Description

The gesture Silvina rehearses for her own life—that of remaining on the margins of the center (which is not the same as being marginalized) in order to become, from that position, a privileged observer and, above all, a free being and writer—is the same one she chooses to dress her secret society of outcasts. Through their clothing, Ocampo configures this alternative social class (which cuts across all social strata) for which she creates a special collection of outfits. This is her plan for consistency: the interconnections generated by these nomadic subjects, whose bodies are exposed to the vitality of clothing that activates passions and awakens, dislocates, tears apart, or even destroys them from within. They make becoming that collective force, which allows the transition from the eccentricity of the object to that of the subject, regardless of their class (or species) of origin.

In this essay, Luciana Olmedo Wehitt analyzes clothing in Silvina Ocampo's stories as a conscious and reflective act. Each character chooses the garments they wear (even the paralyzed girl in " Las fotografías ," for whom orthopedic boots are her only option). The author asserts that the clothed body, in the work of the youngest of the Ocampo sisters, constitutes the container through which flows of connection circulate, harboring these subjects with mutating selves. The intrinsic movement of clothing shocks the characters, defining a threshold of contact with the body where it can assume a new distribution: retreating inward to be devoured (" El vestido de terciopelo , " "El retrato mal hecho "), or transforming the space between them—a contingent territory—into a vector of exit to expand into the creation of a new life ( "Malva," "Hombres, animales, enredaderas," "El vestido verde aceituna ," etc.). In any case, it is to be liberated; to make even death the threshold of a new metamorphosis.

Around what or whom do Ocampo's characters orbit? To what or whom are they loyal? By stripping them bare through her writing, by clothing them, Silvina eclipses them; she confronts them with themselves, with their vulnerability. And she goes further: she forces them to lose themselves in that in-between; she offers them the revolutionary opportunity to choose themselves, to learn to dialogue with one another: to be reborn with a new moon. Of course, waging the battle in the in-between that clothing enables is not for everyone.

Author
Luciana Olmedo Wehitt

Technical specifications
Edited by: Gata Flora
Year: 2024
Type: Book
Binding: Paperback
Dimensions: 19 x 13 cm
Weight: 190 gr
Spanish
Pages: 160
ISBN: 978-631-00-4082-0