Exhibition Forward written by Mariano Cruz García

Useless/Useful
The main subject of our exhibition is conveyed by two variants of the word 'use'. It can be said that this exhibition proposes contexts for the use of these words or, more accurately, that it provides us with the space to set different language-games to explore their meaning. Every design concept, every stage, challenges us to think and act, live the experience, submerge ourselves in such a form of life, play a game in which we can, by ourselves, experience the fuzzy border of the concepts of useful and useless. What is useful in one language game would be completely useless in another, and so on. Thus we can say that whether something is useful or useless depends only on the place we can find for it inside a certain game or story. So, useful or useless depends on our creativity and inventiveness.

Participation.
Wherever there is artistic creation, the creation of reality exists. Art not only produces experience, but produces it on a shared basis, for this building of experience does not stop at the artist's hands, but continues in its reception by the public as a wave which expands the limit of experience, thanks to the participation of more and more subjects. Art does not belong to the artist. Creation never ceases. It incorporates experience upon experience. There is no border between the real world and the artistic experience. The artistic experience extends far beyond the boundaries of the real world. Artwork is participation. It is nothing but a chain of subjectivities and experiences which never ceases to change, and widens itself like a radio wave launched into outer space.

Christina Tso: Visible/Invisible.
"Seeing is believing", seeing is creating. Each of the senses creates experience in perceiving sensations. They do not exist in a privileged sense in this direction. All of them create experience in the same way, and even each sense creates a different experience from the same feeling.

Christina Tso's challenge for the audience of the exhibition is to dispense with the sense of sight to experience fashion. Inspired by the way in which visually impaired people have to intensify the rest of the senses to know and experience the environment, she invites us to consider our sense of sight as a useless sense, and get into her proposal of touching, hearing, and smelling, which makes this a truly original path of getting involved in a world (the world of fashion) often colonised by pure visuality. The result of her experiment could be suppressive. It seems we all see the same things when using sight-sense, whereas if we are forced to experience objects with the rest of our senses, the results will vary, depending on sensitiveness, background or every subject's creativity, as we will see in this interactive design. We could conclude by saying that, in depriving us of our ability to see, she also succeeds in freeing us from certain interpretative prejudices, and gives way to a new reality not determined in its detail by the artist’s mind, providing audiences with a chance to create their own version of what they are experiencing.