Nirma Madhoo – exploring digital aesthetics through fashion films

Describing herself as “culturally hybrid” and an “accidental nomad”, Mauritian born Nirma Madhoo moved to South Africa in 1998. She was based between the UK and South Africa for 2 years, studying fashion photography and fashion filmmaking. Now based in Durban, her work continues to think about how fashion environments are shaped by digital tools.

Her latest fashion film ‘Labtayt Sulci’ showed at this year’s Berlin Fashion Film Festival, and combines a natural landscape with the digital, creating a dreamy, “otherworldly” visual and sonic experience. The futuristic and the surrealist amalgamate. The graceful body movements of the models in her film are transformed into glitchy movements, allowing models to take on an alien or robotic characteristic. However, Nirma manages to maintain a softness and humanness in these characters. With her work being informed by posthumanist and futurist thinking and aesthetics, I interviewed Nirma about her exploration of digital aesthetics.

On your website you stated that you originally studied fashion design, and worked as a design educator and digital fashion media producer. Could you let us know more about your background in fashion and the digital?

I am trained as a fashion designer at Durban University of Technology (DUT) and did the young designer ‘thing’ for a while before starting to lecture fashion theory in 2007. Then in 2013, I went off on a sabbatical to train as a fashion photographer and fashion filmmaker at the London College of Fashion (LCF). My interest in the digital stems from my upbringing – my father who was a science teacher got the family one of the first personal computers to be commercialized, the ZX Spectrum and I grew up surrounded by cameras and gadgets. I think these were incredibly formative in who I became although my passion for the digital crystallized only when I undertook my second Masters at LCF – an institution spearheading research in digital fashion.

How did you get into making fashion films?

My first Masters at DUT researched aspects of construction of the fashion image so the interest was always there. The definitive trigger was watching the fashion films broadcast via digital platforms such as SHOWstudio in the early 2010s. I realized there was something new and exciting that was happening in the fashion world and I wanted to be part of it.

Could you please provide some context on the fashion film world you are a part of?

The fashion film world is open and accessible to anyone with a cellphone and internet connection. Submission to fashion film festivals are equally accessible to everyone from anywhere in the world. In my case, I have found that the LCF network is especially supportive of its alumni and I am slowly developing a network in South Africa where there are small circuits of progressive thinking. I must say that Johannesburg is at the forefront of this especially in terms of digitality.

Looking at your fashion films ‘Future Body‘ and ‘Labtayt Sulci’, they have a similar look in terms of the colours used and the kind of flow created through your direction and music. Do you have a particular style you try to stick to aesthetically?

I am glad that this is noticeable. I am trying to explore a particular sensibility and aesthetic that will hopefully become something of a signature across my portfolio. Having trained in fashion, I understand it very well and for the productions that I am now conceptualizing and directing, I have a very definite idea of how they should look and feel. For my personal projects I try embed a futuristic feel as well as create fashion identities which are alternative but at the same time relatable in a wider context.

On your website you state that ‘Future Body’ was about exploring digital aesthetics with your fashion films. Could you please expand on this? Is your current work a continuation of this?

My personal projects all explore digital aesthetics. Our times are defined by the wider macro technological changes. Very much like how the Age of the Machine in the 1920/30s engendered a whole new aesthetic and design language that defined the fashion of those eras. The tools that the digital provides for both producing and viewing media undoubtedly affect how we both construe and project ourselves. My work interrogates how we conceptualize fashion and fashion identities in environments shaped by these tools. There are significant ontological and epistemological questions that have emerged with innovations in digital imaging and ultimately the concept of aesthetics – these I hope to investigate via further studies andmy current personal projects which are also practice-based research.

On your website you also state that you work “explores discourses of the future and digital aesthetic in fashion new media” – could you please expand on this?

Fashion media is not about representation anymore. It has become about interactivity and embodiment with technologies such as Virtual Reality, Augmented reality and Mixed Reality. We understand that historically fashion has not been just about the clothes on our bodies, it was and still is about ways of beings and serves to takes us to different places and different times. With these new media tools, these capabilities are surely augmented, extended..In what ways? My work speculates on that.

Your latest fashion film ‘Labtayt Sulci’ showed at the Berlin Fashion Film Festival 2017. Could you please reflect on the experience. Was the first time you were part of a fashion film festival?

It was exciting to have Labtayt Sulci show at a public screening at BFFF this month. I have previously shown at London Short Film Festival and Aesthetica Short Film Festival (UK);but also Melbourne Fashion Festival along with the work of artists such as Bart Hess and Hussein Chalayan whose work I look to for inspiration.

Labtayt Sulci has a dreamy, surrealist and slightly futuristic look and feel. Could you please expand on the kind of direction you wanted for the film?

Labtayt Sulci is inspired by NASA’s explorations of Saturn’s moons by the Cassini expedition. Digital renders of Enceladus by NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute are the most evocative ice-blue textured surface with accounts of this being an icy crust over a warm ocean that may have hold extra-terrestrial life. These images of Enceladus (one of which opens Labtayt Sulci) are digitally rendered, not entirely realistic, but really captured my imagination. I remember then also seeing Mann’s World,which was shot in Iceland in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and making the visual link between Enceladus and this. Labtayt Sulci was therefore partially filmed in Southern Iceland’s glaciers. I wanted the landscapes to be natural (as opposed to the synthetic world in Future Body) and to tap in the natural sublime while still looking digital. Keywords for art direction included ‘otherworldly’, ‘atmospheric’, ‘exobiological’, ‘ice moon’.

It’s incredible how you are able to transform the graceful body movements of the model into these glitchy movements while still maintaining a softness. Could you expand on how you achieved this?

A combination of video and sound editing possibly provides the alchemy to translate movement such as this in the fashion films. Casting and directing of actual fashion models for live action filming ensures that is there is inherently grace. Strategic post-production manipulation / VFX help achieve cyborg/alien sensibilities that challenge traditional ideals of beauty. The identities are open to interpretation – they retain anthropomorphic qualities for most and are therefore relatable and accessible in the context of popular fashion but then also encode sub-text which provide alternatives to stereotypical womens’ identities in fashion media.

The music elevates the mood you create in these films. Could you please expand what informs your sonic choices for these films, particularly the film you showed in Berlin?

The sonic landscape sometimes informs the way in which the fashion film is actually cut. In my case I select the audio in preliminary stages and use it as a guide but then also simultaneously edit it to fit the non-narrative structure the productions take. ‘Labtayt Sulci’ in particular utilizes 4 electronic soundtracks, which immerse the audience in an ambient surreal environment on an elemental journey from ice, atmosphere and mist to aquatic and subterranean on a hypothetical Enceladus.

Your work appears to be informed by posthumanist and futurist thinking and aesthetics. Am I correct in saying this? What particularly about these frameworks do you find interesting and how do you think your films help you to explore these?

Yes that is correct. As a consumer of fashion images, I became tired of normative sexualized or decorative roles that women have in mainstream fashion editorials. I could not relate to these on a personal level. As an image-maker I therefore went on to use my areas of experience in teaching fashion / contextual studies to underpin my fashion media work with theory. I have a subjective interest in science fiction as genre; fashion identities that are constructed in my projects therefore hinge on notions of a cyborgian or exobiological other. Hybrid identities – human/machine discourse projected onto the ‘other’ or on the female body is transgressive. Perhaps not overtly, but it certainly goes against the entrenched norms stemming from a ubiquitous but invisible patriarchic system. We read that in theorist Donna Haraway’s work, and experience it in daily life where ‘tech’ and ‘space’ are gendered as masculine. I suppose that what I find interesting about these frameworks is that their rejection of hegemonic structures of power via fiction, speculation and futurism literally provides uncharted territory to create compelling and aspirational narratives.

What are you working on at the moment?

An exciting transmedia project that looks at (pan-)African digital identity and futurism.

Check out Nirma’s latest fashion film ‘Labtayt Sulci’ below

Credits for Labtayt Sulci (2016)

Photography and Direction: Nirma Madhoo
VFX: Alastair McColl
Model: Maxine at Anti-Agency | Akhona Sibisi at Ice Durban
Styling: Hangna Koh
Fashion: Yun-Pai Liu + Siwon Lee + Sasha Louise + Lien Lieu

Costume: Shari Akal Fowles | Shoes: Iris van Herpen x United Nude
HMUA: Holly Jordan + Kat Krupa-Ringuet + Wadene Ngubane
DP + Camera: Kit McKenzie + Nick Morris + Jimmy Reynolds
Additional Camera: Hung-Chun Wang + Shayne Chipps
Production assistant: Khristopher Morgan
Video Editing: Nirma Madhoo
Image Credit (Enceladus): NASA | JPL | Space Science Institute 2008
Special thanks to:
London College of Fashion, Global Outlook Award 2015
White Light Ltd London | Arcanum Glacier Tours Iceland | Arcanum Guesthouse Iceland

Credits for Future Body (2015)

Photography and Direction: Nirma Madhoo