Act like a lichen: A queer fashion workshop is the title of the activity that we held at The Swedish School of Textile – University of Borås (2-5/04/2024), with a group of BA fashion students. An unedited collaboration to cross-fertilize our on-going PhD investigations. This contribution critically discusses such experience. 

The Meth(od) Lab is a place where active, live-action peer review of artistic research methods can take place. It’s a meeting place for design researchers to test out each other’s methods as a form of practise-based peer review. For this edition of the Meth(od) Lab, PhD candidates Helga Lára Halldórsdóttirand Matilda Forssblad have performed a review of each other’s core research method within their PhD studies in fashion design at The Swedish School of textiles. This is the first formal live edition of the Meth(od) Lab, and the lab is fully powered by the trial-and-error generator. We see the lab as an important new venue to evaluate design research, outside the text format, to push how we view artistic output in a research context.

The study of the interaction between body and space has taken centre stage in recent design and architectural debates. Space is being re-examined for its fluidity and ability to adapt, give dimensions, and how space measures change when understood as time. In contrast, the body inhibits this space and time and constantly changes.

The relationship between body and space is interdependent and intertwined, where they constantly affect, shape, and impress one another. The nuances, spirit and social implications of the many cultures and spaces we inhabit imprint on the body, while the body is where identity, reflexivity, soul, and mind mediate; thus, the two incessantly become sites of shifting cultural meaning.

This multi-platform event brings together an international and multigenerational group of artists, researchers and designers to share current understandings, opportunities and challenges of Body and Space Relations through basic experimental art and design research. The exhibition explores empirical artistic expressions and functional aesthetic ideas to examine the role of objects and materiality in cultural sociology, the relation between bodily perception and space, and how it affects people’s art experience whenencountered in an unconventional setting.

Curators: Tazeen Qayyum,Faisal Anwar and Faseeh Saleem