We invite you to the open costume workshop at Temporary Gallery! Costumes will be artistically developed here. The Cologne Carnival can be thematized and prepared in a protected environment.
In cooperation with M*Treff Alte Feuerwache, ROOTS & ROUTES Cologne e.V., Rutfront Fastelovendsbund e.V. and the artists, costume and mask designers Hilma Bäckström, Brigitte Dunkel, Sarah Ferreira dos Santos, Nora Hansen, Jil Lahr, Christina Neuss, Paula Noller and Corinne Riepert.
Artists lead the workshop and help with the design. Everyone can sew costumes, build and be creative. The aim is to develop new ideas for the carnival. The workshop aims to scrutinise typical carnival costumes. Creative and individualised costumes will be created. The art scene and carnival have a long connection: For example, artists have always organised costume parties and incorporated political themes into carnival by designing carnival floats. In the costume workshop, we want to work together to ensure that everyone in the room feels comfortable and that nobody is hurt. That's why we make sure that nobody is excluded.
The open costume workshop will take place between January 31 and February 21 every Friday between 3:30 and 7:30 pm. The workshop is a temporary space led by local artists where costumes can be artistically developed. Everyone is welcome to design, sew, build, learn and exchange ideas.
The Cologne Carnival can be prepared in a safe environment, and there is room for any questioning of the festival.
The costume workshop aims to encourage people to think about the practice of dressing up and the transformative potential of costuming beyond the boundaries of stereotypical carnival costumes. For these are now part of the fast fashion movement—the cheapest materials are poorly made so that they can hardly be worn for more than one season. In addition, the selection of affordable costumes is very limited and characterized by a norm-binary, sometimes sexist and racist world view. The scope of possibilities and free fantasies—who or what one would like to dress up as—often seem limited, manipulated by the influences of the omnipresent consumer society and at the same time also a question of the social environment. In terms of content, the format deals with the practices of dressing up in the context of customs and tradition, but also wants to break free from many practices and gain its own perspectives. In this way, carnival can be viewed in a new light and artistically shaped.
The Cologne art scene and the Cologne Carnival, as a place of political debate and satire based on the democratic right to freedom of expression, have always been closely intertwined in the past—artists designed carnival floats, backdrops for carnival shows and organized costume parties. The artists' festival Laange Ent (1920s), the activities of the Ahl Säu (founded in 1946), the Lumpenball at the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the carnival party DA BA DEE? at Temporary Gallery (2020) are just a fraction of the avant-garde impulses that used artistic means and strategies to help shape the Cologne festival, and not infrequently and not often enough, as it were, to question and thwart militaristic, patriarchal structures.
