Art
ALL COLOURS OF BLACK
Ninna Berger constructs clothing out of recycled materials "from these parameters Restructional Projects evolve and what often starts with a problem solving idea ends up in a project". For this years swedish music and art festival held in Gagnef, Ninna created a set of paper table cloths which transformed with time, use and abuse. As wear, tear and mishap spills effected the paper, it changed the space by changing itself, transferring prints onto the paper from the rings of water left by cups and bottles and tore in it's fragile state into new shapes. In the beginning, they were pitch BLACK. She writes —
All colours of BLACK
Diving straight into the ocean in a competition with my father to collect something from the bottom, I opened my eyes only to meet darkness. Black is born by secret recepies, starts to age, gets washed away, fades, degenerates by from ware or if dyed on synthetics stay crisp and eternally pitch black. It is the colour of happiness and death, the color of outsiderness and belonging, radical thought and bottomlessness.
The other evening I walked through the night, showing off it's black eternal sky as a reminder of keeping thought in perspective. From the black come greens, blues, pinks, reds, greys and then come day light. The intimidating spacial infinity of the color makes my project a neverending work in progress and in the back of my head the black horse of my girlhood daydreams galop, the black hooded t-shirt that I wore as a young teenager until it fell apart still exists and what I thought was the love of my life didn't turn into a black hole in my heart.
I pulled a thread from a knitted black sweater and it grew, I cut a pair of black trousers apart and the seams came alive, my hand touched the paper so filled with black pigment that the palms turn sooted and stained and on the way through a summer hot Berlin my sweat found its way onto the material.
Working with and wearing only black for so many years I still answer the question different every time: Why only black?
Ninna Berger, MFA Textiles
restructionalclothing.com
