See also: Contaminated Life blog

To contaminate is to make impure, unclean, polluted or corrupted. The act of contaminating presents social, cultural and biological dangers that become tangled into ideas of purity, the sacred and moral propriety. Becoming ‘sustainable’ is an increasingly insistent moral imperative.

This blog is part of a seminar involving fashion and architecture students in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University in Australia. The seminar is being run by Pia Ednie-Brown and involves other RMIT staff such as Robyn Healy from fashion, and a cluster of postgraduate researchers.
Through readings, discussion, writing, presentations and design exercises the group that will explore contamination as both a socio-cultural, spatialised construction and a biological imperative. We will explore how contamination (and ideas of purity) play a part in defining the domestic realm (of bodies, clothing and houses), including bodily boundaries, visual hygene, spatial organisation, domestic maintenance (or ‘home economics’/domestic ecologies) and the aesthetic dimensions of domestic architecture and fashion. We will also discuss purity and contamination in relation to disciplinary spaces such as studios, laboratories, art galleries and disciplinary codes of dress and conduct. This will involve historical material, such as how ornament was seen to defile or contaminate the modernist sense of aesthetic purity.

The above exploration will be used to generate radical propositions for sustainable living that account for contamination and waste, recycling and life cycles in a manner inclusive of attention to aesthetic and ethical (rather than moral) concerns.