Title: Colonial Infrastructures: on Fashion with Denzel Veerkamp and Chinouk Filique
Title: Colonial Infrastructures: on Fashion with Chinouk Filique de Miranda and Denzel Veerkamp, with Misha Bleijs, Madeleine and Nathan Schotvanger
Date: 2024-04-29
Category: event
Tags: workshop, coloniality, fashion
@ -31,3 +31,13 @@ This series falls under Varia's Counter Coloniality research thread and is suppo
**Chinouk Filique de Miranda** is a design researcher and critical fashion practitioner. She analyses, translates and visualises the crossover between the fashion system and digital culture with a focus on introducing digital literacy to fashion. In her practice she approaches fashion as a subliminal communication vehicle which she aims to de-mystify in order to inform consumers on complex matters regarding individual agency within fashions' digital landscape.
**Denzel Veerkamp** is a socio-culturally engaged designer navigating topics such as dual-heritage identity and transgenerational history. Born in Amsterdam to a Dutch mother and Surinamese father, Veerkamp meticulously intertwines collective pains of Dutch-Surinamese history with his own confrontations. His upcycling- design practice intertwines storytelling, traditional Surinamese costumes, adventurous patchworks, textile contrasts, and playful volumes. Veerkamp challenges Eurocentric approaches, striving to unlearn imposed narratives, replacing them with alternative realities. Through his work, he critiques Western, capitalist fashion systems, fostering discomfort, openness, interaction, and innovation in his transformative narrative.
**Misha Bleijs** is a fashion designer. She has been working with clothes for as long as she can remember. Whether she went to thrift stores looking for interesting and unique pieces, or whether she just took old clothes from her closet and completely cut them into pieces to experiment with it. she did everything as long as it had to do with textiles. And that’s how her passion for fashion and design started.
She now is a 3rd year fashion design student at HKU. There she is busy discovering her own style and learning new approaches to design. In her work she often brings out the imperfections and rawness. She also is very interested in culture and community. That’s something that plays a major role in her work.
**Madeleine** is studying fashion and textile design. Her process for making garments starts with the textile. She looks at how contrasting textiles work together, which she explores through knit, weaving, dyeing processes, pleating, quilting, patchwork and more.
She’s always been into upcycling and finding creative ways to take old clothes that weren’t ‘for her’ and other materials she had found and turning them into something she could wear. She’s brought that through to her recent work, and has the urge to push that further, and that’s what drew her to the work Denzel is doing.
Madeleine takes a lot of inspiration from her community of creatives at home in Ireland, where serious ideas present themselves in the form of satire and subliminal messaging, and projects are executed with a make-do, collaborative approach.
**Nathan Schotvanger** is a 20-year-old fashion enthusiast with a desire to learn more about the industry and the creation process of garments. Currently, he's following the Jean School International Course at Denim City. This is a 1-year course that specializes in Denim Design & Development, located in Amsterdam. Nathan likes to experiment with styles and wants to explore the industry through arts, culture, and sustainability.
His focus lies in trying new things, such as working with different textures, treatments, materials, and ideas. Trying to add an extra layer to denimwear with sustainable materials or techniques. For his internship at Denzel Veerkamp he wants to learn more about the perspective of an artist and how to bind a strong story to a concept or project.
