Lianca van der Merwe (aka Lala3xl) works as a performer and educator who critically reflects on the literal and metaphorical role the body, senses, and identity play in our relationship with garments. Lianca foregoes an intellectual life in favour of lived experience. She firmly believes that the answer to the issues facing humanity today – like discrimination or sustainability – lie not in strategic solutions but in embodied ones. By physicalising ourselves in the natural world, and by engaging and participating, we can hopefully break down the artificial barriers that distinguish between what is ‘us’ vs. what is ‘them’. Lianca uses fashion as a subversive medium and believes it has the restorative potential to undo what it has been complicit in. Fashion can end the era of human exceptionalism it helped establish.
Website: artletics.space
Instagram: @lala3xl