Returns: Reckoning with systems of capitalism

Nellie Gossen discusses her playful interruption of consumer fashion processes. Returns runs Jan 7th-Feb 3rd at PuSh Festival.

Show Notes

Gabrielle Martin chats with Nellie Gossen about her intriguing performative installation Returns at the Dance Centre, which will be part of PuSh and showing for the duration of the 2024 Festival.

Co-presented with The Dance Centre.

Gabrielle and Nellie ask:

• How can we use clothing as a tool to think and feel through social systems?
• How does end of life care and other educational practices inform the work and design?
• How will the installation expose and reveal the systems of production behind clothing?
• How does clothing form an archive of labour that can be drawn upon with performance?
• Why is fashion increasingly present in art spaces in Vancouver and beyond? What does this mean for audience experiences? Artist practices?
• Will people come back to the installation throughout the festival?

About Nellie Gossen

Nellie Gossen (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. Working through the media of fashion, costume, textiles and performance, Nellie uses clothing as a tool to think and feel through social systems.

With an interest in repurposing the materials, rhythms and choreographies of the mainstream fashion industry, Nellie practices fashion as a space of study, ceremony, and as a critical site of research into embodied experiences of consumer capitalism. Drawing on formal training in both Fashion Design and Religious Studies, Nellie is particularly interested in the space that is created when clothing and contemplative practices meet.

Nellie’s work has been presented throughout Canada and Germany. As a costume designer and textile collaborator, Nellie has worked with artists such as Nancy Tam, Steven Hill, Francesca Frewer, Erika Mitsuhashi, Alexa Mardon and Michaela Gerussi.

Alongside her artistic inquiries, Nellie studies and practices end of life spiritual care.

Land Acknowledgement

Gabrielle and Nellie both join from the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

Gabrielle [00:00:01] Hello and welcome to Push Play, a PuSh Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, PuSh's director of programming. And today's episode highlights clothing as a tool to think and feel through social systems. I'm speaking with Nellie Gossen, responsible for the direction and concept of Returns, a durational performance installation running throughout the PuSh Festival January 18th to February 3rd, 2024. Returns unearths the materials and performances already at play within consumer capitalism. Nellie works through the medium of fashion, costume, textiles and performance, considering the many truths of industrial labour and consumption. Her work explores the materials of mainstream fashion as a vehicle for study, spaciousness, social action, rigorous love, practice and phenomenological inquiry. I'm excited for you to hear our discussion that highlights how these considerations culminate in Returns. Here is my conversation with Nellie. 

Gabrielle [00:01:01] I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that both of us are here today on the stolen Unceded ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) . And it is it's an absolute privilege to be here living on these lands that just contextualises where we are. And I want to now talk about the work that we're doing and the collaboration. So your work explores the space created when clothing and contemplative practices meet. And I'm curious, how did you arrive at this unique point of transdisciplinary inquiry? 

Nellie [00:01:40] For me, these are not fields that I have intentionally brought together. They are rather just parts of me, parts of what I'm interested in, parts of my own training and experience. I come to this work with formal training and the field of fashion design and also in religious studies and spiritual care. So these are just these two poles of my own interests and explorations that of course are going to come together in my practice, whether I like it or not. I think, so I'm primarily thinking about the field of fashion, and that's been a thread that really weaves through all of my work. And when we're thinking about fashion and engaging in that industry and that system and fashion design education, we're really always going to be referencing or talking to the flow of money. Fashion is so deeply intertwined with capitalism from the kind of earliest stages of capitalism as we see it now. So this is always going to be a reference point and always going to be kind of a reckoning when we're talking about thinking about working with fashion. For me, in my practice or what I what I kind of see and understand is that the fashion industry, fashion field is interested in bringing in question topics that are relevant to folks, what's happening out in the world, reflecting, reflecting our lived experiences. And because it is so intertwined with money, with with marketing, with profit, it has the tendency to really flatten and limit and kind of water down all of these experiences. So I guess something that I want to name is any time I'm thinking about fashion, I feel like there is this reckoning with this lineage of less nuance and complexity rather than more. My interest and my field really is really always going to be one of how we can bring more interesting questions and more space into thinking about clothing and and bringing in kind of contemplative practices, thinking about attention practices, thinking about slowing down, feeling with the full body, thinking about weaving and lineages of how we make meaning, of how we reckon with what is known and what is unknown and unknowable. It's just extra space for me to to kind of find what is interesting for me in fashion practice and, and to really be be drawing on other fields and other interdisciplinary practice, other mediums to kind of create more space to think about clothing and fashion in a in a bit of a wider frame. 

Gabrielle [00:04:37] Yeah. So the way you're speaking, I start to get a sense of how the contemplative practice is embedded in the experience that you're designing with Returns and your kind of artistic interests. You're currently studying end of life care, and I'm just curious if you could expand a little bit more on how so that that experience and that education informs the design, how we may feel that, for example in Returns or in other projects of yours. 

Nellie [00:05:12] Similar with with end of life care and about spiritual care. These are I didn't set out with the intention of making a work about that. That's just really a reflection of the questions that I'm asking in my own life. You know, as a student of the field, somebody who has been been studying and practising that in that world, I think there is so much that that enters into my work and is profoundly relevant to how we are moving through the world today, how we're making work today. I see a lot of folks starting to integrate grief work and death work into artistic practices these days. And I think it really speaks to, you know, how we are navigating and negotiating some of the larger questions of bearing witness to to to what what we are what we are seeing in the world today. I think in a practical sense, when we're talking about care practices of of this turning towards are building and capacity building muscle to turn towards experiences that are really challenging, to turn towards suffering, to turn towards complexity and to try to build spaces to to hold that complexity in life or in art practice or in whatever other container it it all creates more space for us to think, think about or for me to think about my artistic practice in a more nuanced way. So what's actually happening in in Returns, it can be considered a caregiving practice. We are borrowing clothing, we are borrowing systems from the larger fashion industry and thinking about how we can use our bodies to offer them value or to to witness them to to care for them and to care for garments that are that are essentially otherwise made to be disposable. So this kind of practice in a way of a re-sacralizing commun-  or commercial garments or commercial materials and how we can bring our our attention can actually change and impact those materials. 

Gabrielle [00:07:36] Yeah. So you're touching on a little bit about what happens in returns that there's this this disassembling and reassembling of garments and and there's an embodied practice there too, that there's dance artists who you're working with who are engaging physically in this space, and that this all kind of comes together to critique consumer capitalism. So it's a durational performance installation that addresses modern production and consumption and how we exist with it and consumer capitalism. and so I'm just curious if you could talk a bit more about how those different mediums come together in this piece to... I mean, you already have been speaking to that, but maybe you could just expound a little bit further on, for example,