"Absolute in VITRO" spring - summer 2011
The Man seeks to open up new horizons of knowledge and opportunities in all times. At first, all genuinely new things arouse interest and raise fears, repel and attract simultaneously. A short time afterwards, a discovery of yesterday surmounts fear, enslaves hearts and turns into a bright symbol of the time to become soon a part of our daily routine...
What repelled and attracted us yesterday, and what will be common and simple tomorrow?
WHAT IS TODAY? IS A TOPIC OF ELENA BURENINA’S COLLECTION
to grow a new liver
to grow a new hand
to put a glove on it
to meet challenge the bitter end
as the new hand feels awkward
and even sometimes uncomfortable
when sticking out naked behind the back
Blue carrots, square watermelons, glowing cucumbers, Dolly the Sheep… All of these not so much need evaluation as is just a stunning artifact of the development of up-to-date biotechnologies.
Over-optimistic futurologists believe that growing a new human being or a human organ will soon be as easy as farming carrots.
A new collection from Elena Burenina is an edgy reflection about genetics, bionics and a genetically modified world.
Starting out from her own varying vision of methods and capabilities of a contemporary genetics, the designer creates the world of models, the world of ‘cell’ people repeated uniform cells of which (a basic motive in the cloth texture) is a portrayal and figure of a cell as a basic component of the body and such of a single sell as a source material for creating an unlimited number of identical clones.
Technologies move us closer to putting in place of a potential to create an ideal human from a set of traits and to create the Absolute being in vitro. Cloning as a way of replicating a unique individual or creating many replicas of the original person completely deprives both an original creation and duplicates of their uniqueness.
At the beginning of the last century, a poet asked: “And you, could you play a nocturne on a drainpipe flute?” The twentieth century answered Mayakovsky’s question with roaring percussions of industrialization and wars that can use everything as a musical instrument. Tunes and instruments change as time goes by. And in a hundred years one can ask: “And you, could you play a melody by a DNA score?” Why not? Piotr Mamchich when creating a sound accompaniment for his show used a special software for recoding information about the nucleotides and proteins structure into a polyphonic music.
To create music Elena Burenina decided to use a chain of silkworm proteins responsible for synthesis of a silk thread, a chain of cotton fiber proteins, keratins and a sheep DNA. These are non-genetically modified organic components making up the basis of the collection materials.
Hoping for keeping identity by everyone in this dehumanizing world
Elena Burenina s|s 2011 collection from V.Observer on Vimeo.