Quaderni di Venezia Arti

Clothes Art and the Absent Body’s Communicative Potential

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Abstract

This paper investigates the conceptual and aesthetic dialogue between ‘Clothes Art’ and ‘Wearable Art’, two intertwined practices that use garments as expressive media. While Wearable Art depends on the body’s presence to animate the artwork, Clothes Art operates through absence, transforming the empty garment into a reflective space. Drawing on Trasforini, Barthes, Frers, and artists such as Kounellis, Boltanski, and Pistoletto, the article explores how clothing, once detached from fashion, transcends utility to become an existential medium. The absent body, evoked through garments, turns void and absence into meaning, revealing absence as a generative space of presence, memory, and the human condition.


Open access

Submitted: Oct. 15, 2025 | Published Dec. 15, 2025 | Language: en

Keywords Body • Absence • Clothes Art • Relative void • Metonymy

Copyright © 2025 Marta Del Mutolo. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


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