Camilio

BLOG 008

Performance and Installation art work:
Title: 3rd hands clothes for(m) me
Pink, Brown, Black, White, Grey and Ashes
Second hand DAPP clothes, 5 stretcher frames in mathematical forms
75cm high x 100cm wide  x 4cm deep

This artwork is first and foremost about #nature, #climatecrises, #globalwarming, #pollution from the #FastFashion #industry and our ability not to change but are very good in clothing our eyes and ears to the facts, for something not important. We don’t need to change our garderobe 4 times a year.

So, for this performance I used second hand, fast fashion, clothes from DAPP (Development Aid from People to People), Lilongwe Malawi. Well-meant second-hand clothing, from The West, shipped to Africa, destroying local textile industries and local entrepreneurs. Mismanaged on site (DAPP stores over Malawi) also had its part in this bankruptcy. In which I mean: while the mindset is on having items to sell, profiting a few, make money and some have a job, the big profit, and “the lead” will still stay in The West. 

The Western Fashion (clothing) industry sponsors this ‘funny’ and shady trade (and Western people supporting it): in The West they think it is donated, in Zambia and Malawi it is sold, a part of it by DAPP, turning it in a donation again. And hence the pollution of the fast fashion industry already has been there before shipping, all the water spillage (growing cotton, washing, dyeing, washing) and Co2 exhaust by the transport (from Bangladesh sweat shops), child-labour in other 3rd world countries to make it affordable in The West, so we can, after wearing it for a short period (give) it away (and feel so good) to “Africa” (like our old polluting cars), another “third world country” (I am not supporting this terminology, I am using it here cynically). With all these second hands clothing, Zambian and Malawian traditional clothing and / or clothing styles that would evolve with the lack of these (not so) old (not worn out (so not efficient and supporting the clothing industry) clothes, is very much disrupted and vanished. Which is not only a loss of local job options, but very much a cultural loss. Besides this latter 2 points, this way of the shipping and than selling 2nd hand cheap clothes has also destroyed the textile industry in Zambia and Malawi, because local produced clothing is still more expansive than these 2nd hands clothing from The West.

As my thoughts where at the time of creating: ‘this system let us all go to hell’, I performed with these forms in nature, holding them up in my white suit (clown / court jester / village fool, The White Western Man) and ending with smashing ashes around, ashes from pervious burned art works.  

My last point to state: supporting fast fashion and the other fashion forms, is also closing your eyes for the big problems fashion is causing.

About the mathematical forms:
All over the world mathematical lessons are given and almost everybody will get lessons about the surface / perimeter of a triangle, square and circle. To show this fast fashion caused crisis is global, and everyone knows these forms. Personally, I would like to add here the story of Paul Cezanne, one of the front runners of cubism. Cezanne saw the world around him build up out of sphere’s, cubes, cones, cylinders, etc. (bit which “world” did he meant?) so he could paint like he did, becoming one of the founders of cubism, a very Western Art movement. In contrast we have Picasso, who for the last steps of reaching ‘full cubism’ used African masks as inspiration (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), so, I like to play with these historical facts and would like to combine these two facts and bring culture back / or just add Zambian/Malawian culture to these forms in the different context they are used here in the installation and performance.