TURNING POINT 2025
Installation
Men's shirts,
Dimensions variable,
Shedhalle Zug, 2025
Turning Point reimagines one of the most emblematic garments of Western modernity: the man’s shirt. Once a marker of bourgeois respectability, political authority, and social order, it becomes in Jacomella Bonola’s hands a vehicle for deconstruction and renewal. The artist meticulously unravels the weft threads from the fabric of three recycled shirts, leaving only the warp, an exposed structure that speaks of fragility and potential.
This radical gesture transforms the garment from a symbol of conformity into an open field of reinterpretation. The extracted threads, gathered on a plinth, become a collective metaphor for reconstruction and the possibility of reweaving new social fabrics. Turning Point questions systems of value, labour, and material waste while foregrounding the tension between disintegration and resilience. Through this slow, manual process, the artist proposes an alternative to the accelerated cycles of production and consumption that define our present condition and raises pressing questions: Can we reconstruct what has been lost? Can we reimagine more sustainable futures from the remnants of past systems?
Credits: © Kilian Bannwart