Fiora Gandolfi - fashion

Romina Dogliani, who lives in the Cuneo mountains in the Piedmont region of Italy, and Fiora Gandolfi are collecting felt, that most primitive of fabric, the earliest in human history. Felt is the rough cloth of modesty, the opposite of luxury, perfect for the real snob.
They are working together on a ‘felt-drive’ to collect and reinvigorate this ancient fabric which doesn’t have warp or weft, but is made by beating Sambucan sheep’s wool (Biella) for hours and hours then wetting it with warm water and natural soap, a process which hooks together the tiny fibres in the wool.

Little felt cloak, hand sculpted and mixed with merinos wool, other fabrics, fragments of silk and with small primitive chain embroidery added,.

	Exhibits of wearable art

	May-June 1989 - San Stae, Venice: Ieri Attualità “L’ABITO DA SPOSA NEL ‘900”

	BALENCIAGA: Vestito da sposa di Carmen Martínez Bordiú, nipote di Francisco Franco, e Alfonso de Borbón, 1972.

	June 1996 - Venice, Istituto d'Arte, Provocazione Confronto Invenzione. Fashion show at Palazzo Mocenigo (Costume Museum) of clothes, recycled, newly-dyed and printed by students under the guidance of Fiora Gandolfi May 1997 - Lubiana, Mestni trg, Landscape Handbags and Painted Books July 1997 - Venice, Palagraziussi, Wearing Art November 1997 - Gorizzo al Tagliamento, Udine, con Art Space, performance Enchanted Rooms



	Foto Gabriella Cardazzo

	January 1998 - Venice, Galleria Materia Prima Art and Crafts, Superfluous is Necessary March 1998 - Paris, Galerie ÉOF, Dressing with Art







	May - June 1998 - Trieste, Galleria Studio Tommaseo Wearable Art


	September 2002 - Perpignan, Pix méditerranée alla Galerie Thérèse Roussel, Reflets de Venise, di Fiora Gandolfi June 2003 - Trieste, Galleria Studio Tommaseo, Imagerie Art Fashion, performance “Vestiti Guerreschi” of the Chinese dancer Zhong-Wu.


	September 2003, Caffè Pedrocchi, Padova, Vestiti di pace e vestiti di guerra


	February 2004 - Venice, Galleria A+A, Waste Victims with Renata Mihelic.

	Inspired, as Bruno Rosada said, by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, these are clothes made from unwanted remnants and castoffs just as Eliot's poetry is made of poetic scraps collected here and there from variuos authors.

	14th December 2004 - Paris, Galerie ÉOF Venezia Transgenica with Renata Mihelic.




	3rd September 2004 - Ljubljana, Slovenia Lapidarium of the Ljubljana Castle Costumes for the performance Continental Breakfast by Emanuela Marassi Music: Puccio Migliaccio Actress: Sara Alzetta Glass Dressing 7th international Contest Design Trieste Contemporanea 2006 Video with the selected works 27th September 2005, 9.00pm - Paris Théâtre de Ménilmontant Perform of the "Ma Ladive" by Hubert Michel Venezia 30 Agosto 2007 at 4 pm IRIS & FIORA PERFORMANCE - HOTEL DES BAINS, VENICE, LIDO


	In this performance women of all ages and all countries want to show how women convey different values. Values that are archetypes of tolerance, beauty, understanding, tenderness, communication, listening. The unclothed women in this performance are not aware of their nakedness because their bodies are like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, far from the idea of the sin. Eve, as it’s written in the Genesis, was *dressed with grace.* At the beginning there was the goddess mother, symbol of fertility and growth. Afterwards the Greek culture of the rationalistic logos came along, with its cult of the phallus. From there comes the myth of force, of violence, geometry, that saturates even today’s emancipated women politicians, who follow the male archetype of the abuse of power. To this tremendous world, in Italy we add the deceit of pari opportunità (equal opportunity) and quote rosa (the pink quota). It’s a world of deceptions and inequalities that crushes the feminine element existing in every human being, which is constituted of male and feminine chromosomes. Women, facing the destruction of the universe, want to suggest a different model of society, more elastic, where blood, violence, torture, arms, destruction, abuse of power and dead have no place. Women together can change the world, and they must do it. Women have a different way of approaching knowledge and wisdom. They know that nature always follows its own course, that is unknowable, and always will. Women found a lifestyle that leads to true reason, to the idea of nature, respect for love in all its meanings. Women want true discovery of their body, not its commodification. In this present moment in history the feminine body and mind are dramatically crushed by a system that wants women to be more and more like ornaments, images, icons. Women do not want a world made in man’s image, men who have completely forgotten their feminine component. Today’s men reduce and crush the vital presence of women. Even the aesthetic canons of the age we live in, the empire of the image, oppress the feminine presence. Today a skinny, anorexic human being has been invented, as never before in all of history, reduced to the extreme of its strength, thin like a rush, so that it does not occupy the male space, not even symbolically. Our universe is tragically dominated by Barbarians and by a culture that morally infibulates true femininity, never shown, never expressed in its pacific, constructive, aesthetic essence. Men, descending from the Greek logos, in spite of all they have been doing for centuries, will never be able to get rid of us. We follow the enlightening words of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the monk who was burnt alive in Rome by the Inquisition. In the XVI century, when in Europe the religious wars were raging, he proclaimed scandalously to the Dons of Oxford: «I am not man, not woman», as we can read in the following passage where he introduces himself: «(I am) Rouser of sleepers (...) not Italian, not English, not male, not woman, not bishop, neither prince (...) but citizen and servant of the world, son of Father Sun and Mother Earth». Text by Fiora Gandolfi www.irisbrosch.typepad.com/divinita www.fioragandolfi.it

Performance 2009 Biennale di Venezia. Erotic Enlightenment by Iris Brosch



		Names for female genitalia in various cultures and languages. by Fiora Gandolfi The representation of the female genitalia is common as a protective symbol in the pre-semite era. It was represented as water, as a serpent or as an almond. This part of the body, which is now exclusive territory of pornography, obscene and frightening, had magic powers. In the ‘Song of Songs’(Ed. I don’t remember exactly how it is called in Bible), we read ‘my love, go into your garden in the perfumed lawn’. Flowers, the rose and the bud in particular were for centuries explicit metaphors and they enriched poems of the ‘litterature courtoise’ like the ‘romance of the rose’ or in the ‘flowers’ of Dante Alighieri from which we get the term ‘to deflower’- lose one’s virginity. There are many terms linked to fruits. Fig, strawberry, prune, grape, or chestnut - as Aretino writes in the 1500’s ‘Ella ha nelle mani e nella castagna le perle, i rubini, i diamanti, gli smeraldi e la melodia del mondo.’ The garden of earthly delights encompasses also the oblong form of the Venetian ‘mandola’ (almond), or the olive in England, which precedes the name Cherry (as in ‘lose your cherry’). In Sweeden ‘fitta’ means ‘humid dewy lawn’. In Arabic countries they use ‘Tamar’ – date. In Turkey it is an apricot. In Romania it is a peach. In Slovenia, and in many other Slavic countries, a prune. From the fruit counter we go the Delicatessen with its fresh cheeses and comforting cakes like muffins. In Macedonia they say ‘Banitza’ or also ‘Dunda’. In the Ukraine ‘Verenik’, in Italy ‘Gnocca’. In the Persian culture it become ‘paneer’, a fatty, soft cheese tasty like mozzarella. Very often the sexual terms that refer to the female sex also mean, as in the Albanian ‘grape’, pretty woman. In Italy they say figo (from fig) to mean marvellous, cool, fantastic. In effect this part of the woman’s body is the woman herself and the ultimate proof of the importance given to this part of the female body we see in the word ‘mona’ (vagina) which has the same roots as the ‘mona’ in Mona Lisa – ‘My Lady’, Madonna (the Virgin Mary) which comes from the Latin ‘Mea Domina’ a term of reverence. July 2009


	December 2009 - Paris, Galérie ÉOF, exhibition Natural innatural with Romina Dogliani.
































	The Three Graces, Rome 25th May 2010
	Text by Fiora Gandolfi
	Traduzione Cristiana Moldi Ravenna



		Performance: ELISABETH PENKER-IRIS BROSCH-BENEDETTA JACOVONI The Three Graces, the bright Aglaia Grace, the merry Euphrosyne and Thalia always bringing flowers, have been shedding light since centuries and they represent an invitation to happiness. Not only for their gestures. Veils, soft tissues, baskets of flowers, clouds of material where they are wrapped up and that rustle about their bodies become the characteristics of their beauty. They are absolute pedestals of their divinity. Graces and women, in a wider sense, bring the supernatural on the Earth.
		According to Charles Baudelaire a woman continues her mission for centuries. She has a sort of duty to fulfil when she tries to be magic, supernatural. “A woman must amaze and enchant. An idol, she must turn golden to make herself adored.” The world of true women has not changed. Let’s look at a Grace of today at work. The world that surrounds her and that she transforms by little gestures, becomes more beautiful. Any tiny thing has a weight, any word has a weight.



		The Cosmos of a woman has no sharp corners or edges: the Graces move with determined but fluid movements. They run everyday life and wisdom with well coordinated accuracy. They cannot give up colours and lights. The goddesses of life know even too well that ‘black’ does not express rationality. It is only the representation of death. Just as the Indian goddess with soft breasts and many arms. A woman is the clear symbol of a human being who can do and finish many things at the same time. A man at work: black neat table, black folder, black pen, white sheets of paper. A woman at work. Open computer on the kitchen table. Besides a big bowl from where to pick a bunch of grapes, a mandarin, a red cherry. Farther, among books and sheets of paper, the little flowerpot with the big fading peony she has not the courage to through away. Together with the melody coming out from a DVD the ground-note is the mumbling from the saucepan where red onions and redcurrants cook for an extraordinary jam. The telephone rings and her curious cat comes out from a curtain (that should be draped in a different way) getting near, rubbing himself against the phone as to know who is it.



		Graces do many things at the same time, they need multiple spaces in order to work, they need sentimental objects, which always express beauty, journey, escape, dream. FIORA GANDOLFI

	FINIS


	Fiora at work

Fiora Gandolfi as Fashion Staff Artist

Mario Valentino

Fendi, 1981

Pijama Palazzo by Emilio Pucci,
Lo Specchio, June 23, 1963

Enrica Massei

Fiora Gandolfi, who has reported on fashion for over 40 years with her witty articles and illustrations. created a number of memorable illustrated articles about fashion for the weekly magazine "Lo Specchio" during the sixties and seventies. It was a golden era for couture fashion in Italy, where the top houses first showed their fashions on the runway of Palazzo Pitti in Florence and later migrated to Rome.

FINIS

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