality combines with touches, smells, sounds, etc. In my work, I am guided by such questions as: How does one feel within a dress? And what can dresses make one feel? Thus, what I make, so one might say, are ‘sensory images’ (imagenes sensoriales), images that are not only visual, but images in concrete, maybe also material images.
I want to stretch the idea that we perceive everything with our eyes. When I think of an apple, I have this image constructed already in my mind, with which I confront all the apples I encounter. But there are certain things, of which you have nothing at hand. So when you encounter them, you have to construct an image with your senses. And exactly this is what I intend to provoke with my dresses.
Swantje: This gives me goosebumps. How is this idea connected to the miracle of the first time? Like travelling to a country you have never been to before and biting into a fruit you do not know the name of, you have no idea how it will taste and smell, what its texture will be like, even how to handle and eat it. Do you want to create such firsts?
Verónica: Exactly, I am thrilled by first times, because they permit you this shock. All your senses come to life, and you are plunged into this fresh water. You have to dare something.
Swantje: Do you witness (on social media?) the current trend of ice bathing, that a lot of health-intrigued people indulge in? Similarly, #ASMR [short for: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response] is a hype on Instagram: Specific accounts produce videos with the sole purpose to give you tingles by different means (e.g. tapping on a microphone’s surface with long fingernails). I see both phenomena as intents to remind us that we are still bodies, in a world that tends to be ‘de-bodifying’. We look at all these images everyday, in the press, on social media, during work, in the city. And within this tendency of the world-becoming-image, all of a sudden, another tendency emerges. Indeed, these images, and everything already aligned to them (our fashion, interior, holidays, cars, restaurants, etc.) are visually pleasing, but beyond that, we are bodies, capable of more. I wonder, could these two trends, ice bathing and ASMR, be allies for you? Or could your work even be interpreted as part of a ‘re-bodifying’ tendency, if you like, that is happening?
Verónica: Yes, totally. This is what happens with the press: You see it, it affects you, but sooner rather than later, you become accustomed to it, however beautiful or cruel these images may be, and the shock stays away. Hence, it only makes sense, and is super enthralling, that people start to search for shocks in new ambits and ways. How fast do we adapt, but how powerful it is to see the world with all our senses!
It is precisely what I intend with sand: We all know sand. We know how it looks, maybe how it tastes (from our childhood), and how it feels under our feet, and in our shoes. But what happens if you make a dress out of it, and create something of which exists no prior image? Do you then still know sand? Or else, as much as you know water, and have contemplated it on a visual level, being safe on the beach, or in artworks and images; as soon as you put your body inside of it, something changes. And this is the moment that thrills me, my greatest inspiration.
Swantje: You create dress-matters that are not textiles, but which are actually materials that contain other materials, such as camomile seeds or sand, as you just mentioned. How does this work?
Verónica: I work with sand, and also sea water, because this is where I am. I live very close to the beach, and I want to express my location. When I worked with sand (in combination with water, agar, and gelatin), what resulted was a matter that was very rigid when it had dried (not like wood, but like cardboard), and thus not comfortable when worn on the body. So I decided to weave it, and it became much more flexible. To do this, I cut strips of the dried material and interlaced them with cotton threads, which made the fabric more gentle and suitable for the body‘s sensitivities . In contrast to sand, sea water actually makes a very elastic matter. It is great to work with!
Swantje: Unbelievable! This reminds me of when you have just taken a bath in the sea, and the seawater dries on your skin in the sun, making it a bit dry and stiff, because of all the salt that is within it. In me, it provokes the wish to take a shower and maybe even apply some cream, in order to get my skin soft again. What I am trying to say is: Making dress out of sand and seawater, for me personally, is a bit counter-intuitive, and exactly for this reason so irresistible—but maybe this is because I was raised by a mother who dislikes the feeling of sand on her skin, which certainly has shaped my sensory experiences. Could you tell me a little more about the thoughts and processes behind these creations?
Verónica: Yes, with pleasure. So these are not commercial, but rather conceptual clothes. I really wanted to explore how things feel, and how the body feels in situations like you just described. I can see the sand, and the seawater, but how do they feel? Also, when I jump into the sea and dive, what do I feel? Biomaterial has the capacity to make me feel like I am within the sea, meanwhile I am not, but just going through my everyday life. Biomaterial queers locations. It is the environment as dress (el entorno como ropa). So these works are truly about the aesthetic experiences they provide.
Swantje: Oh I can totally imagine that! Please allow me to dive a little deeper into your ‘matter-enclosing dress matters’. These matters that are within your dress-matters, seeds, water, seaweed, they turn your dress-matters into something similar to a fossil, or amber, I thought …
Verónica: What is amber?
Swantje: Amber is a translucent orange type of stone that can be found on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, which is often used in jewelry. And the value of an amber stone is defined by what it encloses: (parts of) insects or plants, which often are millions of years old. I see a certain analogy between amber and your creations: Wearing one of your matter-enclosing dress-matters, what covers me is less the dress-matter, which is translucent, but rather what it carries within itself, like a mantle of tiny pieces, seeds, kernels, bubbles, that protects me from the world.
Verónica: This is incredible, so poetic! And you are right, the dress-matter itself is translucent, because otherwise you could not see the matters within it, which is the effect I wanted to create.
Swantje: I see, and by doing so, you let the dress open the stage for other matters to matter … But let us come back to the wearing. Given that so far, I sadly did not have the chance to experience your work in real life: Could you ever get used to wearing sand?
Verónica: I do not know whether you would choose to sit down, relax, and watch a movie in these clothes. So far, I have only worn them for a while. But if you would wear them for the whole day, or even several days in a row? I have never had this experience yet, but I would be very curious to find out how my clothes would behave, and about their conditions after a full day of wearing.
Swantje: Last year, I taught the anthropological course “Fashion and Material Culture” at the Academy for Fashion & Design in Wiesbaden here in Germany. One of the students wrote this amazing term paper about shapewear, for which she asked her test persons to take photos of their bodies and the pieces prior and after a cycle of wearing, in the morning and in the evening, in order to compare how the body and the clothes looked, and to find out how the shapewear changes and where it cuts into the body. Do you think this method could produce new insights for your work?
Verónica: Wow, this is stunning! I want to do that!
Swantje: Laughs. I would be interested to find out how your clothes behave in the everyday, out of which they also simultaneously want to catapult their wearers … And in addition, where I live, we have these really cold winters. Have you considered aspects such as keeping warm, which is the main function of certain garments, in your work so far?
Verónica: Here in Lima, the climate is not as intense as in other places. Yet, during winter, we get a very high humidity rate, which makes a lot of my biomaterials melt. Besides, the very heat that the human body emits can be a problem for some matters. So in the phase of work in which I am now, my clothes do not serve for extreme climates. I am convinced they would withstand certain situations. But in a cold winter like yours, many of them would freeze.
Swantje: … and imagine what sensations this would give! Of course, not pleasant ones, but strong ones for sure! You might not have the cold winter as the one we have to cope with here in Germany, but you have the altitudes. I saw that you use purple corn for your dresses, which, I read, grows especially high up in the mountains. Could you tell us a bit about this plant, which we cannot buy over here? I wonder, in particular, whether using a plant that grows at these altitudes might result in a dress that is more suitable for hiking in the mountains? Is there a connection between the matter’s locality of origin, and the localities where it functions as a dress?
Verónica: Purple corn, or as it is called in Quechuan, Kculli or Kculli Sara, grows in many parts of the Andes of Peru, and one of these places is the Sierra de Lima, which is some hours outside of my city. It is a very ordinary and resistant plant that many people eat at home with their families. So working with purple corn, for me, is working with my origin. But it is true that the clothes made with purple corn are stiffer, a bit like leather, and therefore more protective than other matters, and better suited to both greater heat and cold.
I usually engage with gelatin or cotton as a base. I could not buy starch yet, but dresses made with it would also be more applicable for heated environments. In contrast, rice is not that resistant. However, as far as I found out, in the work with biomaterials, what is crucial is not so much the base with which you work, but it is more about what you do with it.
Fig. 2: Part of Madueño’s collection “Kculli”, hat made from purple corn biomaterial and corn husks.
Swantje: This is ontologically very striking. What meaning do you see, for the future of biomaterial work, inside this finding that the important thing is not the thing, but rather the process?
Verónica: Each biomaterial affords a different way to work with it. And when you apply one strategy, that has worked for you with one matter, to another matter, what results is something entirely different. It then becomes a new image also for me, and I have once again no idea how it works. You have to learn to flow with this. You cannot advance anything. It is not like: “Okay, today I am doing this.” But you have to let yourself be guided.
Swantje: Tell me please, how do you handle all these findings and knowledge that you are acquiring?
Verónica: I got a logbook, which I use everyday. It is about where I let a matter dry, whether it dries in the sun, in the shadow, in what kind of air, and how strong the contamination is. Sometimes, I make two things that I perceive as the same. I put them both in a room to let them dry, one in the center of the room and the other a bit closer to the window. All of a sudden, the mold appears in one and not in the other, or they dry differently. You are really creating with vivid matters! And when it dries, it only sleeps (cuando seca, solo duerme)!
Swantje: … and this is so much more than a metaphor! Another thing that I noted when looking at your posts on Instagram, which was and remains my primary and pictorial access to your work—and this could also be compelling to explore further on a methodological line—yet what I noted is that you also engage a lot of ropes in your creations. What are your reasons, and what effects do you seek through them?
Verónica: I like to play by sketching with threads. But biomaterials are more sculptural. So I started combining textiles (the conventional) and biomaterials (the new), which creates something very propositional. It strikes me as particularly stimulating to make dresses that are not entirely biomaterial, but rather sit within this binary. What is more, ropes often function as a scaffolding in my work, that supports the textile and keeps it in place. Linking both matters allows me to create structures that are entirely different again. And for those readers concerned with circularity: The cotton of the ropes won’t disturb the combustion process of the biomaterial, also because I use undyed ones.
Swantje: Exceptional! And what about the weaving that you undertake with these ropes?
Fig. 3: Propositional shoe made out of woven ropes and spirulina based biomaterial, co-created with Luciana Madueño.
Verónica: In Peru, and Latin America more broadly, there is a lot of superstition in weaving. This becomes evident in such proverbs as: “El hilo nunca se corta” (“You never cut the thread”). Every knot created carries something symbolic in it, because weaving is a path, and you cannot stop walking it. The thread stays with you, like the path you have already walked and paved for you. Weaving is like telling a story.
Swantje: I admit, this talk about tradition attracts me a little more: In one of your posts I saw, you described a piece as inspired by the Chancay. Could you tell me more about this culture and the way it influenced you?
Verónica: The Chancay is a very old culture that works with threads in their particular style in order to connect the living with the dead. My inspiration here was to understand how to connect and converse matters, which I regard a huge power.
Speaking more broadly, I live in a country which has a lot of diversity, and I love to explore it! Peru is separated into three different zones: coast, forest, and mountains. Every zone has its own and so unique practices of dressing and making-dress, and I see this as a great wealth: Some of them are amazing weavers, others amazing painters, again others amazing sewers. And there actually is also one culture that uses a lot of feathers. Many of these cultures exist already for thousands of years, which is why they have such a mystic energy.
It is my endeavor to create not on top, in addition to these cultural heritages, but from within them. However, the biomaterials that could form within the forest zone, for instance, certainly are very different to what I can do here at the coast. I believe that in order to create with the forest, it would be necessary to be there for a while. This would be an entirely other creating-locally-together.
Swantje: So intriguing! Verónica, thank you so much for this conversation. It really blows my mind! I have two more questions that I’d like to pose. First, we spoke so much about the matters you are working with, but whom do you work for? How do you see the person that wears your matters? Who is your ideal wearer?
Verónica: This is an interesting question. The wearer of my clothes does not have a gender, because my clothes are designed neither for men nor for women. They are made for a person that has a consciousness apt for, and that is open to experience the shock awaiting within my dresses. Apart from this, I would let them decide.
Swantje: Nice! And second, what autobiographical elements could we trace in your work?
Verónica: A while after I started creating, there came the day in which I had to try on the dresses I made, because someone had to test them before they could be shown to the public. So I was my first wearer. And what I felt when my body glided into these clothes for the first time, this initial contact is exactly what I want to convey and keep alive with/in my work. Clothes impact us so much, not just on a bodily or visual level, but also on an experiential and sensual level!
Swantje: I see a certain playfulness in your work, if I may say so; your ideas of the first time, of the shock, that we spoke about before. Is your work about a lust for experiencing surprises?
Verónica: Definitely, there is enthusiasm within it, and curiosity. And there certainly is something autobiographical inside of it also, because you cannot create from zero. I just like the idea to take the stage at which I am at a particular moment, and combine it with something else, in order to create a further stage. I enjoy my own search into bioprocesses. What I am searching for is not the repetitive. I do not want to make fashion, because it does not surprise me. I rather wonder: What is a human? What capacities does she have? And what happens if we combine her capacities to the ones of other matters? To what does she become then? Also this posthumanist orbit grips me a lot.
Swantje: An interesting question, that creates such an alluring circle with our beginning, in which we spoke about your queering of the ordinary in/outside allocations of human/dress, thus stretching the human beyond her former borders of the skin. I consider this a lovely way to end.
Verónica, you made this so easy for me. I just had to give you some words in order to make you chat with me, and I felt that it all flew very naturally. Thank you so much for this experience, it was an inspiring, insightful, and joyful one! I do hope we will meet one day in person (and secretly: that I will have the chance to try on one of your matters)!
Literature
Miller, Daniel: Why clothing is not superficial. In: Miller, Daniel (ed.): Stuff. Cambridge [Polity] 2010, pp. 12–41
Ruggerone, Lucia: The Feeling of Being Dressed: Affect Studies and the Clothed Body. In: Fashion Theory 21, 5, 2016 pp. 573–593
Smelik, Anneke: New materialism: A theoretical framework for fashion in the age of technological innovation. In: International Journal of Fashion Studies 5, 1, 2018, pp. 33–54
Woodward, Sophie: Looking Good, Feeling Right: Aesthetics of the Self. In: Miller, Kuechler (ed.): Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford [Berg] 2005, pp. 21–40
Biographies
Swantje Martach received her PhD in philosophy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of the Arts London, where she worked towards a new materialist ontology of clothing. She initiated her post-doc at the Institute for Aesthetics, University of Presov, Slovakia, by speculating unseen beauties. She recently taught at the Academy for Fashion & Design Wiesbaden, and now teaches at the University of Oldenburg’s Institute for Material Culture. She also co-edits the Atlas of Databodies series at transcript. Her latest publications include “Das topische Bild” (IMAGE Autumn 2024, in which she argues for today’s places pictorial turn), and “Thin is a thing, but we are fat bodies” (Atlas of Databodies II).
Verónica Madueño graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where her undergraduate research focused on exploring alternative approaches to sustainability. It was through her Bachelor thesis, however, that she challenged the current fashion system and its overly visual-centered approach to creation, promoting the importance of engaging other senses when dressing the body. She is currently working as a teaching assistant at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where she is also pursuing a Master‘s degree in Cognition, Development, and Learning, while continuing to explore the world of biomaterials from an aesthetic perspective. In addition, she is part of the design team of the Peruvian brand Escvdo that works with artisans from different regions of the country, focusing on textile craftsmanship and collaborative creation.
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Citation
Swantje Martach, Verónica Madueño: Wearing Seeds, Sand, and Seawater: Living Garments as Sensory Images. In: IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, Band 42, 8. Jg., (2)2025, S. 293-307
ISSN
1614-0885
DOI
10.1453/1614-0885-2-2025-16679
First published online
September/2025