BITE P—62
FALL—WINTER 2012
LUCIA CUBA Interview by Susan Walsh Peruvian designer Lucia Cuba’s Parsons MFA collection launched a project, Articulo 6. Cuba’s collection is a form of activism through clothing, with each stitch and cut telling a socio-political narrative. Her designs are effectively installations, created to prompt dialogue and encourage action.
At the root of your collection is a message, what was the catalyst for this project? When I began researching for my project and collection, I was given the chance to interview two incredible women from Anta, Peru, who had experienced sterilisation in a very violent way. At the end of this conversation I asked them what they wanted to obtain from their continued struggle, and they both said, ‘We want everyone to know what happened to us, all of us. We don’t want this to happen again.’ For me, this was the trigger to create something that could inform people about what had occurred. Connecting with diverse audiences and contexts to spread a message highlighting the need to respect human rights and be engaged in the strengthening of citizenship. The idea of constraint and boundaries runs through your collection, what constraints do you find you encounter as a designer? The fact that fashion design is primarily associated, almost exclusively, to aesthetical analysis, creates a strong barrier when it comes to expressing a garment’s agency. The political implications of my project are, in a sense, another constraint. There is a lot of fear in the reactions of people towards my project, a fear that is still present in Peruvian society today when it comes to presenting
works that promote the debate and analysis of certain contemporary social and political issues. The collection incorporates a number of printed imagery on