TABULA RASA

William J. Simmons

Namacheko has always been collaborative, and Namacheko has always revelled in history, which is itself a collaboration among lovers, imperialists, children, the elderly, princesses, peasants, sprawling empires, the tiniest intimacies, resplendent clothes, violent nudities, flashing photographs, disappearances, leathers, laces, flesh-upon-flesh, forced occupations, freedom, and so on. And each time, after each collaboration and each evocation of narratives equally personal and global, Namacheko starts anew. Dilan Lurr writes: “In many ways this really feels like my debut show, like a tabula rasa. And my tabula rasa is the Middle East. It’s Kurdistan and Iraq, where I am from.” It’s true that, even though we can claim no universal truths, we are all indeed from somewhere, and we can all say that we have been estranged, just as Namacheko exists in both Europe and the Middle East. Namacheko has always found ways to rebuild and find love in that fundamental condition of estrangement or rejection, which is common to all people.

So, we are draped in these fabulous autobiographies, and we are gazed upon by the eyes of beautiful women, themselves keepers of tactile histories and images. A tragic, gay French writer of yesteryear probably said that the only truth and the only history are in the eyes of beautiful women. There are so many stories of beautiful women, but still so few of beautiful women from outside the West. Lurr again: “I look at Kurdish women in the mountains, and I look at Arabic women in Basra, the farmers. I look to Iran. Lurr, my last name, comes from the area Lorestan in Iran. My family is originally from there.” And in Lorestan it smells of saffron, so Lurr worked with perfume designer Barnabé Fillion to evoke the designer’s family with both nostalgia and a vision for the future so typical of Namacheko’s work. It is as if this season’s designs are reaching for that future, the horizon seen by women, in these garments’ elongated lines and their diagonal tailoring.

It could be said that Namacheko has always been reaching, not with aspiration or greed, but as one does toward worlds and people one loves, through smells, memories, and things that must be held, things that must be exhumed before rebirth in anticipation of that archetypal tabula rasa. One might be falling in love: with someone who lives very far away, or one might have fallen in love with someone taken away forever by time. All that might remain are clothes. They are ersatz gravestones, fabulous markers of sentimentality. They are carriers of scents and feelings across expanses of land, as in the beloved shirt in Brokeback Mountain, which is abundant in colonialism and queerness alike.

And like herding sheep or finding a handsome man with whom one can settle down, there really is no telling what the future holds, and sure, that is a cliché. One can only perpetually return and see what has changed, return rhythmically to the eyes of beautiful women, return to lands known and unknown, just as Namacheko returns to Paris for the first time since its collaboration with Gregory Crewdson. When I think about Paris, I think about Princess Diana, who was likewise a displaced woman with a displaced heart whose eyes spoke of empires rising and falling. She was looking for something, in Paris and elsewhere, just as we do, as Namacheko does. We wander together. I will conclude with a final quote from Lurr: “I am still lost in who I am or what I want, but the life spent researching is quite beautiful too.”

Full collection images.