A Relational Practice: Commissioning as Curatorial Inquiry

My presentation concerns processes of commissioning within exhibition-making that draw on interdisciplinary forms of practice to produce fashion knowledge. It does so through an examination of Solidarity Together, We Shall Sing. We Shall Sing, Solidarity Together (2026), a sonic installation I curated in collaboration with sound artists Diego Benalcazar and Rachael Finney. The project started with shared research into the ‘Singing Strikers’: female garment workers who led industrial action in Hackney during 1928-1929, adapting popular music of the time into protest anthems. The resulting installation, exhibited at London College of Fashion, used the sound of protest, field recordings and spoken word to construct a layered and sonic encounter with the historical and contemporary narratives of everyday life, labour and resistance in London’s garment industry. Drawing on Kouligas et al (2025), the curatorial context considers sound as an atmospheric extension of fashion beyond its material form, and, following Voegelin (2010), frames listening as a situated, exploratory mode of engagement that shifts fashion curation from visual and object-based paradigms towards relational and temporal forms of knowledge. Through this project I demonstrate how commissioning operates as a curatorial methodology grounded in the construction of relations and relationships rather than the resolution of fixed narratives. In this sense, curation becomes less about representing fashion knowledge and more about creating the conditions through which fashion knowledge can be collectively produced.