Co-costuming as an opening for temporal socio-material entanglements: a dialogical process of co-wearing a connecting-costume

This paper derives from the twelve-hour costume-based ‘performative-walk’ Community Walk that locomoted through the central area of Copenhagen on June 29, 2020. The frame for Community Walk was a bright yellow costume that physically connected two wearers and the concept of ‘walking and talking’. ‘Walking’ was physically sensing the co-wearer through the costume and jointly navigating and negotiating the costume, spectator(s), and urban elements/environment. ‘Talking’ was an investigation of what constitutes a community – where each of the twelve participant stories acted as entry points for the dialogue.
In Community Walk I, the researcher and costume designer, placed myself ‘in the center’ of the co-wearing entanglements. For twelve hours I co-wore the costume with twelve different co-wearers – one hour with each of the twelve participating co-wearers. The twelve ‘walking and talking’ co-costumed entanglements felt almost like how waves spread around an obstacle or an opening. Some entanglement or diffracting patterns had communality and others was surprisingly different. Karen Barad writes that ‘we can understand diffraction patterns – as patterns of difference that make a difference – to be the fundamental constituents that makes up the world’ (Barad, 2002, p, 72).
Ingold suggest that ‘by investigating phenomena through practice rather than mere observation, one can capture the experiential nature of the practice and knowledge becomes transformational rather than documentational’ (Groth C. et al. 2020:4–5). Hence, it is through the active engagement I will investigate how the entangled nature of co-costuming acted as openings and/or obstacles for the co-wearers to become aware of, navigate and negotiate their communal and importantly their different experiences of co-wearing? More broadly my ambition is to discuss, how can we through and with artistic interventions in public space and through and with our differences at sight can migrate towards each other perspectives and assumptions and thereby co-learn or co-educate each other?