YOU KNOW SOME BIRDS

Synopsis

Workshop talk "Chinese Weave"

The artist and fashion designer Regine Steenbock addresses ethnological fashion research and presents excerpts from her photo and film project "Chinese Weave". Participants are invited to a multi-layered decoding of different readings of fashion and clothing in a foreign language and culture.

Clothing is part of the repertoire of human forms of communication. In a rich collection of observations, Steenbock directs her gaze to a world still largely unknown to European eyes. The complex and sophisticated textile craft of the Miao minority in the Chinese province of Guizhou is nowadays intermingled with an omnipresent Chinese fast fashion. The ornamental gibberish of mass fashion from all over the world is incorporated into the Miao imagery and frequently reinterpreted in favor of local meanings.

YOU KNOW SOME BIRDS (5th part of CHINESE WEAVE) is a cinematic approach to the everyday world of the Miao. We experience a songbird competition and see, among other things, the making of traditional wind instruments, the rice harvest and various preparations for a festival. The film title is borrowed from the imprint of a T-shirt that was accidentally caught on camera during a death ritual. Such detailed observations characterize Steenbock's work. Birds, which play a mediating role between the physical and metaphysical worlds in the Miao mythology, appear in many of the garments' ornaments as metaphors. The uncommented recordings offer viewers the most immediate visual experience possible and encourage their own decoding.

„On a journey through the confusing but also bewilderingly beautiful world of pictures and textiles, we increasingly get the impression that it is not pop modernism that has arrived in China. Instead, modernism has been soaked up in its entirety by the Chinese world of myths and symbols. There is no before and no after, no search for times lost, and nothing sentimental; everything is simultaneously in constant, ornamental transformation. The most wonderful transformation of everything into everything else takes place under the sign of the butterfly. To the Miao people, the Butterfly Mother - what a fabulous term - is considered the primeval source of all being. Worshipped in countless patterns in this culture, perhaps the most bizarre is butterfly camouflage: like a butterfly, the camouflaged wearer can thus emerge from battle unscathed.“ (Barbara Vinken in the preface of the photo book published in 2020)

Regine Steenbock first studied stage and costume design at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, then film at the Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main until 1985. Between 1985-93 she made experimental short films (including BIGGI, VEL, LOVE MOVIE) that were shown at international film festivals and institutions. In 1994 she switched to fashion, founded her fashion label "Sium" in 2001 and ran her own stores in Berlin and Hamburg until 2015. Her collections were presented in Paris and Tokyo, among others, and received international awards. Steenbock was a guest professor for fashion design at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin in 2005. In 2013, a teaching position took her to Johannesburg, and in 2016-18 she taught as a visiting professor of fashion design at Beijing Normal University in Zhuhai, South China. With "Chinese Weave" she resumes her earlier work as a filmmaker for the first time.

Film Info

links / references

Project / Host