At a time in history when fashion is often reduced to fast consumption, instant aesthetics and planned obsolescence, the work of Sara Conforti Hòfer stands out as a radical invitation to slow down, listen and remember. Artist, researcher and founder of Project One hundred and seventy for eighty, For over a decade, Sara has been investigating the power of clothing as a sensitive archive, a relational device and a political tool. Her practice, which connects ethics and aesthetics, body and memory, individual and collective, challenges the dominant narratives of the fashion system to restore clothing to its deepest dimension: a gesture that defines, binds and transforms us.
On the occasion of Dressing the Future, Sara Conforti Hòfer brings to the public the complexity and delicacy of her investigations into textiles, care and shared storytelling. Through participatory workshops, performances and installations, the artist constructs spaces in which clothes become tools for self-analysis and bridges between different biographies; places where intimate stories – made up of worn fabrics, embroidery, tears and memories – intertwine to generate a new collective imagination.
The following interview offers a privileged insight into his career: from fashion as a form of poetic resistance to shared experiments with Moleskine Foundation, to the role of the community in the symbolic regeneration of textiles and the construction of identity. A journey into the art of wearing, where every thread becomes a possibility for the future.
How can fashion function as a tool for shared memory and the construction of shared meaning?
My artistic practice stems from the empty centre of the fashion system, that void that conceals the enormous importance of the moral and political act of dressing in a society that constantly seeks to define itself. It is in understanding our daily gestures, in the way we choose to wear what envelops us, that the possibility of evolution lies. But this practice is not only anthropological or aesthetic: it is also an act of poetic resistance. Every fabric, every embroidery, every stitch tells a story of a choice that opposes the compulsion of fast fashion, the speed that erases stories and dissolves memories.
Since 2012, I have been conducting this investigation through the travelling workshops of Centosettantaperottanta, an artistic journey that began thanks to a collaboration with the Education Department of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, which explores the female universe, the memories preserved by clothing and our responsibility towards the planet. It is an investigation into clothing and habitus, a delving into wardrobes to bring out memories, feelings and lives intertwined with clothing items – often accompanied by photographs in which we remember ourselves as happy, which enter the investigation as witnesses to a shared experience.
The methodology is simple and repeatable, but each encounter produces unique results: each cherished item becomes the subject of an emotional autopsy, a tool for understanding who we are and who we can become. A jacket worn out from train travel, a dress from a party that will never return, a shirt belonging to a father who has passed away, a scarf belonging to a mother who loved too much: each object carries a fragment of history, a guarded secret, an emotion to be shared. And in this act of care and attention, each garment becomes a gesture of sustainability: it is reactivated, regenerated, opposing the logic of disposable fashion.
The meetings transform these fragments into a collective narrative. The women tell stories, embroider, write, and as they do so, the stories intertwine, become visible, material, tangible. Each garment, each embroidery, each word becomes a bridge between the intimate and the group, between the private and the public. Some memories evoke pain, others joy, others still the fragile beauty of those who have just arrived in life or those who are no longer with us. All this becomes a common heritage, a shared memory that survives and multiplies, an invisible thread connecting past, present and future.
The project brings these stories to life through exhibitions and participatory activities, where the public can come into direct contact with the objects and the stories of those who wore them. It is in this intertwining that fashion ceases to be mere clothing and becomes an archive, a narrative, a testimony, a living memory: a medium capable of restoring meaning, building bonds and instilling a new perspective on sustainability and the poetry of wearing clothes.
A direct consequence of Centosettantaperottanta's investigations is the performance project 13600 Hz – Concerto per macchine da cucire (Concerto for Sewing Machines), which I have been developing since 2013 around the sound of sewing machines. Each edition is a site-specific Tableau Vivant, where the scenography, sounds and physical presence of the participants are modelled on the theme of the research. The women in the workshops are involved in physical and dramatic expression, giving performative form to the content of their personal investigations. The action, the repetition of gestures and the dramatisation of reflections become a political and poetic gesture, a conscious denunciation of the productive distortions of the fashion system that engulfs identities, stories, lives and sustainability.
How did the installation Centosettantaperottanta – What comes First? come about, and how did the Moleskine notebook become an effective medium for amplifying your research into stories of transformation and resilience linked to clothing?
In December 2020, the Moleskine Foundation invited me to create an exclusive AtWork artist's notebook to be included in its prestigious collection. At the same time, the Florence Biennale invited me to be Guest of Honour at its 13th edition, dedicated to the multicoloured and multifaceted universe of femininity: ETERNAL FEMININE | ETERNAL CHANGE.
These two intertwined occasions gave rise to a special edition of my Centosettantaperottanta project. Until then, the notebook had never been used as a means for such a complex research project: its intimate, pocket-sized format, full of possibilities, made it possible, in a situation of extreme emergency and physical distance, to condense the experience of seventy participants into a work that otherwise could not have emerged or materialised during the pandemic.
The Moleskine notebook – sent, filled in and returned – has become a powerful medium: it collects stories, memories, emotions, fragments of clothing and life, allowing an organic, individual and collective narrative to take shape. In the project, thanks to a participatory and “taxonomic” approach, each participant conducts a veritable emotional autopsy of their own garments, building an archive of sartorial reminiscences made up of words, signs and embroidery. The garments become silent protagonists of a journey of the self in relation to the group, tools for giving birth to new collective narratives, often accompanied by photographs that evoke memory, happiness and nostalgia.
In this special version, I have integrated the question "What comes first?" from the AtWork educational format, creating a shared archive of experiences and stories. Each participant filled in their notebook and created a personal embroidery piece in response to the question. The workshops, which began with the users of Fragole Celesti, a community for the care of abuse, violence and mistreatment, were extended to dozens of other women, who were involved through personal invitations. Between online sessions and face-to-face meetings, more than ten workshops disseminated and sent stories, clothes and embroidery pieces throughout the peninsula.
The notebooks and embroideries, which arrived at my studio from all corners of Italy, were processed and returned to the public first at Palazzo Barolo in Turin and then in Florence, for the XIII Florence Biennale 2021. I chose a formula inspired by the Libri della Fortuna (Books of Fortune) of the Renaissance: the public, also asking themselves the question 'What comes first?', drew a number from a set of small numbered stones, corresponding to an embroidery and, subsequently, to the notebook with the same number. In that simple and random gesture, the observer came into empathetic contact with the story of an anonymous compiler, becoming part of the narrative themselves.
I conceive my work as a constant intertwining of ethics and aesthetics, poetry and responsibility. Artistic practice is relational operativity, an art of interpersonal psychoanalysis, motivated by the desire to contribute to social and spiritual change, to the construction of shared and sustainable happiness. The notebooks and embroideries of Centosettantaperottanta – What comes first? are tools for introspective self-analysis, documents of life journeys and collective transformation, traces that suggest possible future states of mind. There is only one wish for those who decide to venture into this combinatorial practice: Good Luck.
What is the role of the collective process in the symbolic regeneration of textile material and in the construction of identity?
For me, the collective process is where textile material ceases to be a simple object and returns to being a body, a voice, a possibility. It is the point at which the garment – with its seams, its fractures, its stains and its resistance – is symbolically regenerated because it has been touched by many eyes, many hands, many memories. Alone, a garment says something; in a group, it says much more.
In Centosettantaperottanta workshops, when participants begin to share their stories about clothes, an almost physical transformation takes place: the fabric, manipulated, observed, recounted, takes on new meanings, frees itself from those that immobilised it, and assumes others in a collective and poetic rebirth. The process is slow and layered. One woman opens a bag and pulls out a blouse that belonged to her mother; another touches the fabric and remembers her own; a third recognises herself in a colour, a crease, a scent trapped in the weave. Then the individual garment becomes communal, transforming into living matter, a mirror of shared experience, an act of care and sustainability.
This plural crossing allows for a symbolic regeneration of the textile material: pain is alleviated, memory is amplified, private experiences become heritage. The collective process functions like a circle: the garment returns to the person who wore it, but it is no longer the same. It carries with it the words heard, the emotions welcomed, the silences shared. It is an object that now contains many identities and, precisely for this reason, allows each person to redefine their own.
Building identity through textiles means recognising ourselves in the stories of others, accepting that every garment is a container of experiences and that the act of recounting them – together, without judgement – mends something within us. In this sense, the community is not simply a context: it is the engine that allows the transition from the intimate to the political, from clothing to habitus. This is where the transformation really takes place, where every loose thread can find a new knot, a new meaning, a new possibility of being, poetic and sustainable.
Installation Centosettantaperottanta – What Comes First?
Artistic research project by Sara Conforti Hòfer, created in collaboration with the Moleskine Foundation and inspired by the AtWork 2022 educational project.
A dialogue between clothing, memory and identity
The installation Centosettantaperottanta – What Comes First? by Sara is a work of great emotional and cultural impact, capable of intertwining art, memory and identity through the language of fashion.
This first chapter of the project involved 70 participants during the Covid-19 pandemic emergency, who shared their stories related to a cherished item of clothing. At the heart of the project is the Moleskine notebook, used as a narrative medium to collect stories of transformation, resilience and personal connection. The work gave rise to a special artist's notebook, donated to the Moleskine Foundation Collection and recently exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the One World Trade Centre Observatory in New York as part of the Moleskine Detour 2.0 exhibition, alongside works by international artists such as Tord Boontje, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicholas Hlobo, William Kentridge, Francis Kéré, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Sue Williamson and Sigur Rós.
The installation is not only an artistic testimony, but also a collective experience that stimulates deep reflection on the relationship between object, body and experience. Through the dialogue between clothing and ’habitus“ – the social and cultural dimension of habits – Conforti Hofer proposes fashion as a tool for introspection and the construction of shared meaning.
A pedagogical and methodological value
The project also has a strong educational and methodological value: it activates a process of shared memory and symbolic regeneration of textile material. Clothing becomes a vehicle for telling individual and collective stories, transforming itself into a bridge between past and present, between personal experience and social fabric. Thanks to this perspective, fashion emerges as a fertile ground for cultural and identity regeneration, capable of enhancing narratives of resilience and belonging.
Awards and international prestige
Sara Conforti Hòfer, guest at the 13th Florence Biennale, received the President's Lifetime Achievement Award, a recognition that highlights the importance and impact of his work in the contemporary art scene. Centosettantaperottanta – What Comes First? is thus an example of how creativity can become a tool for social cohesion, opening up spaces for dialogue and reflection on the transformations of our time.
The notebook for the Moleskine Foundation Collection
Accompanying the installation is the notebook created by the artist for the Moleskine Foundation Collection – Courtesy of Moleskine Foundation Collection.
The Moleskine Foundation has the largest collection of artist notebooks of our time: over 1,600 donated by authors to raise awareness of the value of creativity as a tool for social change. It is an archive of creativity, a cultural project that began in 2006 and has grown and evolved steadily ever since. Each notebook tells a different story, a dream or a project, a distinctive way of being and relating to the world, opening up new perspectives on an increasingly complex and diverse contemporary world through the extreme freedom of its blank pages. The notebooks are filled with thoughts, sketches, images and ideas specially created by artists and designers, architects and musicians, filmmakers and philosophers, as well as by Creativity Pioneers who tell the stories of their organisations.
