Adrian Pepe | Rehearsing Blue

“Rehearsing Blue” is a body of performances, sculptural forms, textile works, and collective acts of making that explores the unstable substance of color.

Woad, indigo, and synthetic indigo emerge from different territories, forms of labor, and ways of knowing, yet arrive at a common blue, repeatedly rehearsed into being. Across the Mediterranean basin – a landscape of arrivals, departures, and exchange – local dye traditions, imported pigments, and industrial substitutes have met, overlapped, and replaced one another time and again. The color appears stable while the conditions that produce it remain irreducibly different. What is preserved, and what is lost, when difference is rendered equivalent?

Moving between fermentation vats, fibers, plant dyes, and industrial substitutes, “Rehearsing Blue” asks where the substance of blue truly resides. Is it contained within the molecule itself, or within the relationships that sustain it? Plants pass into microbes, microbes into dye, dye into fiber, fiber into cloth, and cloth into symbol. Blue emerges through immersion, oxidation, repetition, and accumulation, carrying traces of multiple bodies while never fully belonging to any of them.

Through the figure of blue, the project reflects on substitution, translation, migration, and co-authorship, examining what persists when one body replaces another and how distinct worlds become connected through a shared material presence.