Carlos Noronha Feio

(b. 1981, Lisbon; lives and works in Lisbon)

The Growing Museum: assemblage I (version III), 2016–2018
Japanese WWII boy’s kimono, Art Nouveau 24” (70cm) 1920s/1930s nurse’s belt in EPNS “silver,”
Yoruba lost wax bronze ring coin, 110 x 100 x 8 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Carlos Noronha Feio’s The Growing Museum brings together artifacts from a variety of origins: geographical, cultural, and historical. Each new assemblage created by the artist is a hybrid construct contrary to the laws of traditional museum logic. In the version of the project presented at Garage, the artist brings into contact objects and images from East Asia, West Africa, and Europe. Their meeting place is also one of the meeting’s participants: the propaganda kimono, an item of clothing which was particularly popular in the period between the First and Second World Wars. The traditional costume made from propaganda textiles was an immediate product of the modernization which gripped Japan in the first half of the twentieth century and directly related to war and colonial expansion, which militarist ideologists considered to be the basis of public prosperity. Judging by the military technology illustrated, it can be assumed that the event depicted on the kimono is the Battle of Khalkin Gol (1939) between Japan and the Soviet Union. Two incarnations of Japanese “bombers” can be found in The Fabric of Felicity: the bomber depicted in Feio’s assemblage and the bomber jackets from Yuichiro Tamura’s collection. In both works, the artists show how clothing becomes a screen onto which images born of colonial fantasy and political imagination are projected.