MODUS Hosts is a series of collaborations that serve as an opportunity to showcase the methods and modes of production of practitioners exploring fashion in the expanded field. For the first iteration of MODUS Hosts, we were delighted to work with studio practice CAULFIELD—SRIKLAD to present Unfolding Inter-local Practice, an installation and online exchange during Dutch Design Week 2021 at Onomatopee Projects.

Unfolding Inter-local Practice is a collection of embodied expressions, illustrating an emerging design methodology, a process, a practice. The installation explores the cultural memory held within the garments inherited from a dual Thai-Irish family archive and examines the contrasting dressing practices associated with the tailored suit and the Theravada Buddhist robe. Through the embodied experience of dressing and undressing in these garments, this methodology engages the intimate process of thinking through materials. Drawing insights from folding, covering, layering, tying and wrapping, transforms the cultural memory associated with these garments into a space of cultural imagination. This is a present day inter-place* and provides a new starting point for design aimed at creating a sense of belonging and sense of inter-locality**.

*inter-place: a union and integration of multiple places that shape experience
** inter-local: the process of belonging, through the union and integration of local experience

CAULFIELD—SRIKLAD is a studio practice by brother and sister Daniel and Siranee Caulfield-Sriklad. With backgrounds in fashion design and communication, academia and industry, their practice is interdisciplinary. They understand the act of dressing as ritual and fabric and the body as interdependent. They design for the body as a system of possible actions, through an awareness of being, becoming and belonging, thus creating conditions of possibility and embodied consciousness.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31169