Sabrina Calvo

Sabrina Calvo is a transdisciplinary artist who has spent twenty years deconstructing narratives and designing virtual worlds. Calvo is the author of the novels Toxoplasma (2016) and Melmoth Furieux (2021). She rediscovered sewing in 2020, a practice allowing her to build “an intimate poetry between clothing and magic.”

Sabrina Calvo, when asked to identify the thread that runs through her work

Reve Riviere

Calvo rediscovered sewing in 2020 and her designs are brimming with cuts, tears, strings, and sashes. See her Instagram account @reve.riviere, where she dutifully logs impressionistic sketches, material samples, and the glorious mess of her sewing table.

Having worked across fiction, performance, and fashion Calvo points to two common themes that fuel her work. The first is being attuned to dreams and “trying to manifest them” irregardless of medium or material. Secondly, a deep empathy, informed by introspection about what one can offer, and listening closely for what others need.

Queer and marginalized creators have an opportunity to help others with their stories, by representing alterity and other ways of being, and also by combatting the “monpolization” of spirituality by non-inclusive actors.

How to nurture a radical, inclusive, art-making practice that is not driven by profit. Stay focused on work you love while learning your craft very well, then, outsource your technical skills. Channel that revenue back to your art and keep your practice pure.

Calvo namechecks German philosopher Walter Benjamin as an enduring influence—and references his ruminations on fashion. In Benjamin’s opus Arcades Project, written between 1927 and 1940, he catalogued hundreds of short notes logging observations made in Parisian shopping districts related to capitalism, class relations, aesthetics, and the palpable mood as the 19th century receded from memory. Clothing is a central topic in the Arcades Project, and of it Benjamin famously (and morbidly) wrote “fashion is never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver.”

Sabrina Calvo, on navigating time and desire

sava saheli singh

sava saheli singh is the eQuality-Scotiabank Postdoctoral Fellow in AI and Surveillance at the University of Ottawa AI + Society Initiative. In a previous post-doc at Kingston University singh co-produced three experimental short films as part of the Screening Surveillance series, and she is currently researching how teachers use learning technologies in their practice and how this has been impacted by COVID-19.

sava saheli singh, commenting on Calvo’s fashion process-focused Instagram account

Sabrina Calvo, on her ‘virtual’ origins in fashion

Long before her interest in physical fashion was renewed, Calvo worked on clothing for avatars in Second Life. Predating Fortnite and Decentraland, the original open-ended MMO laid a foundation for our current ‘metaverse moment.’ Launched by Linden Labs in 2003, Second Life’s in-game currency of Linden dollars became a major motivator for many users—bespoke user-generated economies of clothing, jewellery, and architecture flourished, briefly.

“Fashion is just being draped in dreams, basically. Dreams are manifest, with us every day, and a form in themself.”

Toxoplasma

Calvo’s 2016 science fiction novel takes place after the revolution. In it the island of Montréal is under siege—its bridges are blocked by the federal army. Supporters of the old liberal world and those who aspire to an anarchist society are tearing the streets up, seizing the moment and transforming the cityscape into something new, in which human communities survive and reconfigure themselves.

Sabrina Calvo, zooming out from art to address bigger narratives

Calvo has an expansive practice, spanning writing, game design, and textile work. I loved her graceful way of talking about both the immaterial and the material aspects of art-making, and the “beautiful correlations” she discovers while working across mediums. The practice of sewing by hand, for example, drew her back to writing by hand, after she realized how much of writing passes through gesture. What emerges from the pen is so much different than what emerges from the keyboard, I think because the tip of a pen on paper is a single point of focus, a direct line from the mind through the body and onto the page. Typing, on the other hand, requires a forking of focus: the eyes land in one place, the screen, while the hands are off doing their own thing. Calvo talked about dreams, about the project of making dreams manifest. I think that requires a certain fluid, frictionless relation between body and mind.