Past Trends

Believe - Linda


Religion is a way of life. In the past, it was the way of life. Christianity became commonplace, and the Roman Catholic Church dominated. When the Church lost its dominance during the Protestant Reformation, Christianity become closely tied to politics. In the Age of Enlightenment, the idea of Christianity as the purest expression of spirituality was supplanted by the concept of “religion” as a worldwide practise. This caused ideas as religious freedom. It also caused religion to lose its attachment to nationality. It was now a personal feeling or emotion.

Freedom of religion comes in many forms. It not only supports the freedom to manifest religion in teaching, practice, worship, and observance but also includes the freedom to change religion or not to follow any religion. Everyone believes in something (even though it’s the rejection of gods), and has the right to express those believes – also children. The next logical step was the arise of children’s rights. In countries such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland, children have the right to follow their own religious beliefs even if their parents don’t share those or don’t even approve.   

Children have to be heard before their parents change their religious upbringing to a different belief.

Personal identity - Celine

Every single day the world is getting more modernist than it already is: we can travel faster, have almost unlimited freedom, communicate with each other while on other sides of world, and more. All these things extend the globalization, and are turning our world more and more into a ‘global village’. All of this took some time of course and in the past we already had to deal with globalization.

However, this phenomenon has made it so that we live closer next to each other, even though the physical distance has not changed. Our feeling to express ones unique identity has, however, not changed. Even in the past, people felt the urge to show that they were part of a specific culture or sub culture. A micro trend that evolved form the maxi trend of Personal identity, is to express by use of body art, e.g. tattooing, tribal’s etc.

In the 70’s the term body art became a definition of a stream that came out of the conceptual art and the performances. It is a form of art were the body of the artist is the primary medium where the human existence will be researched critically. Most of the time these body art performances got something to do with religious practices.

Independence - Sander

As being independent, feminization was probably one of the biggest steps forward to independency. Women didn’t have the same rights as men, only because of what they do or do not have between their legs. For centuries, they lived with it because they thought it was a normality, but the world was changing and so were the women. They started to protest to the, at that time, current living situation. There needed to be change. With, or without something between your legs.

Rebuilding - Milan

The past has known a lot of big “rumbles”: World Wars, environmental catastrophes, economical crises, etc. However, times moves on and things past, people look once again to the future and start rebuilding what was lost.

For a trend in the past, I therefore looked at WWII as a Megatrend, which led to ruined Europe and the loss of several million lives. Following was the surrender, rebuilding and eventually the baby boom as one of the by-products.

The pictures I chose are of the things I mentioned above, within the centre the act that made the future manageable again. The colors are almost all black and white, in favor of the past, though I did add one picture with more brighter colors to show that after darkness and depression, comes light and hope for a better tomorrow.  

Collectivism - Kelly

Collectivism has been a big trend in the last century. A good example is world war I. Countries formed a coalition with other nations to form a bigger group. They formed a front. Later that century other cultural groups collected themselves, and distanced themselves like Hitler did in world war II.

Of course there are also a more positive image of collectivism like the hippies around the sixties. They were al connected to a certain kind of music, behaviour and way of live. They formed cultural groups.

Every group has its own characteristics. The way you recognize a group is by the way they express themselves. For hippies this was by the way they dressed, flower power and sexual expression.