I began working on this collection project in summer 2020. After spending months of isolation in my apartment in Antwerp, I have finally traveled back to my home country. I spent two weeks of more isolation in my childhood home. Situated on a mountain chain that stretches from the Sea of Galile, to Acre, by the Mediterranean, I set for two weeks. The sun woke me up in the mornings, the bright moon lit my bed as I slept. There, I felt one with my the world around me. The trees and I grew up together. As I stood by them, we moved in the soft wind, and I could feel my roots tangled in theirs.
This time brought with it many moments of reflection, it was the first time I felt such connection to my childhood home. I could see my child-self walking around the garden, I remembered his passions and curiosity. I remembered the urges that brought me to leave my home country, to study fashion in Europe. For the first time in my adult life, I reflected on the story of the land which I come from, its people, my neighbours, my family and my place in that land.
Reaching the end of my quarantine, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I craved the fast city, I craved the suffocation and coffee and wine and music, and strangers. A month later I couldn’t wait to return to Europe, were state politics are a pas time leisure for some, and an unknown territory for others, where people leave me alone, don’t stare at me from the other side of the street. But still, the craving for the connection I felt to myself and to nature, to the people in which’s culture I was raised in, remained.
I realized that the deeper I dig in those thoughts, the more those dualities make themselves present. I decided to create a collection in which those dualities come as one, every silhouette contains in it an aspect of those urges, which at times seems as if they can not appear one by the other, but are in fact in direct connection and relation. One does not exist without the other. Together, they are able to main- tain balance. These were the foundations of the story, the vision that begun forming in my mind.
I tried to create a narrative that is composed of a collection of impressions that gathered in my mind while observing the world I live in. Some of which are far memories of the past, reformed and carved by time. Of some, I can remember vividly the moment in which the impression was made. Some are quiet, some grand, and some live only in my mind. The story I aimed to tell with this project is not one. There is no motive, nor opinions, it is made of the meeting between intuition and observation. I choose to show what my guts tells me the world is craving for, what it needs to see. That which I see, and therefore am obligated to reveal.
