Your body is a precarious financial instrument. Your heartbeat is measured, your choices are monitored and ranked, your future behavior is calculable, monetizable and further looped into existence. You are a mathematical depiction of flows, aggregate data in a continuous present. Get ready for the ultimate transaction.
For its latest collection, Prosper Centre’s sportswear is mixed with street fighter motifs and stock market data. “Symbols of desired power are worn as appropriations of our opponents’ strengths.” The collection points to the intersectionality of the human-data-animal assemblage, marking the contemporary body as meeting place of technologic and organic streams of influence.
Including seven different items, ranging from jackets, kick-boxing shorts, jogging pants, hoodies and t-shirts, the collection was produced in Iași, an industrial town in the North East of Romania, through a residency with tranzit.ro/iasi. At 221A in Vancouver, all items in the collection are available to purchase throughout September and October 2016. One of each item in the collection will be acquired for 221A’s growing research library, available for reference to artists, designers and culture producers at large.
Iași was formerly known for its textile trades. The 1990’s marked the fall of a socialist type economy in Romania, which determined the profound transformation and alteration of local infrastructures. Most factories have disappeared or have been privatized, consequently leading to an atomized invisible industry ruled by the market economy, where all individuals are altered to meet its needs. Practicalities related to the specificity of producing a fashion collection (human resources, timing, technological process, efficiency and costs control) allowed for a mapping of the current resources in Iași. What followed was a processes of negotiating outside all existing industries or domain protocols.
So many interests were met through this collection’s production processes: economic strategies, skill sharing, a socialist-industrial past, resource aesthetics, an under-valued textile factory, the textile education industry and so on. The AW2016 collection by Prosper Center transformed transit.ro/iasi into a producer for contemporary culture. The result of this process continues to manifest itself on random streets, which follow our invisible networks of coincidences and market driven intentions.