As this name is quite a mouthful, they abbreviated it to 2008daughters. They are a Berlin-based designer-artist duo who, since 2012, have been uniquely bridging the gap between art, performance and fashion. Their work and projects revolve around bodies and their processes. Having met in Milan in 2008 during a project called ‘Let’s Circus’, which partly inspired their name, the pair decided to team up to find out what they could create together.
2008daughters: ‘Berlin Movers’, 2012 // Copyright: 2008daughters
Due to their different backgrounds, it’s an exciting challenge to try to define their work, even for the artists themselves. Griese is a trained fashion designer, accounting for their tendency towards including garments and fabrics in performances. Di Fabio’s roots are in performance art. The combination makes for something rather unusual.
One of their first projects, called ‘Berlin Movers’, grew from an idea for a movement: participants were walking around Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg, wearing t-shirts made by Griese and performing movements choreographed by Di Fabio. This was captured on camera, as an experiment to see how, or whether, the movements of these different bodies could come to life in photographs.
Ruth Amelung: Your work is difficult to categorise or define, but you seem to be in the cross-section of performance, art and fashion. Was that the idea behind 2008daughters?
Derek Di Fabio: The idea was to make something with the motive of production using the body. Clothes were an obvious starting point. We were also thinking about production sites, where people can physically come together and share knowledge, while they’re making clothes, for example.
RA: Do you consider your work to be fashion, art or performance?
Isa Griese: I don’t want to specify it. One time I called it a not a workshop, because that was more what it was. And a show can be an exhibition, but it can also be a fashion show. Of course that’s also about the English language, but for me it’s not necessarily fixed. I don’t know if I can define it.
RA: You most recently had garments exhibited at Duve, as part of Iris Touliatou’s ‘Can You Wash the Water’. Your collection was not being worn, but laid out to be looked at. Was that unusual for you?
IG: It was and I thought that it would be more linked together. Our collection was about cycling. She had canvases and sculptures and I think that worked, but I was hoping it would have been more connected than it was. We made a few references to her work, for example. We had an actual print of a friend’s tattoo of a watch and put it on a cycling glove, a reference to one of Iris’s canvases.
DF: For this, we were thinking about clothes for cyclists specifically but there are also some influences from older projects that are visible in how we displayed the work.
2008daughters: ‘Squash Every Week Into A Day’, 2016// Copyright: Bennie Julian Gay
IG: Then this question about fashion in galleries or museums came up for us, too. Does it belong there? Does it work? Perhaps for shows like Jean Paul Gaultier’s ‘From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk’, but then there is a historical element as well. It was interesting.
RA: The body is an important starting point in fashion. What role does it play for you?
DF: For a project we did in Torino in 2014 called ‘Sew u!’ we made a sewing machine so that we could sew someone directly into a dress. The idea was to make wearable sculptures. This person lay down on the table and we sewed the dress straight on. So our work is objects or clothes, but they need the person: a body to complete them and bring them to life.
2008daughters: ‘Squash Every Week Into A Day’, 2016// Copyright: Bennie Julian Gay
RA: How does the idea process work? Where does your inspiration come from?
IG: For the cycling pants and gloves: I’m not sure how we came up with the whole collection, but we had the idea of doing something like that about two years ago. So it happened step-by-step. Sometimes, like the idea with the trolley and sewing someone into a t-shirt, it seemed bit crazy at first. I was also always wondering what Derek meant by trolley, because for me a trolley is a bag, like cabin luggage. And we weren’t living in the same city, he was in London and I was in Bremen, so there was a bit of a language barrier. When I looked up the translation and realised that he meant a shopping trolley, I understood, saw some sketches and, of course, was on board.
2008daughters: ‘Sew u!’, 2014 // Copyright: 2008daughters
RA: But usually you don’t design with someone in mind?
IG: Not usually, but it depends. Back in school we had to design with a person in mind, sometimes using a mannequin. If you didn’t, you would have been working on yourself, because either me or someone else has to fit it. I don’t work with mannequins anymore, I work with real people. I have to see it on the body. In school, I used to use my dad as a model for some pieces, like trousers and jackets. But now it is more about the body for me.
2008daughters: ‘Sew u!’, 2014 // Copyright: 2008daughters
RA: So your works are more one-off pieces, not necessarily for sale?
IG: Yes, most are. I also did some t-shirts and made about 10 editions of those, two different sizes. But I already noticed that they didn’t fit everyone. Friends were trying them on, and some said that they weren’t for them. Of course the pattern didn’t fit everybody. It’s not easy to produce something that fits everybody. Setting the price for the pieces is also really random: for example, we liked the numbers 66 or 77 or 222, so they became the prices. The main aim for us is not to sell. I guess art and fashion are a bit different in that sense. Unless you produce editions.
RA: Is gender an important question for you?
IG: I don’t think about it in our work, but of course the designer in me knows you have different patterns for men and women, shoulder, back, waist. I don’t have a classical female body, so it’s easier for me to wear men’s or unisex clothes.
DF: We don’t want to define what we’re doing in terms of fashion. It doesn’t matter: male, female. When we’re producing things or making clothes we’re not thinking about whether it’s for male or female or gay or trans, they’re just for people. It’s about the form, and things are allowed to clash.
2008daughters: ‘Sew u!’, 2014 // Copyright: 2008daughters
RA: You seem to not be worried about the outcome of a process during a project or even the audience’s reaction. Does this way of working sometimes scare you?
IG: Well if friends don’t like it, I ask myself why. But with strangers, at first it doesn’t matter if their reaction isn’t good. Of course it’s different when it’s someone really big and knowledgeable critiquing it.
DF: Maybe there is a fear of not being honest with yourself. It’s not about the fear that someone else won’t like it, it’s about the fear that you weren’t honest and as a result haven’t produced an honest piece of work.
RA: You have very different backgrounds and you’re from different countries. What have you learned from each other as creatives?
DF: [laughs] A lot. For me I probably learned pragmatism from Isa.
IG: In the beginning, when I was going to Italy for several months at a time, I learned that maybe you don’t have to know until the last minute what the work will be and accept that it’s never finished. For the performances, we never know who will show up, who is going to be there, it’s heavily influenced by the people. I didn’t necessarily learn that from Derek, but I learnt it doing what we do.
RA: As a designer, when you start a piece or collection you have an idea of the final look, so that sounds like a contradiction of how you actually work.
IG: And that’s both difficult and refreshing, because sometimes you can’t but you have to relax and say that maybe the outcome doesn’t matter, it will come out how it will come out. And also I can work by myself with my sewing machine, show Derek and then we work on that and make some changes. But sometimes something just emerges while doing it together.
RA: Why did you choose Berlin?
IG: It’s so international, but what people sometimes forget is that it is still Germany. It’s not a crazy city, it’s still German. And while occasionally Germans can be crazy, they’re also very pragmatic and very organised. No one is in a hurry, but it’s also dangerous, because it can make you slow down.
DF: I was in London doing other projects and then I met someone here, and Isa was here. I mean I’m not in love with the city, but I’m also still discovering it. Living somewhere is different than coming to visit as a tourist. It could be on the cards that we’ll go somewhere else, perhaps even different directions.
