Lake Studios Berlin

Interpretive Assembly looks to honour the vast legacy of garment labour within the performing arts, and reorient the work of the seamstress, garment worker, and costume designer as a robust space of agency, authorship, and impact. Drawing on mythological and archetypical ideas of the seamstress as a weaver of fate and builder of worlds, this research aims to create a quiet dialogue between the hands that shape garments, and how these garments go on to shape the conditions of bodies as they move, think and feel on stage and in the world at large.

Using the working body as a starting point, my research looks towards the subtle gestures of working hands and feet, the tilt of a head leaning in to check seam details, an arm pulling thread through fabric, and the many ways the body shapes itself around a sewing machine. Interpretive Assembly uses the body to trace a long, quiet archive of gendered work, and centers the time-space of garment labour as a way of knowing, holding, feeling and paying attention. 

Elevating the embodied knowledge of garment workers, this is my first phase of research to create a choreographed dance work made by garment workers, for garment workers.

https://nelliegossen.com/
https://www.instagram.com/nelliegossen/