75% seminar: Charlotte Østergaard. Crafting material bodies – exploring co-creative costume processes

At the center of this artistic research lie costumes that are crafted to connect two or more people. The costumes, called connecting costumes, act as a medium to study the co-creative process of doing, listening, and thinking together. In the three artistic projects Charlotte Østergaard invites participants, performers, and designers, to listen to and explore specific connecting costumes with her and to respond to the costume and the situation – the framing.

Charlotte intends to share agency or ownership in our exploration with the participants and invite them to become co-creators. As co-creators, they are invited to engage in, inform, influence, interrupt, and critically reflect on the costume and the co-creative situation in ways that matter to them.

Through and with this artistic research, the ambition is to formulate ideas of co-creative costume processes that value the act of (material-discursive) listening and the art of hosting with generosity and communal hospitality.

Main supervisor: Sofia Pantouvaki.

Second supervisor: Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk.

External opponent: Dr. Rachel Hann, Northumbria University, UK.

About Charlotte Østergaard

Charlotte Østergaard is a costume designer, textile artist, and PhD fellow at Malmö Theatre Academy, Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts at Lund University. Charlotte has designed costumes for more than 65 performances, e.g., for the Danish Dance Theatre, Skånes Dance Theatre, and Rambert Dance Company.  

Charlotte has received several grants from the Danish Art Foundation, her costume-driven performances have been shown at, e.g., the 15th Prague Quadrinnale of Performance Design and Space, CZ (2023); SWOP – international festival for children and youth, DK (2022); Walking Copenhagen, DK (2020) and Up Close performance festival, DK (2020), and her artworks are represented in the collections of Danish Design Museum and The National Gallery of Denmark. 

Her performance project AweAre was nominated for the biennale prize at The Biennale for Craft & Design, Denmark (2019) and received an Excellence Award at From Lausanne to Beijing - 11th International Fiber Art Biennale, CN (2020).

Read more about Charlotte as a PhD student