Fitting Room

A curtain hanging on a half-moon rod has been sewn out of homeless people’s clothes. Franciszek Orłowski received them by means of barter (performance The Kiss of Love, 2009). The transactions occurred in the streets; Orłowski offered his own clothing in exchange for dirty rags reeking of long unwashed bodies. In this action, more important than the homeless themselves was the gesture of putting on someone else’s clothing, getting into someone’s skin, connecting with the traces of an alien body, smell, experience. The project was meant less as social criticism than as an “operation” on the author’s own organism, while its essential aim was to examine an individual’s relationships with fellow human beings, to explore the physical and mental boundaries of self, and finally to assess the ability to transgress those boundaries and the emotions attendant on such a transgression.

Street people were selected as participants in the action due to the hardness of their experience: their various habits, social exclusion, the perception of not being able to deal with life. Their physical presence is impossible to overlook: they stink of sweat, urine, cellar spaces; their clothing exuding the reek of physiology is synonymous with the loss of dignity. Many thresholds must be crossed in order to enter into such a skin: from controlling repulsion to combating fear of infection and disease. The exchange can be perceived in terms of an internal rite of passage. In the social sense, this rite is not completed: the final stage of inclusion (conferring a new status within the community on the individual) does not occur; but the two previous phases of the rite: the initial one (exclusion; by assuming someone else’s clothing) and the intermediate one (liminal, e.g. Orłowski’s return home in the clothes of a homeless man) seem constitutive to the artist’s psychological condition.

Initially, Orłowski did not intend to make use of the acquired clothing. Fitting Room, as well as his three other works: Project 0 (zero) (2011), Doorway Curtain (2013) and Skin and Bones (2013), evolved as a result of a subsequent contemplation of the issue of homelessness. The work reflects the association of clothing with identity, which is so central to the project. The economic aspect of shaping the self-image and outward image of an individual has been brought to the forefront. The first stage of the “change of skin” takes place in shop’s fitting room: suitability of the new garment to the physical and psychological structure of the self is tested, after which the transaction takes place, money changing hands. The performance that resulted in the making of the installation is an inversion of this exchange. In Fitting Room, this brief process acquires a different weight: in the stifling reek of the bodies of Others, the self-transformation, usually connected with a happy involvement in consumerism, loses its pleasurableness and the usual non-reflectiveness.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz