Sunday Arts Magazine

7 Sep 2017

Pia Interlandi – Fashion Designer & Workshop Presenter at the Melbourne Festival of Death & Dying

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Pia Interlandi – Fashion Designer & Workshop Presenter at the Melbourne Festival of Death & Dying

David & Brendan talk to Pia Interlandi who is running a workshop called “Dressing for Death“ for the first Melbourne Festival of Death and Dying in collaboration with our friends at Dancehouse and the Melbourne community. The festival will take place 9-10 September 2017 at Dancehouse Studios located at 150 Princes Street, North Carlton. There will be over 20 participatory workshops, performances, talks and ceremonies on different aspects of death and dying over two days. In addition to talks and discussions, you will have experiences, which do justice to the full spectrum of what is at stake in mortality.

Pia Interlandi is a fashion designer whose work often incorporates death as a scientific and psychological concept. She has a particular interest in textile manipulation and garment transformation, informed by her fascination with human biology and time spent in Japan under the instruction of Yoshiki Hishinuma. As an undergraduate in RMIT’s Bachelor of Design in Fashion, she began dissecting garments ‘autopsy-style’ and experimenting with dissolvable fabrics as a method of exploring life’s transient qualities.

This became the basis of her current PhD study at Melbourne’s RMIT University, entitled [A]Dressing Death: Fashioning Garments for the Grave . However it was when her grandfather died in 2008 and she dressed him for his funeral that her work began to move away from metaphor and began to engage in the realities of death. At this point she also trained to become a certified funeral celebrant.