Marina Dalgalarrondo treats garments as if they were thought hypotheses taking shape as disjointed sculptural experiments. Her mannequins are perhaps witnesses to an event: limbs absent, torsos tilting on precarious angles, suspended in gestures that never complete themselves. What emerges are not just clothes or models, but sardonic entities trembling between categories, as in a theater frozen mid-motion, or a choreography that refuses both a beginning and an end.
In The System of Objects, the French philosopher Baudrillard mapped how things slip from functionality into signs, from utility into atmosphere, and from object into code, thereby escaping their presupposed destiny of use. A chair is no longer simply for sitting; a car, no longer just for moving; they circulate as signs in a larger code, indexing prestige, modernity, and belonging. Dalgalarrondo stages this slippage with irony and instinct. Her apparel does not cover the body but exposes fractured concepts as each mannequin becomes an argument in couture, a sculptural speculation draped in medieval echoes and vernacular flair.
These pieces frame events in perpetual suspension: a sleeve arrested mid-arc, a bodice collapsing under the weight of its own citations. Here, history sheds its linear trajectory to drape, tangle, and loop back upon itself in a continuous return. The result is a temporal collage—a single garment sutured from disparate centuries that defies the very premise of a timeline. Here, fashion acts more as a time machine, but one that jams, sputters, and insists on its own campy malfunction.
Dalgalarrondo’s mannequins huddle like survivors of a hyperreal explosion, conspiring together. They form constellations of absence, with their missing limbs gesturing more powerfully than any presence. Form is not in the service of function but in the service of a mischievous intuition that suggests the useless might be more necessary than the useful. The result resembles a runway that has collapsed into an installation, as if the garment has transformed into speculative prosthetics.
The works pulse with a camp sensibility, blurring the lines between the gravitas of medieval forms and the raw, disruptive energy of the streets, where heraldic dignity meets a spirit of playful subversion. They dramatize the metafunctional: objects that transcend their apparent use to become signs of their own excess. A mannequin missing an arm does not lament; it displays fashion’s fragmented and recombinant state. A garment overloaded with layers does not aim for comfort; it stages the absurd theater of surplus information, where every fold carries another reference.
To encounter these works is to be caught in their blast radius, where objects insist on engaging our thoughts as we attempt to analyze them.
-By Vinicius Duarte