This presentation is a culmination of all the different elements featured in Per°Form Open Academy — the atelier workshop opening keynote and the embroidery workshop held earlier. Together with individuals from vulnerable and marginalised communities in Bogotá, fashion designer Diamantina Arcoiris has created fashion with and about difference. She shares the journey and experiences of working with the individuals whose silences, self-doubt, shame, rejection and hopeless are re-fashioned. The creative self-expression through cultural production symbolically transmutes pain into passion and fear into confidence, and resist alienation that comes with being on the fringe.

Images by Don Wong