Playing at the intersection of age-old mass street protest and up-to-the-minute technology, Ralph Borland devised a “suit” to be worn by every well-dressed activist. Frustrated by his inability to act effectively in a 2002 New York street demonstration against the World Economic Forum, which attracted strong police attention, Borland, a South African student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University at the time, responded in his studio with Suited for Subversion.
The red vinyl “suit” can be inflated at will by the wearer, protecting the head and vital organs from hard police batons. At the same time, the suit gives the wearer the appearance of an oversized and threatened exotic lizard fully prepared to defend his territory. The suit gives further warning to would-be attackers by amplifying the sound of the agitated wearer’s heartbeat for everyone to hear, a gesture Borland describes as “simultaneously powerful, strong—amplifying the surge of blood through your body, projecting your bodily sounds out into the environment—and also vulnerable, revealing, transparent.”
In making his design, Borland drew on the influences of such international activist groups as the Italian-based group Ya Basta!, and the Wombles, the British-based White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles, all of whose members wear white protective wear to protests. Earlier, and for more intimate possible confrontations, Borland and two fellow NYU students, Margot Jacobs and Jessica Findley, had designed Front (2000): a pair of all-white sound-activated, inflatable ceremonial conflict suits, which draw on the ritualized, rather than actual, violence of much animal display. In exhibition situations the trio performs as attendants and helps visitors to put on, posture, and play in the suits. Front has been exhibited in Berlin, Cuba, Montreal, and Dublin since it was developed, and Suited for Subversion was selected for the exhibition SAFE: Design Takes on Risk at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2005–06. MoMA subsequently purchased the work for its collection.
Suited for Subversion, Borland’s most well-known work to date, may be a form of armor, but it is also disarming and thought-provoking. Its cheerful color suggests the carnivalesque rather than the militaristic, and to hear the sound of a protester’s accelerated heartbeat may be unexpected. But the effect also signals, to authorities such as the police—even in a theoretical situation—the humanness of their adversary.
Suited for Subversion 2002
Nylon-reinforced PVC, denim, padding, speaker, pulse-reader, circuitry
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Pieter Hugo
© Ralph Borland
The Millefiore Effect (Ralph Borland, Jessica Findley, and Margot Jacobs) Front 2000
Ceremonial conflict suits: plastic, fabric, air, electronics
Image courtesy of the artists
Photographer: Jason Wallace
© Ralph Borland, Jessica Findley, and Margot Jacobs