FUNNY FEELING

Synposis:In the book "Else/Where Mapping", Andrea Codrington's short essay "Contours and Colonies" addresses the issues of cultural and religious identity through dress. In 1945, Jeanne Terwen-de Loos, out of necessity, weaved a Western dress out of silk maps of colonized parts of Asia. The dress represents her identity through size(small), time period(World War II), location (Indonesia), and perhaps culture (Western European) and class (upper to middle class).

While the dress has been stored away in the Rijksmuseum for many years, Amsterdam-based research group, De Geuzen, brought it back into spotlight. The group then reappropriated the dress into three other dresses along with a web site that further details the mixed colonization of Dutch and Indonesian influences. Codrington compares the site to landing in a foreign country and wandering through the information. The idea of getting lost is the essence of both the site and the dress in order to evoke the "lively, messy history of Mrs. Terwen-de Loos.

http://www.unravelling-histories.org/

The makeup of one's identity comes from family, education, culture, religion and values. Fashion is one way of identifying with a certain aspect of one's identity. But rarely is what we wear a clear informational mapping of one's makeup. To read a human body as a topography for information is certainly a different and more subjective experience than reading it flat.

My response:My cultural identity is a combination of my Chinese upbringing and popular culture in America. To trace what has influenced me in my past is also a mishmash of things that eventually did stick and have made me the person I am now. My own identity can be traced similarly to Terwen-de Loos in size (large), time period (late 20th century), location (Eastern US), culture (Chinese), and class (middle class). Another similarity is the idea of of assimiliation through "tolerance" that de Geuzen brings up. The difference between Terwen-de Loos and myself is that while her story is about colonization, mine is about immigration.