UNGÜENTI: ROTTURE E RIMEDI

Cosmetics for the Female Face

UNGÜENTI is composed of 16 unique pieces designed and handcrafted individually. Each piece is created as a result of a research with biomaterials to build the whole artistic environment. This project combines material research, fashion, and performance.

"Ungüenti: Resti, rotture e rimedi" is created by Raquel Buj at Real Academia de España in Rome. It is inspired by Ovid's classic poems 'Cosmetics for the Female Face', where the author describes different recipes for beauty and skin care.

The natural elements included in these ointments recipes (petals, lupins, daffodils) serve in this project as a trigger to generate a laboratory for biomaterial experimentation that gives physicality to the poems and expand the classical concept of beauty towards less canonical and anthropocentric views.

As a result of this research, a series of garments understood as second skins that, like nature, are in continuous transformation. These become skins like ointments, when they interact with the bodies that inhabit them. Layers of protection that take us back to Antiquity to rethink, from the contemporary, the ecological complexity that surrounds us.

A fashion performance activates these second skins giving visibility to the space that Ovid ignores: the care ritual. In this natural location, dancers get dressed and undressed, change their skin with intimate movements that require some other gestures that, like the garments, are made of body and matter.

Ungüenti is a reinterpretation of Ovid's poems, an exercise of material recreation through clothing and biomaterial experimentation. A project that look at what is unwanted: the broken ones and the remains that arise from the creative processes, but that, by appreciating them through meticulous work, we begin to remedy the ills that afflict a damaged ecology.