1983 - THE TROUT

Purses in PVC with a dividing pocket containing liquids and objects.

The first was a life-size trout, floating in the pocket... The fish in the purse: Pardon me, but is this real? Don't worry!... It seems that they are all in there together, trout and personal belongings, as if in a fridge... July 1983, IL GIORNALE Purses turn into shows: Another purse contains fragments of a glass, straws and ice-cubes floating in mint green syrup. If you fill it up, the effect is even more catastrophic; not without reason has it been baptized "Disaster on the Rock". March 1984, IL GIORNALE "Putting a perfectly imitated fish in a transparent bag and taking it for a walk is like putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, as had been done by the Surrealists. It's ignoring the rules of the established game, it's being ironic. The demystification of the material, of fashion, the satire of consumerism through a new consumerism is brought forward by the two designers who use dissonance and other clearly surrealistic effects. K.W. is from Zurich for a reason... Avant de Dormir, if the comparison may be made, is the equivalent in minor key of the Bureau de Recherches founded in 1924 by Breton and friends to invent new surrealistic creations..." "The evasion from reality, from rationality... creates a situation of surprise like the chance encounter of two distant realities on a plane which seems to reject them both... There are obvious and close ties with the hyper-realists and pop...Pastry, bread, food reproduced and trivialized in realistic detail in plastic...pick up on a game favored by Oldenburg. We can also go further back, to the Wunderkammer and the too-often cited Arcimboldo. The incongruous element in an otherwise ordinary situation is the key to the humor of the objects produced by Avant de Dormir. But the attraction of these objects is above all due to a sense of discovery of an immense freedom of invention. A freedom that permits everything, even emptying the object of its functionality, affirming instead the artifice, the absurd, and ambiguity as pre-programmed objectives. "In 1976, they opened an office-atelier under the name of Avant de Dormir that continues producing objects difficult to classify... All of us have seen on the arm of some young woman one of those absurd purses by Avant de Dormir...It is difficult to remember all the 2200 objects that have been produced thus far, not to mention the variations in color..." ( da MATERIE PLASTICHE) 1984 "Orders from the USA flooded in: the purses with the fish are now sold in shops in NY, SF, LA". Panorama, " L'APPARENZA INGANNA" 1984.