Yarden Levy
Hi! I am Yarden (not pronounced like garden), I am a V&A/RCA History of Design MA student, currently researching the gendering of fashion design education. After completing my undergrad in fashion design at Shenkar College, Israel, I worked for two years for Rose Archive for Fashion and Textile, a collection held by Shenkar College. During my work there, I served as an archivist, a digital and social media manager, assisted with exhibitions the archive took part in and gave classes to students and visitors. I then realised how passionate I am to gain and share knowledge through material culture. With this realisation in mind, I started the History of Design program, which allows its students to learn history through design objects while widening the scope of what a design object is.
Since moving to London, I have been interning and working for Kerry Taylor Auctions, where I assist with photoshoots for the auctions’ catalogues, preparation for auctions, and assist clients in the pre-auction viewings. I am also the co-editor of the up and coming Unmaking Things, a History of Design blog, where us students are going to share our smaller bites of interest and research, in a fun and inclusive way.
Main image credit: Left: Philippe Boulakia, Tsabar Containers (Hummus on the Right), 1990s, Shenkar’s Institution for Documentation and Research of Design in Israel, Israel. Right: Typical Hummus Aisle in an Israeli Supermarket, Screenshot From a News Clip About Hummus, Walla! News.
Degree Details
School of Arts & Humanities
As a person who comes from a place that holds colonial values and is denying the freedom of another nation, I try to use my privilege of studying in the V&A/RCA to focus my research interests on post-colonial, or in the Israeli case, post-Zionist, discourses. My previous research, for example, was tracking the change made in hummus packages and advertisements in Israel from the establishment of Israel to the present day. This every day, mass-consumed object is feeding its consumer with ill histories of oppression, exclusion and endless efforts of defining Israeliness. Currently, I am writing my dissertation about Shenkar College’s fashion department, where I studied. I wish to answer the question of how the fashion department is designing the ideal fashion design student through gendered stereotypes. My research focuses mostly on Israeli intersectionality and on the complexities of gender in an unsettling place like
Israel.
Image credit: Me as an archivist in the wild, photo by Lee Barbu.
dן
As first-year students, our contributions to RCA2020 form a work-in-progress encounter with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This serves as a springboard for collecting, discussing and sharing ideas on the topic of Digital Discomforts. The project explores issues brought about by the impact of digitization and the web, such as structural inequalities in digital access, the design of sites and content encountered online, user experiences in the internet and evolving conversation channels.
Resulting from intense weeks of collaborative work, the following diagrams are representations of our practice as design historians, intended to reflect real-life corridor-conversations we would have usually had in person as part of our studies. Impromptu, spontaneous and intellectually unpredictable these conversations embrace spelling mistakes and thematic jumps as characteristic of the method of communication. Our diagrams show the twists and turns of such informal, creative encounters. You may find them sometimes difficult to navigate, or even difficult to read. This is a deliberate dramatisation of the experience of digital inequality, bringing with it digital discomfort.
