Xenia May Settel in conversation with Perwana Nazif

Salon de Normandy was organized by The Community and powered by Novembre.global, as a free-to-visit and free-to-exhibit-by-invitation initiative at Hotel de Normandy in Paris, held between October 17 and 20, 2019. The salon is a gathering of an international community of galleries, exhibition spaces, projects, collectives, publishers, and labels inside the 150 years old hotel.

searching for a glove, 2019, presented by autobody

As part of Auto Body’s installation for Salon de Normandy in the historic Hôtel Normandy in Paris hosted by The Community and in collaboration with Novembre, stylist and artist Xenia May Settel presented works reflecting on the ephemerality and permanence of forgetting through clothing and other objects. Discarded items throughout the room and on particularly positioned mannequins provide commentary on divergent and new temporalities, the potentiality of forgetting, and what sort of narratives and memories clothing can occupy and create.

https://www.xeniamaysettel.com/
http://www.autobodybellport.com/
http://www.salondenormandy.global/
https://thecommunity.io/

I’d love to begin by asking you the title of the work—I can’t find it anywhere.

The install was more like the Auto Body install of the room than this piece by this person or this piece by this person so I didn’t really have a name for it. If I did have a name I think it would be very descriptive of what’s happening, maybe “Mannequin searching for glove”.

Can you tell me more about what was happening, walk us through the installation?

You enter the room and there’s the door of the hotel room opened due to a sock that was under the door and on the bed there would be one mannequin under the sheets that was covering his face with the use of a tank top. That mannequin had one leg up and the other one laying down on the floor like hesitating between coming out of the bed and keeping his/her eyes covered. The mannequin was dressed with a 19th century nightgown and on the bottom they had a Pink Floyd 70s pajama pants with a 2000s Christmas sock that I bought at Walmart. The other mannequin was leaning down and searching for a glove that if you leaned you could actually see that glove. That second mannequin was dressed with a pair of Levi jeans, a corset from the 1900s, a man’s shirt from the 70s or 80s, gloves that were maybe from 1800 that were leather with embroidered with tiny pink roses on them. The third 3rd mannequin looking out of the window was dressed with a pair of Weston loafers (which is an old school loafer that still exists today but was from way earlier), a little bikini from Louis Vuitton, like early Marc Jacobs from the 2000s or 90s, and a very recent item of clothing for surfing that had all the use of technology with a certain type of material that enables you to surf in certain weather conditions. Each of them had a different time era like they had gone through a time machine and came out of the time machine all fucked up with a bunch of different years on their body. The pieces that were not on the mannequins [were the] missing Christmas sock, the missing glove, and my christening dress that was inside a closet.

You’ve worked in styling for a long time and earlier mentioned to me that as part of your fine arts degree you created an art book that included editorial, fashion work. It seems that you have not only occupied both the fine art and fashion apparatus, but in a way that engages or draws from one to the other rather than occupying both simultaneously?

Yeah or not really actually—I was a stylist assistant for a long time and that was my fashion world and I was in art school but they were separate. I linked them in my personal work, but I was living in the everyday very separately. I didn’t even notice I was linking them.

But with this you were very explicitly engaging both as Auto Body had asked you to create something related to styling. Could you talk more of the ideation behind the concept of the show? We see links to time and memory but what were the specific styling decisions that factored into this and the process?

When they told me it was in a hotel room, I realized the hotel was built in 1857 but I may be wrong—1800s, 1900s, 1850 something, but anyways I realized just how many people had come through this hotel room and lived a very intimate life. When you go into a hotel room, you undress, you bathe, you wash, you brush your teeth, you sleep and these are the most intimate things of every human being. There’s nothing social about it. We eat together, we take the subway together, we work together, but those moments of bathing and undressing and sleeping they’re so personal. Even when you’re in a [relationship], it’s really very singular. It’s funny because they’re hotel rooms at the end of the day, this intimacy is in such a common room that everyone’s been using one by one. This contrast is what interests me. My styling is about contrast. I think it’s very powerful to have something mixed from the 2000s mixed with something [from the] 1900s. Maybe that’s the common denominator that I trigger. And that’s the way I express myself, by contrast.

Your overall styling practice, you mean, not specific to the styling of the show?

Yeah and it’s the same contrast of intimacy and cordiality that I find interesting to look at in a hotel room. There’s so many of these intimate moments, but its reproduced so many times per year because the hotel room is meant for that. It’s the space for that very interminable intimate moment where you undress and let go of your clothes and then put them back on the next day and you’re gone and it’s a new person. Then came the idea of wouldn’t it be so amazing to be able to leave a trace after you undress and that’s where I thought people do! People forget things in hotel rooms all the time and the things they forget are the only clue of their presence, it’s the only trace. I thought it would be interesting to imagine everything they could have forgotten and then put them on mannequins and have those mannequins searching for things that they don’t want to forget in that room.

Right, everything is wiped away, totally erased when the room is cleaned as if no one was ever there before. Auto Body’s description of this show call this a subtle intervention, a blurring line between historical decor and the works themselves. I can see that with the clothing prior to this cleaning routine of hotel rooms, but the mannequins are so obviously not a part of the room, if were to not imagine them as hotel guests. I wonder why you chose to use mannequins in the room and not just the objects left there, an installation of their spectral or ghostly presence.

It wasn’t my first idea to use mannequins, at first I did want to do exactly what you’re saying but Will, my friend from Auto Body, really challenged me [saying that] maybe the clothing needs to have a shape because that is your signature in styling—the shape. Otherwise, I’d be making still life styling. I think the mannequin is more about this idea of my process as a stylist [of] 2D objects becoming 3D as soon as they are put on a body. Then, I wanted to have mannequins to become actual bodies that are put in a certain way that is so close to human being that we put shape to this concept in the present moment. Like if all of them were doing an action, not just standing: one of them is searching for something, the other one is getting up out of bed, the other one is looking out of the window. Clearly the way I have positioned them was to really bring to life something that has, is of the realm of nostalgia and past

You see that through your styling work too, there’s so much movement and life in the still photographs through the fluid form the clothing objects take on.

Than you! It’s true that for me it’s important to play with the contrast of photography. That’s where the magic operates, when you feel so much movement in something that is so very much still by the fact that it’s photography

You have previously described the clothing as activating the space in comparison to how you see hotels as an empty space alive with people. This activation doesn’t necessarily deal with the materiality or physicality of the objects and clothes, but these stories and memories such as the story of your Christening dress hand-stitched by a French woman who stitched for the Queen of England.

Yes I think you can say that, that’s true.

And regarding the temporalities dealt with in the piece, I found the whole idea of it so fascinating, this idea of forgotten objects. I wanted to relate it to Paul Ricœur’s sort of epistemology on forgetting of giving back the past its own future, something that does not, of course, exist presently—but more so on the implications of this. That being this imaginative future. It seems that with these stories you not just activating these past memories but inviting for imagination here where this idea of forgetting to be this potential to imagine alternative futures or presents.

For sure, even in the way I process I’m always imagining because there’s something so freeing about being able to imagine other destinies for things. [The] what if, this chain of events [that] changes your destiny or where you are going. I think that’s so free because there’s so many possibilities and it opens so many doors.

I was also thinking of the Deleuzian idea of the image of time, but applying to an object of time with your works. He talks about how there are two parts to time: a past that’s preserved, which is seen through the forgotten objects and the present, where time is linear and goes smoothly forward. Then there is also this other thing where these objects hold a recollection image and negotiate this dialectical image that holds both these pasts in preserving them, but also allowing for people to project their own narratives and stories and imagine, which is so wonderful about it.

It’s true, when I did the glove under the bed I really imagined it exactly as what you are saying, people having their own narratives project onto it.

With all these stories these objects you are using are such containers for these really special and random memories, especially the tension and play with past and future—the second life you mentioned. I was just thinking of when you are rushed in a hotel room to leave for check out time that becomes frozen in your piece along with the idea of forgetting that becomes frozen in such a way that you can dissect it more.

Something that is forgotten freezes until its found again, it defies movement in a way

Hearing you talk about the styling process and thematic ideation center on contrast really hits it on the nose with me with the mannequins—even this idea of imagination via a sci-fi aesthetic. I saw that temporal contrast, or even merging, with the body of the mannequin where face takes on more classical features and the aesthetics of the bottom half appear more futuristic and almost absurd and within a contrast in its deterioration or rust, indicative of time passing.

It’s super random. I started searching for mannequins and found those 3 mannequins from this guy and loved the whole story behind them. [The mannequins] used to be in this nightclub outside of Paris. [They were] in cages in this weird nightclub and they’re totally malleable, the arm can go 360, the head, the legs, everything—that is very rare. So the idea is, the guy making them had actually forgotten about his mannequins. He actually found one mannequin and was like oh yeah I need to get rid of them and then found 2 more that were hidden behind a huge speaker of his sound system in the nightclub. So those mannequins themselves are totally forgotten objects and super random and their first life is very different from the life they had at Hôtel Normandy. [The way I] ended up searching for all the little pieces [for] my art is exactly what I’m talking about [in the art]. It was quite funny actually to process it. I thought oh this is so meant to be, I need to get them because of the whole story of it and experience of it. It has to be them, it has to be those 3 weird mannequins!