O Último Prefixo [The Last Prefix] | Ivan Hunga Garcia
Residency: 27.12.2021 – 06.03.2022
Open studio: 03.03.2022
O Último Prefixo (OUP) is the name of the collection produced by Ivan Hunga Garcia during his residency at INSTITUTO. The pieces in the OUP collection were showcased at an open studio before being presented at the New Blood show at Lisbon Fashion Week, which took place a week later.
Ivan Hunga Garcia conducts authorial research using fashion as a means of expression. He focuses on speculative future scenarios, bringing together scientific and philosophical concerns with commercial, conceptual and audiovisual objectives.
His 2022/2023 collection, O Último Prefixo, unleashes an entanglement of scatological thoughts where humans are recast in a far lower position on the food chain. Using a planned modelling approach, silhouetted bodies are supplemented by material extensions. These extensions mutually appropriate one another in a reciprocal, parasitic relationship in which they are all hosts. Surfaces are covered in bacterial and botanical cultures. These communities exemplify the volatility of material presence in different phases. The constant transfiguration and appropriation of consumed and consuming organisms evokes a metaphysical dialogue of interdependence.
The pieces in the OUP collection were presented in their purest state as characters that are independent from the human body, encouraging their observation from a design and empirical perspective. This is not a collection presented six months in advance, like most fashion collections. This set of communities does not wait for consumers’ needs to the detriment of their own properties. Nor is it an idealised collection, designed to remain eternal and timeless during that wait. As the name suggests, O Último Prefixo creates and interrupts cycles, developing and breaking them down in favour of others. These subjects evoke the eternity of changing physical states and the ancestry of material intermittence.
From the symbiotic production of bacterial communities in partnership with Aquela Kombucha and Costuralogia to the germination and cultivation of aerial gardens, the collection reached peak physical condition at the New Blood show at Lisbon Fashion Week and subsequent days in the lead-up to spring.
Support: ESAD Matosinhos, Aquela Kombucha, Costuralogia (Clementina Delgado), Lisboa Fashion Week
Photography: Ivan Hunga Grcia and INSTITUTO.