About
Urania is a project by Fabio Quaranta that brings together and revitalizes, through
the humble and silent act of laying out, fashion, affections, and narratives.
The space cartographically accommodates garments and accessories that Quaranta
has collected, cultivated, and rescued from certain oblivion over more than 30 years
of research. Always drawn to explore the shadowy zones and postural thresholds
of a rigid and codified fashion system, his practice is defined by a critical and
ecological rereading of fashion design, deliberately sidestepping notions of mere
creativity and novelty. The role of the fashion designer is thus reimagined; it is no
longer about designing clothes but shaping spaces of agency; it is no longer about
entering production but unearthing the most anonymous past and enhancing it.
The designer behind Urania resembles more a curator, or better yet, a curatolo: an
ancient Sicilian profession that identifies the one who looks after a flock or a salt
marsh. Just as a curatolo oversees the formation of sea salt with daily, purposeful
yet caring gestures, so Quaranta sifts through flea markets to retrieve scraps to
turn into treasures. While the curatolo admires on the salt flats the mirroring sky,
Quaranta employs Urania, the astronomical muse, to bring the sky to earth and
sketch an affective constellation.
The material, resting neatly and methodically on white cloths—ennobling the DIY
aesthetic of the street market with aseptic precision—weaves performative textures.
The garments trigger relationships, remembrances, and emotions. They harbor and
reflect not only particles of Quaranta‘s dispersed subjectivity but fragments of
each of us: Urania is a realm of infinite narratives, a field of forces, flows of desire,
and positionings.
Urania is an ode to rags and ragmen, a numbered collection of unique objects to
be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled each time. It‘s a project of fashion
design, or rather on fashion design, where the body is present in its absence: it‘s an
invitation toembodied action—to inhabit, traverse, feel that material, once again.
“Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may
live.”
Ezekiel 37:1-14