ROME.- With You can have my brain the Rehearsal section of MACRO hosts Anna-Sophie Berger (Vienna, 1989) and Teak Ramos’ (Ohio, 1992) first artistic collaboration. The exhibition presents a body of work conceived and made from a jointly built archive on the subject of fashion at-large, which the two artists investigate from a social and historical perspective, whilst also delving into the realm of technical garment construction. The work takes shape in the form of a series of looks which stem from the archive built by Berger and Ramos: images, text and theory on the subjects of everyday material culture and fashion, with a somewhat serendipitous focus on the early modern era (Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries).

The looks, which are worn by ten chrome mannequins, are composed from garments made of various fabrics applied with black and white A4 print-outs sourced from the archive. Some garments focus on single historical or theoretical case studies and others take a more composite approach to the socio-cultural ramifications of bodily adornment, and its conceptualization and interpretation over time. The garments themselves draw their composition from Western fashion’s canonic repertoire (jackets, pants, skirts, dresses, aprons) and reflect an attempt to skew specific period definitions. At once visual and textual, the styled looks in the show are conceived as a single artwork, comprising both subject and object, accompanied by architectural units, as well as a video and photographs.

The units, consisting of two large-scale V’s and a V-shaped bench, draw inspiration from make-shift studio photography props. Like an open circular fan, at the centre of the room, the units act as prosthetic free-standing corners and don three color photographs of flowers.

The Eighteenth Century Woman, a documentary produced by the MET Museum in 1982 on the occasion of their homonymous exhibition, plays on a monitor. Narrated by Hollywood actress Marisa Berenson, the film perhaps reveals more about 1980s American museological and historiographical approaches to the past, than about the Eighteenth Century itself. Berger and Ramos thus collapse past and present to grapple with what historian Elisabeth Wilson refers to, in her seminal study of dress, as “the frontier between the self and non self”, since to her “clothing marks an unclear boundary ambiguously, and unclear boundaries disturb us.