Radical Play 2023

IT TAKES A VILLAGE PROJECT CREDITS

MODELS Elena Turner-Thorne My name is Elena Turner-Thorne. I am 27 years old and I have Down Syndrome. I am mixed race as my mum is white and my dad is Black. I love music, singing, dancing, and modelling. I love to dance as it makes me feel free and alive. I can create my own routines to express how I feel. I love to model as I can be anybody I want to be just by looking or moving in a different way. Modelling with another person means we can create characters and share ideas too.

Jessica Williams My name is Jessica Amy Williams, I am 19 years old and I’m from Liverpool. I am a strong woman because I go to college every day and I love laughing with my friends all the time like I always do. I am happy, I am fun, I am joyful to bue around because I leave pieces of myself wherever I go. I am loving my life.

Lara Wates I'm Lara. I'm 18 years old and live in West Sussex with my family. I'm studying for my level 1 diploma in Beauty at college which I love. I am into fashion, beauty, and pop culture, and am a big fan of the Great British Bake Off. Tathi Piancastelli Thati Piancastelli was born in São Paulo, Brazil. She works as a digital influencer with large national and international brands, having more than 400,000 followers. She has acted in various professional theatre plays, two of which were written by herself. She is also an activist defending the rights of people with Down Syndrome, including representing Brazil at the UN. She is a character in the renowned cartoon magazine, ‘Turma da Monica’, popular in Brazil and Japan.

CULTURE DEVICE

CURATORIAL TEAM

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Madeleine Burdon

Alina El-Assadi

Nayanika Singh

Ben Olive

Selin Kir

Sammy Baxter

Shelby Winter

FASHION

Yangrung Chen (Moco)

Jérôme Henrottin

Lee Weinberg

Daniel Vais

Ayumi Kajiwara

Diego Fernández Álvarez del Castillo

ACADEMIC ADVISORS

Luke W Anderson

Mercedes Vicente

Liu Xuenyang

WITH THE SUPPORT

MAKE UP ARTISTS

CSM Loan Store

Diane Jin

CSM Photography Department

Lais Pattak

CSM Digital Print

Molly Whiteley

CSM Hospitality

GRAPHIC DESIGN

CSM Events Build Team

Tanvi Ranjan

CSM Staff and Security

Miraculous Manufacturer

CSMTechnical Support

PRODUCTION

Lethaby Gallery Build Team

Abdul Rahman

MEET ALL COLLABORATORS

RADICAL BEAUTY PROJECT Radical Beauty is an internationally recognised art and fashion photography initiative operating under the umbrella of Cultural Device. A child of Culture Device, Radical Beauty is dedicated exclusively to working with models with Down Syndrome, blurring the boundaries between art, photography and fashion, and working to provide an alternative vision for beauty today.

They aim to challenge commonly held perspectives of people with disabilities and facilitate conversations to celebrate their unique expressive and creative capabilities.

By challenging conventional notions of beauty and spotlighting the voices and talents of the artists to showcase their talents, Radical Beauty has already garnered immense global recognition for its ground-breaking contributions to conceptual art and fashion photography projects. Furthermore, they have launched the world's first photography collection exclusively featuring models with Down Syndrome. Collaborating with over 40 renowned fashion and art photographers from around the world and featured in Vogue, Dazed, and i-D to name a few, the project encapsulates the spirit of inclusivity and creativity. https://www.radicalbeautyproject.com/

MORE INFORMATION ON RADICAL BEAUTY PROJECT

RADICAL PLAY

“Playing to me means joy - no rules, no limit, and not caring about what others think.”

-Jessica Williams

Radical Play, the latest photographic addition to the Radical Beauty (RB) Project, features two newly commissioned series of portraits highlighting four models with Down Syndrome in a collaboration between RB and Central Saint Martins. It explores portrait photography through the interplay between subjectivity and representation. At a time when the agency of these creatives as autonomous individuals is often challenged and contested as coercion, Radical Play questions the normative conventions of desire, and artistic expression, and firmly believes in the agency and autonomy of neurodivergent creative individuals. Underpinning the rhetorics of play, the new commissions at display aim to challenge prejudices and preconceived notions of difference in the fashion and culture industries. Taking from its name, Radical Play emphasises play as a tool for communities to negotiate, construct, express identities and re-interpret societal expectations.

Ingrained in the ethos of RB, radical changes the fundamental nature and is the spirit of defiance of the status quo. The RB creatives represented here are its embodiment. Brian Sutton-Smith conceived play as a complex, multifaceted, and essential aspect of human behaviour influenced by social norms, significantly shaping individual identity. Play in these portraits allows these individuals to mediate subversive means of self-exploration and freedom away from convention, encouraging innovative, boundary-pushing ways of being.

Through these portraits, radicalism is asserted as a celebration of unapologetic individuality, furthering RB artists’ claim to creative agency.

The exhibition calls for a new framework for what the creative community can become when barriers to access dissolve. It offers hope and confidence in challenging normative conventions of beauty and change towards expansive, innovative and inclusive realities. Radical Play acknowledges that these models are neither mere representations of a label nor spokespersons for the entire Down’s community. What they are is a testament to the boundless capacities of the human spirit in expanding representation; they are artists in their own right.

Radical Play; assertive, disruptive, transformative.