Sweatshop

We’re getting towards the end of the Summer. How did you find it? Are you ready for more of that heat? Or do you prefer this green and pleasant land, green and pleasant?? We spent a couple of beautiful, very hot and sweaty days in Brockwell Park, bringing SWEATSHOP to the people of Lambeth Country Show. My fellow artist was delighted to push our bicycle overlocker (an overlocker attached to a bicycle, transported by tricycle) up the park hill in 32 degrees, but thanks to the enthusiastic response and dozens of lively conversations, it was well worth it.

SWEATSHOP (it’s a kind of immersive fashion theatre performance, honestly you’ve got to be there) was born out of 10 years of banging my head against the sustainable fashion wall. Global North culture needs to feel optimistic, and it’s not really for me to take that away from you, but if you’re worried that you’re a bit too optimistic about the future of the planet, then start a ‘sustainable business’ that’ll chill you out.

The frustrating thing about consumerism is that it can only make space for you to sell something. It’s gotta be snappy, it’s gotta be feel good, the customer is King, and they want to feel like what they’re buying makes them a really great ruler. Some of us think in systems, in connections and networks. Consumerism would tell you that, say, ‘food production’ is a system. But for some of us, we see how food production is completely wound up with access to the land, which is a political ideology based on historical acts of parliament, colonialism, oligarchy and how we view each other’s validity as humans. We see that there are lots of things that are farmed, not just food (fibre and fuel), and each of those need to be considered in conjunction to make the right decisions about land use. We see how food is a cultural product, how it signifies identity, how it brings pleasure, how it is inherently social, the way food is eaten is part of the story, the narrative around community and celebration. Etc etc. Well try putting that essay on a facebook advert for organic eggs!!! (or in my case organic pants). No-one has time for that.

It started to become clear that I needed a way to immerse people in ideas bigger than just- conventional cotton= bad, organic cotton= amazing. 

What better way than a sewing machine that we can take to festivals and make sweatshirts with people right there and then. (Well there probably is a better way, but this is the one we’re trying right now.) Festivals, aaaaand maybe protests. ‘Protest’ and ‘Building New Systems’ are the two sides of the ‘Systems Change’ coin. I don’t feel like protest makes sense if you’re not exploring the possible alternatives. And I don’t believe that alternatives should be thought up in a think tank by thinky people and then presented to us doey people to try and put into practice. When we perform SWEATSHOP we make a physical thing right there. Something exists that didn’t exist before. We want to show people that it’s possible and it’s fun. We even made the machine that we make the sweatshirts with. It’s so important to inhabit that reality where the things we do have concrete outcomes. Of course it’s just a drop in the ocean of polyester nonsense being churned out every second by the big boy high street trashion churners. But it is a real, physical, totally exists drop. Not a theoretical drop, or a future drop, or a drop that can only be dropped if everyone just agrees with us and votes for ‘insert your favourite never going to be voted for policy here’.

Mashing up our Slow/Bespoke/Ethically Sourced/Participatory/Emancipatory fashion performance with protests on other fronts helps us to draw some of those systems thinking connections. What if we take SWEATSHOP on a mass trespass, like the ones Right To Roam are organising to protest the privatisation of public footpaths and the overall lack of access to countryside in the UK. This is actually a really brilliant piece of the puzzle; Right To Roam are on the same immersive strategy. They believe that we need to experience nature first hand in order to learn how to care for it better. A lot of the time we’ve become so separated from the care of the natural world around us, that it’s easy to believe we live in some kind of life size mini railway model. Trees, and riverbanks and grassy hills have a physical form, but when you get up close they might just be plaster of paris painted with green acrylic. How often are we fooled by the fiberglass modelling of a sandstone cliff in a theme park or the centreparcs swimming pool? In fact nature is a living, breathing entity much closer to our own internal organs; try wearing concrete shoes for a week and maybe that’s how our local neighbourhood trees feel!

The Earth Logic Research from London College of Sustainable Fashion picked up on this point. In indigenous clothing supply chains, where every raw material might be produced and processed by one community, the same community who eventually wears the clothes, the effects of, for instance, a particular toxic dye on the health of a stream (which maybe everyone drinks) is noticed immediately. People don’t need to wade through some Corporate Responsibility coverup on an ‘our ethics’ webpage in order to make important decisions about how to dress with respect for nature. They can experience an ongoing relationship. They are embedded in it. Earth Logic called for the development of hyperlocal supply chains, so that people can regain this experiential knowledge. The same way that Right To Roam want to give people experience of walking or kayaking in beautiful places, and not wanting there to be litter there, or massive motorways. It’s the logic of the Commons, that everyday residents of a landscape can be powerful stewards of that land, that actually they are best placed- because they can develop a depth of knowledge specific to a particular bioregion, and a depth of care specific to their home. 

None of this can be easily ‘sold’ to someone, people have to figure it out for themselves, we can only offer an experience that triggers the imagination. That hopefully chips away the myths that we are inert in the system, that we’re only here to buy. People regularly step off our bike and proudly agree with their mate that ‘THEY JUST MADE THAT’ totally unique upcycled SWEATSHIRT, which lets be honest is only a bit true LOL, but it’s an important feeling. We can make so much more possible. WE NEED TO MAKE SO MUCH MORE HAPPEN. Let’s remember who we are, the civilisation of Iphones and Alexander McQueen, beautiful crazy things made by brilliant people. Let’s start Trespassing on the Consumer ideology that a beautiful human is just a Consumer, and embed ourselves back in nature as its most creative species.

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