Artist-researcher Fossheim Ingvill

BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants

At the Saari Residence, I will focus on the written component of my article-based doctoral thesis "BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants" (2020-) at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Material knowledge is a fundamental part of a costume designer ́s practice, yet artistic practice that incorporates systems knowledge and interrogates biobased material development as part of the performance-making is rare. My doctoral research addresses this gap in artistic practice and academic research. A key interest of the artistic research project "BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants" is to explore how ecologically informed material practice in costume design can contribute with new perceptions and understandings of material agency, where ecologically responsible and accountable praxis is considered a value with implications beyond the performance event. As such, it resides at the overlapping area of aesthetics and ethics. The main research question is: How can the costume designer ́s development and application of biobased materials have agency and enable the emergence of new modes of artistic expression? The main method of this multi-modal inquiry is my artistic practice as costume designer and maker, developed in relation with a theoretical framework where Costume Thinking (Pantouvaki 2020) and the concepts Intra-Action (Barad 2007) and Extramaterial (Grosz 2017) are central. Costume holds the agency to offer alternative perspectives, entrancepoints, from which we may engage in dialogues, discussions and reflections on issues and topics relevant beyond the context of performance and art. This research project aims to develop new insights to the academic field of costume research, and to our understanding of what the agency of costume material and the praxis of the costume designer can be in the 21st Century.