{"id":492122,"date":"2026-05-19T09:46:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T09:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/492122\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T09:46:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T09:46:15","slug":"inside-tilda-swintons-world-of-garments-and-artistic-fellowship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/492122\/","title":{"rendered":"inside tilda swinton’s world of garments and artistic fellowship"},"content":{"rendered":"

in tilda swinton\u2019s performance, garments become living archives<\/p>\n

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Tilda Swinton unfolds a faded pink cardigan in front of the audience at Onassis Ready in Athens. It belonged to her father. She still wears it. Nearby sits a kilt still covered in the white hairs of one of her Springer Spaniels, which has since passed. Olivier Saillard, the French fashion historian guiding the performance, listens as the British artist wonders aloud whether a museum would preserve the traces of fur still clinging to the kilt. Saillard answers no. The hairs should remain. \u2018I don\u2019t want to clean this kilt,\u2019 Swinton says.<\/strong> Across A Biographical Wardrobe, the artists treat clothing as emotional evidence.<\/p>\n

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Presented as part of the wider exhibition Ongoing at Onassis Ready, the live performance by Swinton and Saillard turns garments into living archives of memory, grief, kinship, and artistic collaboration. Staged inside the Onassis Foundation\u2019s newly opened arts space in Athens, a former plastics factory transformed into a raw site for artistic experimentation, the project gathers decades of Swinton\u2019s creative life through films, installations, photographs, and performances made with some of her closest collaborators, including Pedro Almod\u00f3var, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Jim Jarmusch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tim Walker, and the late Derek Jarman. Yet despite the names surrounding the exhibition, Ongoing resists the mythology of singular artistic genius. Instead, Swinton frames creativity as an act of fellowship.<\/p>\n

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A Biographical Wardrobe, Tilda Swinton \u2013 Olivier Saillard | all images \u00a9 Andreas Simopoulos for Onassis Stegi<\/p>\n

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preservation gives way to lived memory<\/p>\n

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The performance plays out almost like an intimate s\u00e9ance. Garments hang suspended in space without mannequins, hovering like absent bodies while Swinton narrates the lives attached to them. A velvet dress sewn by her mother\u2019s seamstress. A christening robe worn by generations of her family since 1896. Military jackets belonging to her father and grandfather. A Lacroix suit repeatedly reincarnated across decades of films, portraits, and public appearances. The stories are told casually, humorously, and sometimes devastatingly. Swinton recalls being told by her older brother at age three that she looked \u2018pretty\u2026disgusting\u2019 in a dress she loved. Later, speaking of inherited femininity, she shrugs gently: \u2018We can all wear them. We can dress up as whatever we want.\u2019<\/p>\n

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One garment carries scraps of paper still tucked inside its pockets. Another bears scratches deliberately added by designer Alber Elbaz after an accident damaged the fabric before the Oscars. Swinton repeatedly returns to the idea that objects become meaningful precisely because they continue to live alongside the body rather than being sealed away from it. \u2018We can preserve dresses,\u2019 Olivier Saillard<\/strong> notes at one point,<\/strong> \u2018but we cannot preserve movement, gesture.\u2019<\/p>\n

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That refusal of static preservation shapes Ongoing, the wider exhibition surrounding the live performance inside Onassis Ready, a project that resists the retrospective format, perceiving the past instead as an unfinished collective of relationships still evolving. During the press conference, Swinton recalls initially rejecting the invitation to create the exhibition altogether. \u2018I was not ready to close the story,\u2019 Tilda Swinton explains.<\/strong> The idea of assembling old clips, costumes, and relics from past projects felt incompatible with the way she understands artistic life, so she proposed a cluster of collaborations still actively generating new work. Everything inside Ongoing resists closure. Swinton describes the exhibition as \u2018a seedbed of work,\u2019 comparing it to \u2018a kitchen midden\u2019 filled with fragments, scraps, and ongoing conversations. Many of the installations are newly commissioned specifically for the exhibition, while others remain deliberately unfinished or unstable in form. The project is designed to evolve as it travels internationally, accumulating new collaborators and works over time.<\/p>\n

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Swinton and Saillard turn garments into living archives of memory, grief, kinship, and artistic collaboration<\/p>\n

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the red thread is the kitchen table<\/p>\n

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The philosophy of artistic collaboration that stays at the core of the exhibition feels increasingly radical in a cultural landscape organized around branding, isolation, and authorship. Tilda Swinton describes spending recent years traveling globally in her role as Chanel\u2019s arts and culture ambassador, speaking with younger artists about their anxieties surrounding creative life. Unexpectedly, she found the same concerns surfacing repeatedly across cities and continents, particularly around social isolation, mental health, and the pressure to function as an individual creative commodity. \u2018You\u2019re encouraged,\u2019 she says,<\/strong> \u2018to brand yourself as a commodity.\u2019<\/p>\n

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For the artist, Ongoing becomes a response to that condition. Throughout the exhibition and performance, she repeatedly returns to the collaborative environments that shaped her own practice beginning in the 1980s alongside artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman and a wider creative community built around co-authorship. \u2018Prepare to go to the set as if you\u2019re going to a party,\u2019 Jarman once told his collaborators.<\/strong> Swinton still describes that ethos as foundational to the way she works.<\/p>\n

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The artist insists that the relationships generating the work matter far more, as she describes the exhibition through the metaphor of a tree. \u2018The relationship is the trunk of the tree,\u2019 Tilda Swinton explains<\/strong>. \u2018The particular conversation that comes out of the relationship is the branch. The film, or the performance, or the article, is just the leaf. It\u2019s very disposable. It\u2019s not the most important thing. It\u2019s the process that\u2019s the most important bit.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Again and again, Ongoing returns to the kitchen table as the real site of creation. Swinton describes decades-long conversations unfolding over cups of tea with Jarman, Joanna Hogg, Luca Guadagnino, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul long before projects formally existed. The films emerge almost secondarily from these sustained exchanges. \u2018The red thread is the kitchen table,\u2019 she shares.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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staged inside the Onassis Foundation\u2019s newly opened arts space in Athens<\/p>\n

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derek jarman\u2019s presence lingers through shared objects<\/p>\n

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Nowhere is this philosophy more moving than in Swinton\u2019s recollections of Derek Jarman, the filmmaker who launched her screen career and remained one of her closest artistic companions until his death in 1994. At one point during A Biographical Wardrobe, she lifts a simple sweatshirt shared between them for years. \u2018At any time, one of us would wear it, wash it, put it in the airing cupboard, and then the other one would take it,\u2019 she remembers.<\/strong> The sweatshirt still carries a small tear beneath the arm. She has never repaired it.<\/p>\n

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Jarman\u2019s presence moves through A Biographical Wardrobe like a ghostly current. Swinton describes accompanying him to Dungeness as he searched for a place to build what would become Prospect Cottage and its now legendary garden. She remembers the fear surrounding the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, when HIV was spoken about as a death sentence and governments responded with exclusion rather than care. In her telling, Jarman\u2019s openness about his diagnosis became an act of radical dignity. \u2018He brought people together,\u2019 \u00a0the actress notes.<\/strong> \u2018He gave the status of HIV dignity.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Yet even here, the whole project resists monumentalizing grief. It lingers in gestures, routines, fabrics, and shared objects. Swinton repeatedly refers to the exhibition as being \u2018full of ghosts,\u2019 though not in a mournful sense. The ghosts inhabiting Ongoing remain active presences, collaborators still participating in ongoing conversations. Asked how she continues to communicate with artists she has lost, including Jarman and B\u00e9la Tarr, she responds naturally: \u2018I\u2019m in constant conversation with them.\u2019<\/p>\n

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The reconstructed environments in the exhibition hold this sensation of suspended time. One installation recreates Flat 19, the London apartment Swinton inhabited throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s, reconstructed alongside longtime collaborator Joanna Hogg almost entirely from memory. Swinton refused to enter the completed reconstruction until shortly before the exhibition opened in Amsterdam. When she finally stepped inside, she described the experience as a literal return. \u2018That is not a set,\u2019 Tilda Swinton emphasizes. <\/strong>\u2018That is the flat.\u2019 She later describes the apartment as \u2018a chrysalis,\u2019 the site where she transformed from recent graduate into artist, collaborator, and eventually mother.<\/p>\n

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large-scale moving image installations transform the space | image \u00a9 Margarita Yoko Nikitaki for Onassis Stegi<\/p>\n

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softness as a form of artistic resistance<\/p>\n

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Both the Ongoing exhibition and the A Bibliographical Wardrobe performance repeatedly insist on the importance of maintaining vulnerability, tenderness, and collaborative dependency within systems that increasingly reward speed, productivity, and self-branding. Swinton\u2019s reflections on fashion are particularly revealing in this regard. Rather than treating the red carpet as a glamorous spectacle, she describes it as performance, labor, and choreography. \u2018I want to feel like I\u2019m representing a team,\u2019 she explains.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Even disaster becomes collective improvisation. Recalling an Oscars dress damaged moments before departure, Swinton remembers designer Alber Elbaz responding with experimentation and creativity, deliberately scratching the fabric further until the flaw became integral to the garment itself. Elsewhere, she speaks about preserving inherited clothing not as museum objects but as usable extensions of living memory. Her grandfather\u2019s coat remains meaningful not because it belongs to family history, but because, as she puts it, \u2018it\u2019s still a really warm coat.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Again and again, the whole project rejects institutional perfection in favor of traces left behind through use. Garments hold dog hair, tears, stains, creases, receipts, notes, and signs of wear. The body never fully disappears from them. Tilda Swinton reflects on why clothing becomes such a powerful vessel for ancestral memory. \u2018It\u2019s the usefulness of them where the spirit lies,\u2019 she says.<\/strong> \u2018These are not museum pieces.\u2019 That same philosophy extends outward toward artistic life itself. Swinton proposes that the most meaningful creative practices are those capable of remaining porous, unfinished, collective, and alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Near the end of Tilda Swinton and Olivier Saillard\u2019s performance, A Biographical Wardrobe, the British artist recalls a line from Memoria, her film with Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Asked what death feels like, a character responds simply: \u2018It\u2019s nothing more. I just stopped.\u2019 Yet throughout Ongoing, almost nothing truly stops. Conversations continue. Collaborations expand. Ghosts remain present. Clothes are reworn. Old friendships generate new work. Somewhere, still, people sit around kitchen tables imagining what might come next.<\/p>\n

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archival materials map the evolving network of Tilda Swinton\u2019s artistic collaborations | image \u00a9designboom<\/p>\n

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Ongoing gathers photographs, archival materials, films, and installations | image \u00a9 Margarita Yoko Nikitaki for Onassis Stegi<\/p>\n

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portraits and fashion collaborations trace decades of image-making | image \u00a9designboom<\/p>\n

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The Maybe (1995)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"in tilda swinton\u2019s performance, garments become living archives \u00a0 Tilda Swinton unfolds a faded pink cardigan in front…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[267],"tags":[49171,365,362,363,364,366,18,117,966,19,17,205979],"class_list":["post-492122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art-interviews","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-radical-softness"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116600608557889412","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}